Becoming champions
I started Impact Gaming in 2015 as a Rainbow Six Siege and esport enthusiast. This first year and a half of my esports career were massively beneficial in learning the intricacies of a professional esports roster.
Going into 2017 I made Impact Gaming a true company and began to recruit in every title I learned about and felt comfortable scouting. Impact Gaming began with titles like Call of Duty, CS:GO, and Gears of War with limited success. Our best placement in the first six months was a 13th place at Gears of War Las Vegas in 2017.
Key friendships
At that event I met a man named Glenn (aka. iiNK), I didn’t know yet how much that meeting would affect our path of growth just a few months later. In July of 2017 one of my first ever Call of Duty players, and now one of my dearest friend Collin (aka Terrifick) introduced me to a title called H1Z1.
It was my first experience with battle royale and I was immediately hooked. I loved how competitive that game was, and how it felt to watch the late game of classic H1Z1, was like something I had never experienced before.
A highly competitive title, that was easy to understand and describe, with a semi-solid player base. H1Z1 was the Hunger Games of the esports and gaming community. It had a highly competitive, highly engaged, and highly toxic community. More importantly, the community cared about its top players and teams. That made H1Z1 a great title for Impact Gaming to make its name in.
Because the title was so new, teams had yet to fully be able to monetize their H1Z1 rosters; which meant that H1Z1 teams wouldn’t brake our bank. This fact is incredibly important when your five figure budget is getting outbid by established brands working with seven figure recruiting budgets left and right. Titles like Call of Duty and CS:GO were impossible to gain any sort of land without spending six figures worth of budget yearly on each title. Players that draw more eyes cost more money.
Getting it done
Let us flash back to August of 2017, Impact Gaming signed its very first battle royale team and applied to compete at Dream Hack Atlanta 2017. Long story short, our first roster failed to qualify and this is when Glenn comes back into the fold. I was always a player first owner, but I knew I wanted to be in this event no matter what. Glenn had a roster that was looking for a new home and we locked them in immediately after the first denied application.
Special thank you to this amazingly talented roster: Geesh, Carta, ShellShock, Kandivan, Triv
This roster had competed on the CW network in the first ever H1Z1 tournament, Fight for the Crown! I knew they were an insanely driven roster full of naturally gifted esport athletes. Dream Hack Atlanta 2017 was the most important event for the company to date; and I was incredibly excited to now have a roster I believed could win the entire thing. The boys finished the event with the best placement we had ever had, third. They also won the first sustainable amount of prize pool money for Impact Gaming with just over $20,000 earned.
Going forward the team swapped over to eRa (for a higher salary offer) for TwitchCon 2017 before returning under the Impact Gaming banner for Dream Hack Sweden 2017. I had landed an amazing sponsorship deal with OPSkins subsidiary Wax.io. It was a crypto currency looking to advertise through a team and we needed just about $10,000 to send the roster to Sweden. The deal we locked in was well above what we needed and allowed us to share thousands of dollars’ worth of skins to the community that we loved so very much.
*Grand Finals Dream Hack Sweden 2017
If you watched Dream Hack Sweden you still remember what happened. Grand finals, Map one, Impact Gaming dominates the competition with a nineteen kill Victory! In a fifteen team – five player title, that’s killing over 27% of players that drop into the map. Doing that in the grand finals against the very best competition in the world, was an incredible show of what happens when preparation, determination, and team work shine together in perfect harmony.
Grand finals, Map two, Impact Gaming drives late game onto a bridge where four of our five get almost immediately killed. One player remains, our in-game leader Geesh goes prone in a smoke bomb. What happens next was one of the most memorable plays to ever be seen in Esports history. Geesh earns five more kills (four with grenades) and survives for a second place finish all alone against fifty hostile players all around him.
This gave Impact Gaming a nearly 60,000 point lead going into Map three. There was a slight chance that we could get over taken by a roster under Method but that did not happen.