Trademark Gamers

What you saying?

Firstly, apologies for the delay in my first column. I have been bogged down with exams, dont think Ive done so much work in my life - in the library at 5am, out at 3am. Its been a hectic few weeks, but finally I have some time on my hands and I can put my time towards other things, such as the Trademark Gamers CS Team. Many of you have noticed me on the roster, but Im not actually playing for the team... so what is my role exactly?

What the hell is madSpunK? & 6 Kittens

Firstly in case you havent seen or heard of me, many people have known me in the scene as madSpunK. I started playing CS 1.6 around 8 years ago, I found the game in some dodgy stall in Malaysia where some guy tried to blag it to me for £1. I ended up bargaining it down to around 50p and installed it when I got back to the UK. The box which had the CS mod on it had a pencil drawing of a guy in a mask holding a gun to another pencilled guy with a SWAT outfit. I was on 56k back in those days, broadband was just rolling out and was more of a luxury. I was hooked straight away, and started a new team called 6 Kittens - a piss take team of the current #1 UK CS team at the time - 4Kings. The madSpunK name was born after I decided to take the piss out of a 4K member called mAdm0nK, and 6 Kittens started entering some leagues after some practice. We entered into BWCSL (BarrysWorld Counter Strike League) and this is where we started our claim to fame. Near the end of the league we were pitted up against a team that had previously done an interview column on PC Gamer, and the map was cs_militia. Using some amazing tactics (taking the hostages to the sewer and camping for the whole half) we managed to win the game.

We then entered Clanbase UK, the biggest and most well known UK CS league, and pitted ourselves against top teams such as uninspired, cs-marines, numbers and eventually after months of games we shot to #1 with much controversy. I still remember only upgrading my 56k to broadband in the middle of the league, and there were times where my connection definitely cost us a game or two. I was made the caller of the team from the start, and having to call tactics at the start of the round using ventrilo was a nightmare. A round would start and I would transmit then and lag out completely. I remember my team mates telling me in the 3rd round (when I would eventually be able to rejoin the server after redialling into my ISP) that they were running around spawn like headless chickens waiting for a call... oh those were the times. The solution: making binds in my config.

It was my lastchance

6 Kittens eventually died, and I eventually went to Uni and quit CS for around a year. However in that time I formed a team along with some ex-6K members (you may have heard of Song) + 2 other players that had played in a semi decent team (again Ive forgotten the name of the team) - Arak and Stannly (who now play Source). This team was called lastchance, and again even though I wasnt playing, I was made the CL. UKTerrorist lans had just started and we attended quite a few of them, 1, 2 and 4 - quite a lot of my student loan was spent on attending them, there were no teams that recieved lan funding apart from 4Kings and later... Team AMD Gamer. We played fairly well on each of them (5th, 2nd and 3rd) and were invited back to the UKT Finals. The line-up had many changes during this time, but the eventual line-up was myself, Song, AdY, milka and hih1. We placed 3rd behind 4Kings and Team AMD Gamer, which we were pretty chuffed about. We were always the underdog at each event, we didnt have the big sponsors that 4K or T.AMD so we were given nothing on a plate and had very little practice due to Uni and other commitments, but we always fought hard for our top 3 status.

Good things always die, but what about after?

After that we werent as committed as before, but we went to the odd lan here and there, mainly the big profile events. Another big result we managed to blag was at EOGC in 2004. Here we were pitted up against GoodGame (the #1 French CS team) who were pretty damn good at the time... and somehow with little or no practice we managed to draw with them and go into 3.... yes 3 overtimes where we eventually lost. The next high profile win for us was attending Harrow Lan (run by Desp and Eagle... more on them later!) and beating c4u in the finals TWICE after coming from the lower bracket. c4u had Kritikal and wilz00, more names you might of heard of. Next was the Acon5 qualifiers, where we went as a lastchance mix (Kardy madSpunK hih1 HeadBulB and Sn). This was another event that stood out for me as the other two big names in the tournament were landed and 4Kings. We were put in a group with landed as we were seeded 3rd and landed 2nd, and us being a mix made us complete underdogs. The eventual winner of the event would be given a trip to the Acon5 Finals... all expenses paid, and the runners up would get £350 nVidia graphics cards each. I remember going to the toilet just before our game against Landed, and I was confronted by one of the landed members. Whilst taking a slash :D, b0sh spoke to me and said "I know you want to get out of the group stages so we will give you as many rounds as you need to come 2nd in the group". I turned around, gave him a cheeky smile and walked out. So the big game started... and what do you know, we beat them. I think the Landed line-up at the time was Toomy, Messiah, b0sh and other top dogs. We were pretty chuffed, as we knew 4Kings wouldnt be able to take the trips to the finals as they had another event at the same time they were already attending, so the trip would be given to the team that finished #2, and this was our big chance. The next group started playing their games, however we came back from the pub to watch 4Kings play one of their games. They were running around with knives, losing a game on purpose to end up 2nd in their group - which would mean they would play us straight away as we ended up top in our group. Landed and 4Kings were good mates with each other, so we knew this was setup and they completely broke the rules where teams were not allowed to drop rounds on purpose. After hours of complaining the admins told us there was nothing they could do seeing as 4Kings was such a well known team, and we played them in the first bracket stage and was knocked out... so we missed out on the trip and the graphics cards.

And the rest...

This put me off CS for a while, and I quit for a year or more to focus on other things. For fun I started up one last mix team. Made up of friends (Song, Desp, MutuM and hih1) we went to our first event together - WSVG London. This was a huge UK event with loads top foreign teams (MYM, 4Kings, mTw). This was probably my most favourite event, and youll see why. Myself and Song had moved into a house together as we were both in Unis up in Birmingham and we had no internet connetion, so for the 3 weeks leading up to the event we didnt touch CS bar a few 1v1s on aim_map for fun. We knew this event would be just a laugh, but it turned out more than that. Our first game was against suigeneris, a fairly old Irish team with names that had been around for as long as I had (Vertakill and others). We blagged a win against them, but did go into overtime against them. Our next game was against some random chinese team, which we beat comfortably. We then played the #1 seed for the event... the one and only 4Kings. They had been through a million line-up changes since the start of CS, but their team for that event was probably one of their strongest - Mangiacapra, AdY (my old teammate), DaY, natu and aKuJi. We had no tactics, and I had to call tactics from the spot. The first half ended up 9-6 in their favour as CT on inferno, so we knew we had to put up some next level fragging and teamplay as CT to even stand a chance. The next half started, and we managed to trade rounds during the first half. At 5-5 I think, we started winning more and more rounds and the thought of us actually winning the game started popping into our heads. We won another round, then another and another due to some amazing individual play by each of us (especially Song) and we were 9-5 up. We needed the last round to win, and 4Kings were on a semi-eco. DaY stepped his game for the last round, whipping some ridiculous deagle headshots on us and 4Kings won the round. We were gutted, another bloody overtime. Unfortunately, it didnt swing in our favour and we were knocked to the lowerbracket, and we would have to face one of the loudest teams at that event, SeveN from Iceland. We felt gutted about the 4Kings game as we knew we threw it away, but didnt care too much as we had achieved way more than we thought we would have. Again, we fought hard against SeveN and took them into overtime AGAIN, but lost in OT again. Due to the results we decided to make the team live, and it would eventually be named Overtime. More roster changes, our eventual line-up at our last event was Kardy (he was back for one last shot), Kurt1s, hih1, Song and myself. We attended the ESWC Finals in 2007 and placed 3rd behind 4Kings (Mangiacapra, Toomy, Harriman, AdY...) and Dignitas (Kritikal, wilz00...). A bad performance but we did beat 4Kings on one of the maps in the BO3!

And another kitkat... break

I took a step back from CS again and on the side I joined a team to start up a lan event company - Infinity Gaming, along with Eagle and Desp. To sum it up we did lots of small then big events, and eventually merged with Elysium Gaming owned my Philip Wride. We managed to run some high profile events, such as the Kode5 UK qualifiers in 2008, and we are now looking to host our 6th event. I took a year out in Uni and decided to play a little bit more CS, and joined 4Kings with monkE, mh, ShaQ and jenuwiN. After 2 events I finally put the mouse to rest.

And the now

Although I am back to Uni with loads of work, Ive put some free time working on Trademark Gamers. I have been made the team captain and apart from forming the team, I will be helping them get to that #1 spot in the CS UK 1.6  scene by helping with tactics, helping them arrange their games and structure and giving them some motivation. In time I hope we will be able to attend all of the top foreign events. Thats it for now, expect another column giving more details on the teams progress soon!