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We're a long way from Georgia. More specifically, we're a long way from those hot sweaty afternoons where Quake players gathered at a tournament for a chance to take the keys to John Carmack's Ferrari 328 GTS back in the late 90s. The stakes are now even higher, the audiences even bigger, and there's a sense of professionalism creeping in. Paul Kent is a man who's seen the transformation first-hand. "I first got involved in eSports before it was even called eSports, back in about 1996 when it was taking off with Quake, just after the Doom days," Kent tells us. "It wasn't really until QuakeWorld, when Carmack rewrote the first proper network code to allow us to do gaming online and allowed us even ping - so it wasn't just the person closest to the server to win all the games. I took part and played in a lot of the top competitions like QuakeWorld at CES, and took part with some of the biggest teams in Europe."
University soon beckoned, followed by a career at Creative Labs helping design chips for mobile phones and set-top boxes, but eSports remained an interest and a passion. It led to the formation of website WGL, and then Gfinity, the company he runs today. Launched early last year, it's a company founded to establish eSports in the UK, to help boost its reputation as a professional concern and to raise its profile in a territory that's been traditionally cynical towards the discipline. So what makes now the right time for all this to happen?
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