When a 10-year-old Dimitri Hadjipaschali started playing computer games his parents scoffed at the idea. Hadjipaschali was housebound, after breaking his ankle skateboarding, when he discovered his brother playing a game called Counter-Strike. This proved to be an existential moment on crutches; gaming became Hadjipaschali’s life.
“I just needed a crosshair and Counter-Strike was the game I kind of stuck with. I decided I was going to be a full-time gamer when I joined [eSports team] Bravado in 2008&#8230; I was doing it full time, trying to win competitions. Every time it came to a tournament I was trying to win. Every time I would come in second or third it was the worst day of my life for me. That’s when I knew,” he says.
Eight years later, Hadjipaschali is one of the rising stars in the next online craze in Africa. In bedrooms across the continent a generation of professionals is playing electronic sports, or eSports, for a living.
Competitive online gaming draws millions via streaming websites and where as much as $20 million can be at stake. It’s a bit like the Olympics for geeks and eSports has its own disciplines. Hadjipaschali is the captain for Bravado’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS GO, team.
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This is a first-person shooter game where a team of five tries to thwart bombers. In tournaments, teams play off in a best-of-three taking turns to attack and defend. The more games you win, the stronger your team becomes.
CS GO is one of the most popular games in South Africa. Globally it is the fourth highest-earning eSports game, with 5,396 professional players competing for $19.16 million in prizemoney at 1,710 tournaments, according to esportsearnings.com.
In Africa, this multi-million-dollar eStory is just beginning. The competition in South Africa is fierce. For years, gamers have battled for a few spots in international competition. That’s where the money is.
This is why Hadjipaschali is at a team boot camp in the cold hills of Meyersdal, south of Johannesburg. The team is here to train for the Electronics &amp; Gaming Expo (EGE) in Cape Town. On the line is a shot at the international arena – an all-expenses-paid spot at the Electronic Sports World Cup and a chance to win $75,000, in Paris at the end of October.
“If we don’t take first place [in Cape Town] we don’t know when this opportunity will come again,” he says.
It’s going to be a long night for the team. On any given day, Hadjipaschali practices nine hours a day, often finishing at dawn. This weekend, with the promise of Paris looming, they will push even harder.
“A boot camp is for us to be more focused, to get more work done. It forces us to work when we are next to each other.”
It has been an historic and lucrative year for eSports in South Africa.
From Johannesburg is Barry ‘Anthrax’ Louzada, one of the old hands – which doesn’t take too long in this business. Involved in the industry since 1999, Louzada is called the South African godfather of eGaming. He slogged it out for 10 years as a competitive gamer around the world.
“Two years ago, you were at maybe a R100,000 ($7,000) total cash prize money for an event, because there was only one event a year. Now you are looking at over R2 million ($142,000) in just one year,” says Louzada.
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These days Louzada is a shoutcaster, in English that means he gives live commentary on the sport.
“When I started out, it was a case of people driving around going to each other’s houses [barbequing] and LANing (network gaming). The internet wasn’t workable in this country for us to actually do any sort of online competing or playing. Now you have got hundreds and thousands of people coming to conventions,” he says.
As Louzada’s days as a competitive gamer are ending, Hadjipaschali’s are just beginning. If you saw Hadjipaschali walking down the street you wouldn’t think he was one of the top online gamers in the country. But those in the know ask for his autograph. For Hadjipaschali it’s more about the rush than the cash.
“In the beginning you can feel that pressure, that big match temperament, where you are not at the comfort of your own home behind your computer at your desk. When you are at home your hands aren’t shaking and it’s easier to play.”
Hadjipaschali’s next step on the road to fame and dollars was at a tournament in the cavernous Cape Town International Convention Centre on July 29. The team strolls in with the ease born of years perfecting their craft. They set up their computers, log in, huddle, and put on their headphones. Once the headphones are on, says Hadjipaschali, they won’t see anything but the screen.
With a crowd of almost a hundred cheering them on, it takes two hours to win their quarterfinal against a team called Energy. The players get up, shake hands and then make their way back to their hotel for some rest.
Hadjipaschali isn’t the only professional gamer in his family. His older brother Andreas, who founded Bravado, also had his shot. Now the team’s manager and coach, Andreas is even more determined to see South African gamers on the international scene.
“You only have one or two options, to make do with what qualifiers we have got [in South Africa] or we go overseas and we try qualify over there, but it gets really expensive. To go overseas, for five days with five players with accommodation, food, drinks we spent easily over R150-R170,000 (around $12,000). It’s different if you are living in Europe and there are qualifiers there all the time.”
Although the industry is booming, it’s not easy for the players of Bravado to play professionally. The team practises online every night. This is to accommodate players like 17-year-old Aran Groesbeek, who is still in school. His parents will allow him to play only once he has finished his homework. Ashton Muller, 24 years old, works part time as a manager at his father’s construction company. He dropped out of university to focus on gaming.
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Robby da Loca spent a year in Sweden, the mecca of CS GO, trying to make it. But, with the high cost of living in Europe and having to work part time, he fell short and returned to South Africa. Da Loca is so captivated that when he first started playing, he would sneak onto his brother’s computer to play with his earphones off, so he could hear if his brother came home.
The final member is Ruan van Wyk, a qualified industrial engineer living in Port Elizabeth.
In Cape Town, the competition moves on to its final day. The atmosphere is intense as Bravado huddle before their semifinal. The auditorium is packed with fans. Shoutcasters blast their commentary. Behind the players is a giant screen, where the action is shown. Thousands more watch online. Bravado scores a crushing victory to get to the final.
South Africa has drawn the attention from teams around the world. One of those is Anthony Nell, manager of the South African branch of international brand Flipsid3 Tactics.
“What [Flipsid3 Tactics] are interested in is the player development in South Africa. They are looking for good players that are from parts of the world untapped by the rest of the world,” says Nell.
If you thought that gamers couldn’t earn a salary you would be wrong. Nell says even basic salaries for a player in a reserve league and lower would be around $5,000 a month, excluding prize money and endorsements.
The most lucrative eSports game is Defense of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2). It attracts total prize pools of $86.7 million. At The International 4 in August, the crowdfunded prizes locked at $20.7 million and the winners, Wings Gaming, from China, walked away with $9.1 million for a week’s work.
Africa might not have as much cash to spare, but the pressure in Cape Town’s final is intense. Hadjipaschali and his team win a contested first set against their rivals, Carbon eSports, from Cape Town, who are playing at home.
Bravado suffers from nerves in the second set, throwing away an eight-point lead as Carbon force a decider. Ten minutes before the crucial final round that will make or break this team, Hadjipaschali gathers outside for a pep talk.
“Play calm and play smart,” he says.
The talk pays off and Bravado wins the final round clinically. The team leaps from their chairs shouting. The elation on their faces is priceless. It’s not the Olympics, nor the World Cup; but for these players it’s just as important. Hadjipaschali is so overwhelmed he cries.
“This is unreal. It may not seem like a lot to people, but this is what most of us do full time,” he says.
Ahead of Hadjipaschali and his team lies Paris and a possible $75,000, and that’s just the start.
How many more young men and women from Africa are going to go out on the international stages in search of millions, earning a living in a way their parents would surely fail to understand. Check your kids in the bedroom.

You  Can’t Get The Kids  Off The Computer

On any given day, you can find Mike Lawrie sitting on the patio with a cup of tea in his hand or watering his plants. His wife, Christine, plays scrabble on Fridays. He prefers to dress in khaki shorts and a cotton shirt in the summer heat. This is the 75-year-old who brought the internet to Africa, making it possible for kids, and their parents, to watch movies, play games and surf the World Wide Web from their homes.
His vigour as the father of the internet in South Africa is reflected in his twilight years. He also brought the internet to this retirement village in Pretoria where he is teaching his neighbors how to use their cell phones.
“We’re having a whale of a time doing it. It’s keeping me busy. But today for the first time, one of the old ducks came with a Samsung S4. She’s got a grandchild who lives here with us, and he knew exactly how to use this phone. This kid can’t be 10 years old. It’s fantastic. If I told this kid, 10 years before you were born, there was no internet, he would look at me and say ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”
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When the sun was high on this summer day, the friendly and polite Lawrie offers a glass of iced water and biscuits on his shady patio, ringed with dozens of succulents in pots.
Lawrie’s journey begins in Cape Town where he grew up with a flair for mathematics and science. He struggled to find a job, until he turned to punched card machines, the primitive form of computer programming.
“It was the early computer stuff. Ever wondered why there are 80 columns on a screen? It’s from the punch card system,” says Lawrie.
Along came 1962. Computers were into their second generation and were a little smaller; they could now fit into a lounge, recalls Lawrie. He was one of the few people in South Africa who could work on them.
A purchase made by Rhodes University of an ICT 1301, in 1965, changed everything for Lawrie. The computer had to have a technician. It meant 25-year-old Lawrie moved to Grahamstown, from Cape Town, with his wife, on her 21st birthday, to babysit the ICT 1301 at the university’s computer lab.
“You had to rattle electronic circuits to check for faults. You hit it with a hammer… tap, tap, tap… if the computer still runs it means there is nothing wrong and you move onto the next one. They made them to last. It was a great machine to work on. It taught me computing through and through. These days techies haven’t got a clue about how a machine works.”
The backwater could’ve been the last place you would expect a computer techie to thrive, but Lawrie did.
“Grahamstown has no great industries. It has no electrical noise. Electrically it’s a quiet town. We arrived in November and came back to Cape Town in December, and told people about this pokey little town. The next year we went home, to Cape Town, the same streets you have lived in all your life now looked narrow.”
To say Lawrie is a mere techie is an understatement: he brought the net to Africa, as an experiment, in his own time.
“The doing of it was pure technical. It was fun, it wasn’t a project. It wasn’t our job at the university to specifically do it. It was never part of the reports for the university. The main thing was to run a computer service in the university. Low and behold we tweaked the system and got it working.”
Lawrie took the first step in  linking the world in Grahamstown. With 100 meters of copper wire he set up a primitive computer network that connected the physics department to the university mainframe. He then tried to connect something a bit farther, his house, two kilometers away.
“We found out that if you take two wires from Telkom, then the South African Postal Service, you can put five volts in this side you get five volts on the other end. If you jumper it, [the computer] thinks a modem is connected to the other end.”
By 1985, Lawrie developed an internal email system. Academics could now speak to each other on campus through their computer. Its commonplace now, science fiction then.
The next phase took three years, Lawrie wanted to connect to other universities. The issue was some used IBM computers; the university used a VAX operated computer.
“Low and behold we got the thing to work, using IS protocols. This was magic, connecting two independently controlled computer systems. By 1988, we could take a VAX computer, take an email, put it into our homegrown system, pull it out again, pull it through a sausage machine and then make it an IBM mail and send it off to Potchefstroom,” he says.
It dawned on Lawrie that the system had the potential to send an email around the world.
Lawrie contacted a network called Bitnet that agreed to let South Africa join their network. But, he first needed to get approval from Uninet, run by the CSIR, the government research facility that spearheaded network projects in South Africa.
“I took this proposal to the board, and the board laughed me off. They said I was out of my mind, because Bitnet is run by countries that have a stance against apartheid and would be shut down.”
“I was cheesed off and I don’t get cross that easily. I decided the best thing to do was never to go to a committee again. It’s so easy for a group of people to say it can’t be done.”
Lawrie found an alternative solution in FidoNet, a TCP/IP freebee package designed by Randy Bush in Oregon, in the United States (US), which was smuggled into South Africa on a floppy disk by a friend named Pat Terry.
“This was luck beyond belief,” says Lawrie.
With floppy disk in hand, Lawrie also needed to negotiate an account with the University of Delaware to give him access to the internet. From his computer in Rhodes, Lawrie was able to send mail to Delaware, to Bush in Oregon, to a Unix system, and then over FidoNet.
“The point about the FidoNet was in the testing phase of getting ‘some’ form of international email to work prior to releasing the email service for general use to Rhodes staff and students. This testing was in 1988, the service to Rhodes folk was operational early in 1989.”
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“We are now at the point where I can sit at home and I can log into our mainframe, create mail and send it to someone in the US. You would sit at eight o’clock at night and type an email out to this guy, he doesn’t know when it’s written, and writes back. In his email he invites me to come to this conference saying he wants me to come and talk about what we are doing. I then reply back and say great. He then writes back, how did that mail get here so quickly? How could the interchange of email to Africa be so quick? It was like instant. This guy was expecting to get a response from me in three weeks and he got it in about two minutes. This opened eyes all over the place.”
On November 12, 1991, at 10.44AM, Lawrie set up the first permanent link to send mail, via file transfer protocol (FTP), it was a long walk to the internet for Africa.
“He’s quite an anomaly. Even at that time he was a visionary,” says Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 2003, Balliah came across Lawrie when reading archives for her master’s degree.
“I found on the internet a bunch of usenet groups, which were archived, by whichever browser was there back then. They were literally archives of text messages sent by individuals over the internet.  One of them related to South Africa. It related to the original internet work that existed in South Africa at that. I became interested in following this trail, it became a forensic trail. I picked up people’s names and eventually it led me to Rhodes University where the network was started.”
All roads lead to Rhodes. At the end was a meeting with Lawrie and two days of lessons in internet history. It prompted Balliah to write a book on the history of the internet in South Africa.
“I’ll never forget he told me once ‘Everyone at a university complains about how students are only downloading porn, and I look at them and say at least they reading something’. It’s always been his approach. He will complain about how much students consume data, but his approach is let them just play,” she says.
Back in the retirement village, Lawrie is as happy as an email on a server. He presides over the most internet savvy retirement homes in the country.
“What was I driven by? I don’t know. It wasn’t a pioneering nature. It definitely wasn’t the politics of it that motivated it. What’s this concept of emails and why would one want to sit at a computer, type something in and see it somewhere else. How do you go about selling something in a world that doesn’t use email? So I didn’t set about selling it. I set about making it work,” says Lawrie.
You can take the technician out the computer lab but you can’t stop him from joining the dots.

Once Upon A Time There Was No Internet…

The gathering of the nerds. You would think you wouldn’t hear yourself over the explosions and crossfire on their screens. Instead there is barely a whisper; the silence of the nerds if ever there was. It’s an eerie experience watching 2,500 gamers in Africa’s largest LAN (local area network), held at the Really Awesome Gaming Expo (rAge) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in almost monastic silence.
Just a gentle tip tap on their keyboards and the odd click of a mouse with 2,500 pairs of eyes glued to their screens for three days and nights.
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Row upon row of geeks sit at their orange tables with their computer towers glowing in the dark and two-liter bottles of cool drink never far away. Some nap on inflated mattresses; others merely sleep on their keyboards.
It’s not a question of come as you are, rather come as you want to be. They call them cosplayers, or in English, the people who dress as the characters on the screens. One of them is 23-year-old au pair by day and cosplayer by night Lauren Mutch, who enjoys dressing up as Naruto, the Japanese based cartoon anime hero. Mutch is learning Japanese so she can go to the Mecca of anime to teach English and, one day, become a narrator in an anime series.
“I love anime. I thought to dress up as these characters would be something really cool, so why not try it? It’s a way to celebrate your fandom with other people. I wish I had my Naruto contact lenses now to show you, I left them at home,” says Mutch.
Someone who didn’t forget his anime eyes is Douw ‘Silver Angel’ Kotzé, dressed as Uchiha Itachi, another character from Naruto. His creepy Mangekyou Sharingan lenses are hard to miss. Elsewhere a thin Batman hangs out by the shawarma store, an award-winning married Legends of Zelda couple look for new games to play and a 20-year–old Syndra from League of Legends is at home posing for photos with zealous followers.
Just an ordinary weekend for the 33,000 nerds who flock to catch a glimpse of the latest in all things geeky; from computer games to comic books.
“Overall we’re seeing gaming and the geek tech genre growing all the time, if the show is anything to go on,” says Michael James, rAge owner.
Speed is everything for a LANer. It’s so popular; James had to install a 2-gigabyte-per-second line (Gbps) to provide enough bandwidth to keep the gamers happy. This is a thousand times faster than what most South Africans live with on their 2-megabyte–per-second lines.
“We even had a hiccup with the internet one year when we couldn’t supply enough bandwidth. But now we’re 100 percent sorted out and we’re 100 percent sorted out with the network,” says James.
But rAge is a small drop in the ocean for an industry that’s worth $217 million in South Africa, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC): South African entertainment and media outlook: 2014 – 2018. By 2018, it is expected to grow to
$335 million.
It’s not just Africa that is enjoying the boom. Nerds worldwide are making millions in eSports. Twenty million people tuned in through online streaming to watch The International 2014 finals of DotA 2, a strategy game where two five-man teams face off in a battle to destroy each other’s base.
Ironically DotA started as a custom map in 2005, made by fans of World Craft 3. It became so popular that it launched a whole new genre of computer gaming Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). The winners of the finals, Chinese team ‘Newbee’, pocketed $5 million from a prize pool of roughly $10 million.
This is not the only game to rake in millions of viewers. In 2013, the League of Legends finals drew 32 million viewers. Still not as close as the Super Bowl XLVIII final which drew 111.5 million.
It’s not just computers – mobile games are on the rise. In 2013, PwC noted that King’s Candy Crush Saga, a mobile social game, was downloaded 500 million times. By 2018, it expects South Africa’s mobile gaming market will rival console games for the leading platform for video games.
“Digital is making a huge inroad, so guys like Steam [an online gaming and shopping store], people are buying games there instead of in a shop,” says James.
Gaming has become so big that it’s believed to be larger than the movie industry.
“If you add the consoles and all the hardware involved, it’s probably getting around to where the movies are at the moment. Every avenue I’ve kind of looked at or investigated has gone onto speculation. It’s not a very definitive thing because gaming is so wide and broad. But it must be very close,” says James.
Disney’s Iron Man 3 took 23 days to hit $1 billion in sales, and is now currently the 6th highest grossing film according to Box Office Mojo. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, the violent role playing game, grossed $1 billion in just three days after being released by its parent company Take-Two Interactive.
The nerd herd in their rising millions will be sure to argue this in front of their desktops long into the night.

Tag: Computer

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You Can’t Get The Kids Off The Computer

Once Upon A Time There Was No Internet…

The Nerd Herd