Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (5 page)

The thrill of video-game competition and the quest for glory are what draw millions of players into online video games each day, and keeps them coming back. They’ve been present and enduring since the medium’s emergence.

Founded in 2004 in a former metal shop at 388 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, Barcade is an establishment that expresses its gimmickry through its name with rare economy: a bar themed around 1980s arcade machines. Barcade has little of the grime and grubbiness of its New York amusement-arcade forerunners, whose players would hunch like addicts, swapping tips in whispers as they competed for high-score dominance some twenty-five years ago. For Barcade’s patrons, most of whom are in their twenties, this is, rather, a museum of outmoded technology.

They wear much the same uniform as their forebears: Martin Amis, following his dalliance with an arcade machine in southern France, moved to New York, where he described the wardrobe of the average arcade-goer at the time as: ‘woolly hat, earphones, windbreaker, jeans, moonboots and a Rubik’s Cube key-ring,’ a similar uniform to that of the twenty-first-century Williamsburg hipster. But the majority of today’s clientele come to enjoy the ambiance rather than feed a high-score-chasing habit. They come for this parade of hands-on exhibits, curios whose bleeps and flashes provide an atmospheric link to a past long gone but, through the iconography of
Space Invaders
and
Pac-Man
, not forgotten, and even made fashionable. (The chunky pixel aesthetic of 1980s video games is again popular, this time not through technological necessity,
but through artistic choice. Many game developers use archaic pixel art as an aesthetic, either to infuse their game with an air of nostalgia, or simply because they prefer to work with these cartoonish sprites.)

Regardless of the
zeitgeist
that gathered these machines today, there’s something transporting about their physicality. Stare into the
Asteroids
field, face lit up white and fixed five inches from the screen, and the experience is no less mesmerising than when it rolled out of designer Ed Logg’s mind and into bars in 1979. Barcade offers a glimpse of how things once were, when the video-game industry was still in its mewling infancy. Grasp an arcade stick here and you shake hands with one of the medium’s proto-Adams, that which begat
Galaxian
, which begat
Defender
, which begat
Elite
, which begat
Super Mario World
. Here you can reconnect with that past.

Then there are those who come here not for nostalgia, or for a beery lesson in interactive history. Rather, they come for something more alive and current. Because here, in the monolithic permanence of the high-score table (many of which still proudly display the three-letter initials of players who recorded their scores in years gone by), some of the video-game form’s primal appeal can be found.

Hank Chien is a plastic surgeon from New York. He specialises in reshaping his patients’ eyes to create a crease in the upper eyelid. He first heard about Barcade when browsing the
Donkey Kong
world leaderboard, an online list of the highest scores ever recorded on the formative arcade game. Unlike other patrons, he comes to Barcade not to soak up the beer and atmosphere, but to compete.

A few months before he found the global
Donkey Kong
leaderboard, Chien had watched the Seth Gordon documentary
King of
Kong
, a film that documents the rivalry between two of the arcade game’s best players, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, as they compete for the world-record score in the game. Chien, curious about the game (he was seven when it originally launched in 1981; the Taiwanese national had never played it before), loaded a version onto his home computer only to discover a natural, latent talent for the game. Each night when he returned home from his private practice in Flushing, Queens, he would play
Donkey Kong
.

Donkey Kong
was the first video game designed by the medium’s most famous and storied designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, shortly after he joined Nintendo in the mid-1970s as an artist. Initially the young designer was told to devise a game featuring the cartoon character Popeye. Nintendo, however, was unable to obtain the rights to the American comic strip, so Miyamoto was instead asked to invent his own character for the game. Drawing inspiration from the classic 1933 film
King Kong
and the fable
Beauty and the Beast
, he constructed a simple story involving a gorilla that had escaped from its cage and kidnapped the player character’s girlfriend, Pauline. In the story, the gorilla climbed to the top of a seven-storey construction site and began to hurl barrels at his pursuer below.

Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, asked Miyamoto to choose an English name for the game. Miyamoto used a dictionary to look up the words he wanted: ‘Donkey,’ as a synonym for ‘Stubborn,’ and ‘Kong’ for gorilla. The gorilla’s master, the player-character, was just known as ‘Jumpman.’

The game was a sizeable success and sold more than 67,000 machines in the United States. Following the success, Nintendo changed Jumpman’s name to Mario in honour of the company’s U.S. landlord, Mario Segale, who had generously agreed to give the
company’s American office more time to pay its rent prior to
Donkey Kong
’s release.
Super Mario
was born.

The game’s vital place in the medium’s history is clear, and its success was no fluke.
Donkey Kong
has endured not only for its memorable characters (and a high-profile legal case brought by the film studio Universal, which claimed that the game was based on its seminal film
King Kong
) but for its allure as a competitive game, a place where players are able to showboat and quest for glory, competing against both the titular gorilla and other players who seek to demonstrate their dominance through the high-score table’s resolute verdict.

Chien grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and attended Stuyvesant High School and then Harvard, where he was a math and computer science major. He graduated from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Donkey Kong
quickly became the ideal way for the young doctor to relax, even though the precise twitches and jolts of play mimicked his day job.

The surgeon soon realised he had a talent for the game. After three months of concerted effort, he managed to reach the ‘kill screen,’ a notorious threshold for any player of the game: the point at which
Donkey Kong
freezes owing to a programming bug, after which it is impossible to progress.

Eager to take his newfound talent on the road, but unsure of where he might find a working
Donkey Kong
cabinet in the wild, Chien logged on to the Internet and visited Twin Galaxies, a Guinness Book of World Records–endorsed website that collates the world’s highest recorded scores for a slew of arcade games. Chien wanted to know whether there was another top-flight
Donkey Kong
player in New York, someone with whom he might share tips and
secrets and, if he got lucky, who owned a working cabinet on which he could practise. Almost immediately Chien found his man: Benjamin Falls, one of the top
Donkey Kong
players in the world.

‘I contacted him through the site and we immediately became friends,’ Chien tells me. ‘Now I would consider him a mentor to me.’ Falls introduced his new protégé to a number of other top
Donkey Kong
players. They invited him to Barcade, the only bar in New York with a working
Donkey Kong
cabinet.

‘Naturally
Donkey Kong
was the first game I played on my initial visit,’ says Chien. ‘What grabbed me about the game were the constant improvements in your scores and the long learning curve. No matter how good you are, there are always ways to improve your game.’
Donkey Kong
also appealed to Chien as a game that dynamically creates its challenge. Players have to learn its concepts, rather than merely memorising the precise moments at which to jump. ‘People talk about patterns in
Donkey Kong
when really they are just guidelines,’ he says. ‘There are no patterns in
Donkey Kong
, and the ones people refer to as patterns frequently fall apart.’

After another few months of playing at Barcade under the tutelage of more experienced players, Chien was able to reach the kill screen consistently. ‘At that point, I decided I would buy my own machine, record a score, submit it to Twin Galaxies, sell my machine, and be done,’ he says. ‘However, I was still improving, and by the time I got my machine I wanted more than to merely reach the kill screen: I wanted a million points. At the time there were only two official scores in excess of a million points, so it was an ambitious goal.’

The first time Hank Chien broke a million points, he was killing time in his small apartment in midtown Manhattan before a flight. It was a victory, but somehow it didn’t satisfy in the way that he had hoped. He had reached his ambitious goal but, with all the
drawn-eyed hunger of the glory addict, he decided it wasn’t enough; he wanted more.

Chien had his chance to improve upon his feat a few weeks later, in February 2010, when a snowstorm forced him to cancel his surgery schedule for the day, allowing him to sleep in.

‘I actually tried to go to work that day,’ he recalls. ‘When I reached my car, it was engulfed in snow up to the side-view mirrors. I called my office and cancelled everything for the day. Being locked at home, I decided to make some world-record attempts.’

Chien switched on the
Donkey Kong
cabinet that stands next to his television. At first, he found that he ‘couldn’t get a game started,’ as he puts it. The game’s first few levels are more random than those that follow, and frequently players will take more risks since the stakes are lower. ‘This is why you’ll see even the top players dying very often in the early stages and sometimes taking hours before they play out a game,’ says Chien. ‘I took frequent breaks and caught up on sleep throughout the day.’

That night, well rested and relaxed, Chien sat down for a final attempt of the day. Two and a half hours later, moments after the stroke of midnight, Chien stood to his feet, shouting the proclamation: ‘New world record!’

‘It is a good feeling to know you’re the best in the world at something,’ Chien told
The New York Times
shortly after his victory, ‘but one thing about
Donkey Kong
, you know there are people out there trying every day to break your record.’ Indeed, Billy Mitchell, the previous record holder, wrested the title back five months later with a score of 1,062,800 points. Steve Wiebe, the other major
Donkey Kong
competitor featured in Gordon’s film, set a new record with a score of 1,064,500 points the following month. Then, in February 2011, Chien set another world record at the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire. This rapid leap-frogging demonstrates the vibrancy of
competition within the game, the draw for competitors to prove their dominance at a game that, in technological terms at least, has been outmoded for decades.

The quest for glory through the lens of public performance has always been a part of the video game’s appeal. Video games
are
like musical instruments, but that is only half of the truth. They are also very often like sports, constantly gauging the player’s performance in words or numbers. They are competitive, driving players to strive for domination. They are a challenge, and one that most obviously accounts for the acts of human obsession and commitment to their simulated bounds, even, as in
Donkey Kong
’s case, decades after their invention. For many players, video games offer the same thrill and appeal as sports: an opportunity to prove oneself, to measure oneself against others, a focal point for aggression, rivalry, and battle within a simulated domain.

This would have been a significant factor in keeping Chen Rong-Yu at his keyboard the night that he died.
League of Legends
, the game that he was playing, is so effective at drawing its players into the cycle of sport and improvement that there are now training houses around the world whose residents live together only to improve at
League of Legends
.

One such group lives and practises less than an hour’s drive from the Internet café in which Rong-Yu died.

The Taipei 101 skyscraper’s stratospheric tendrils stab at the Taiwanese capital’s skyline. This was the first building to break the half-kilometre mark, its towering silhouette an exclamation point to mark modern man’s obsession and achievement. The 101 floors inside
provide office space to many of the world’s largest investment banks and corporations, including Google and Starbucks. It’s filled with the pungent aromas of money and success. The surrounding area is some of Taipei’s most expensive real estate, home to well-to-do bankers, lawyers, and the like; it’s a seat for the city’s mayor.

It’s also home to five young men who, in 2012, left their homes and moved into a penthouse apartment within the Taipei 101’s shadow. The friends are unlikely neighbours to the other Xinyi District residents. They don’t have high-powered jobs in industry or technology and, at the time they moved in at least, none could be considered rich.

Chen, Alex, Stanley, Toyz and Bebe are the Taipei Assassins, a professional eSports team who, for two years, used this spacious house as their headquarters, home, and training facility.

In January 2012, the training began in earnest. The days started at 9 a.m. and lasted for thirteen hours. During this time the young men played
League of Legends
almost continuously, trying out new techniques, then refining them, watching replays of their mistakes and victories and poring over footage of other teams’ matches in an effort to discern their rivals’ idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses.

‘TPA,’ as its fans would later affectionately refer to the team, spent two hours each day exercising and taking English classes; an education to produce a PR burnish. This dual focus on inward and outward professionalism was no coincidence: Garena, a private company based in Singapore, paid for the house, its twenty computers, food and weekly cleaners. Garena’s directors hoped that their investment might be recouped in tournament winnings.