When fourth-year computer science student Erik Burton started playing first-person shooter game Quake a decade ago, his focus wasn’t on becoming exceptional at the game.
What he didn’t know was that his interest in the game would set him down the path to winning a $25,000 scholarship along with his partner, Carleton alumnus Greg Bouevitch.
Representing Carleton, Burton and Bouevitch won the Collegiate Quake Championship, a two-on-two Quake tournament seeing 50 teams from colleges and universities across North America meeting in Dallas, Texas to compete for $100,000 in scholarships.
The duo swept every opponent in the tournament, losing only a single match in the finals to their opponents and practice partners, Appalachian State University.
“I wasn’t surprised at the outcome,” Burton said. “That was roughly how the practices went, as well.”
It was Burton and Bouevitch’s first e-sports competition of this size. Burton, who was relatively inexperienced, held his own until the top eight when he started to become outpaced by his competition.
“I was definitely the worst player in the finals,” he said.
Burton, facing steep competition from other longtime veterans of the game, devised a strategy with Bouevitch, who goes by the screen name “cha1n.”
“Our play style was directed at giving him all the healing, power-ups and armour,” said Burton. “I just tried to play passively. I wasn’t trying to get kills, because I knew if I took the power-ups, I’d get less bang for my buck than he would.”
Bouevitch approached Burton about the collegiate tournament, hoping to find a second player to play with him.
Quake has a relatively small following, despite being the first competitive first-person shooter e-sport. Even experienced players had trouble finding someone to team up with, as many didn’t know anybody who played Quake at all, let alone someone who played Quake from their university.
This was not the case with Bouevitch and Burton—the pair knew each other since high school and happened to attend Carleton together.
Burton said finding out that he was going to join the tournament meant that he had to start playing to win, while also working full-time. He practiced for over an hour and a half a day, amounting to about a 100 hours of Quake over a couple months.
“I knew I needed to play every day,” said Burton. “There’s a lot of money on the line.”
The focus was on mastering the game’s tricky movement and unique physics system.
“Quake is debatably the fastest game,” said Burton.
He says that its steep learning curve is one of the reasons that the game is as small and niche as it is.
“It’s very hard to get good at the game,” said Burton. “A new player could probably aim okay, but against more experienced players, he’d probably just get owned, because of the movement . . . it’s purely skill-based.”
Burton went from playing Quake to relax, to analyzing his mistakes, hitting important shots and playing to win.
The tournament was organized by college e-sports group Collegiate Star League as part of QuakeCon 2018.
Burton was surprised and grateful by the large prize pool he and Bouevitch took home, though he expects the prize to be smaller next year.
“I’m guessing the turnout for the skill wasn’t what they expected,” Burton said.
Burton plans to keep playing Quake, honing his skills so that he can compete beyond collegiate levels.
