The First Game
Blinkzr said qualifying for Pro League almost felt better than winning Champs.
He said it with the easy honesty of someone who’s already processed it. Not nostalgic, not performing humility. Just: it was like that, and here’s why.
He was studying Finance. He was playing Rocket League for fun. He found Apex in season nine, which he describes in retrospect with fond bewilderment. He genuinely thought it looked terrible.
Then COVID. Twitch. Tournaments on screen at some hour when nothing else was happening. And at some point, with no clear moment he could point to, the idea shifted from this looks fun to I wonder if I could.
The first Pro League game he ever played, his team won. All three of them screaming, certain. Absolutely certain, they were the best in the world. They ended the day in 14th. Dropped zero points across five games. Just lost, repeatedly, on the day they were sure they’d arrived.
He tells it like a good story, which means he’s made peace with it.
What’s odd about that sequence is the order of things. Usually people remember the fall and forgive themselves for it later. Blinkzr remembers the certainty before the fall landed, and finds it funny. The feeling was real when it happened. He keeps it.
Monsoon interviews him like they’ve been talking this way for a year. Which they have. The format, teammates turning the mic on each other, sounds like a gimmick until you hear the register: no media training, no performance, just two people in Paris who’ve already won something together and are quietly weighing whether they can do it again.
When they get to what actually irritates them about each other, it comes down to this: Blinkzr is the IGL. Monsoon used to be one. Two people who read the game the same way, trying to stay on the same side.
Monsoon says Blinkzr gets hot-headed fast when things break down. The IGL instinct find exactly where the recipe failed, immediately, doesn’t always leave room for people to land before the audit starts.
Blinkzr says: yeah.
No defense. The clean acknowledgment of someone who knows what he does and is still in it.
“We chill,” Blinkzr says, near the end. “Just don’t trip and win finals.”
Which is either the most relaxed thing a defending champion has said before a grand final, or the most accurate description of what it actually takes. Probably both.
He was studying Finance. Now he’s in Paris, the day before. And the first feeling he still carries, the one that almost beat winning the whole thing was the moment he realized nobody needed to tell him this was real.
He’d already played the first game.
Adrian Kovacs