The First Esports Champion Won John Carmack's Ferrari
Abstract
In June 1997, id Software’s Red Annihilation Quake tournament crowned the first champion of professional gaming, and the prize was not a check but the personal sports car of id’s lead programmer. Dennis “Thresh” Fong defeated Tom “Entropy” Kimzey 14 to −1 in the final at E3 in Atlanta and drove home John Carmack’s Ferrari 328 GTS. Guinness World Records recognizes Fong as the world’s first professional gamer, and the keyboard layout he popularized (WASD plus mouse) is still how virtually every first-person game is played today.
The Tournament
Red Annihilation was organized around Quake (1996), the first shooter built for internet multiplayer. Nearly 1,900 players entered the online qualification rounds in spring 1997; the best sixteen advanced to the offline finals at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Atlanta in June. The event drew mainstream press attention precisely because of its bizarre grand prize: John Carmack, id Software’s co-founder and engine programmer, had put up his own Ferrari 328 GTS.
The final, played on the map Castle of the Damned, was one-sided to the point of comedy. Dennis “Thresh” Fong, a 20-year-old Californian already famous on the early Quake ladder scene, beat Tom “Entropy” Kimzey of clan Impulse 9 14 to −1: Kimzey’s only scoring event was killing himself. Fong took the Ferrari; Carmack even agreed to underwrite the insurance for the first year so the new champion could legally drive it. That same summer, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) was founded, building regular tournament structures on the scene Red Annihilation had proven, the starting line of organized esports.
Why Thresh Mattered Beyond the Trophy
Fong’s larger legacy is under the fingers of every PC gamer. In an era when many players still moved with arrow keys and turned with the keyboard, Fong played with the WASD keys for movement and the mouse for aiming, a configuration that freed the right hand for precise, continuous view control. His dominance made his config file a downloadable object of study, and the layout spread through the Quake community into the defaults of later shooters. WASD + mouse-look became the industry-standard control scheme for first-person games, as unquestioned today as QWERTY; see The PC Gaming Revolution.
Guinness World Records lists Fong as the first professional videogamer. He later co-founded gaming services such as Xfire and remained an investor and entrepreneur in the games industry, the first person to turn tournament skill into a career, decades before esports filled stadiums.