The history of e-sports is punctuated by as many spectacular failures as it is by success stories. Both last long in the memory and shape the collective consciousness of those that follow it. When the times are good that is reflected in the mood and the actions from people at all levels, but when the times are bad the cynicism and bitterness becomes almost infectious.

In recent times we all know the big stories, the events that have gone on to impact on the wider e-sports community in one way or another. And while we’ve all been there watching from afar, there are a few people who have had to try and ride the storm as best they could while they were caught in the thick of it. Mike Bembenek is a name that might not be instantly recognisable to a lot of you, but of late he’s been there, done that and bought the life preserver.

A Halo player that went on to be an editor and caught a break working with X-League TV, since then he has known his fair share of highs and lows. Not least of these was the spectacular debacle that was a UKeSA, now remembered as almost laughable footnote in the annals of e-sports. In this, the first of a two part interview, Mike talks about the rise and fall of X-League TV, his first involvements with TNWA, the problems with enemydown.eu and much more besides. He speaks frankly and doesn’t dodge the difficult questions. The second part will deal almost exclusively with the great UKeSA failure, but before we get there – and indeed, before Mike got there – there’s a bumpy ride first:

So, you sort of got your big break in e-sports working for X-League TV, but what sort of background did they have? Had they always been dedicated to wanting to bring gaming and e-sports to television?

Basically one of the senior guys at the company was dabbling in a range of projects they thought they could get into, video gaming being one of them. During his research into all of that he came across competitive gaming and he wanted to dedicate X-League TV solely to that. So it was all about competitive gaming from day one… It wasn’t necessarily approached the right way but they were certainly dedicated to the idea of televising and promoting that side of gaming.

Mike indulging in a bit of shoutcasting

Let’s talk about the high point of X-League TV. I think most people involved in the e-sports community would certainly have heard of it and perhaps a respectable number outside of that. What would you say were the memorable achievements of the operation before it ended up collapsing?

It’s kind of weird because there were like eight to twelve of us working full time on it, which to run a TV show, let alone an entire TV channel, is pretty incredible. The people who worked on it really worked hard. Right before we got told that we were likely to lose our jobs we were doing the FIFA Interactive World Cup for EA. We had a whole themed set built and quite a big budget for the shows. There was a small production company travelling all around the qualifiers in the UK and went out to the finals in Berlin. Before that we’d had a big Halo 3 tournament for a prize of £10,000. We had quite a few teams come out of that and the seeds of the current Power Gaming team.

The Halo 3 stuff for me was a highlight because that was the game I played, but we did some great shows I thought. One big game that never got the appreciation it deserved was World In Conflict. We did some stuff for that with GIGA, which is now owned by ESL, where we had live feeds of English players taking on German players and that was pretty awesome. We were getting there and one day we just came into work and there was a notice saying you’re out of a job.

So what precipitated that? Did you see it coming?

I was hugely surprised when it happened. I had no idea it was coming. I knew that we were bleeding money at the start but it seemed like things were turning round. EA were paying us to do the FIFA World Cup shows and if you actually sit down and watch any of that stuff I think it’s some of the best e-sports content that has ever been produced. It’s watchable for an every day person. It just came from nowhere, just when we were doing the best work.

What were the causes as you see it? Now that you’ve had time to reflect and take stock of the situation what exactly were the problems with X-League?

Ultimately the funding was pulled. It was all run by Richard Desmond of the Daily Express and a whole bunch of adult TV channels. They went into all kinds of stuff, like that “Roulette Television” you see quite a bit of now in the small hours, they were one of the first to get into that. They had all kinds of shopping channels. I just don’t think they were seeing the returns after a year that they’d hoped for and they just said “that’s it” and pulled the plug. It was just a start-up project with a big backer and without that backing there was nothing you could do.

Would you say the lack of expertise and understanding from the people who were running the station was a factor?

I think it was a factor, but it was just so new. You look at e-sports events now and they have trouble attracting sponsors. We had a good number of TV viewers and even with that sponsors weren’t willing to commit, especially with some of the games we were showing. There was a lot of Call of Duty, a lot of Halo 3, so it’s all violent content. It was just a big juggling act and the sales people just didn’t seem to be very good at getting across that what we were showing was going out to the right demographic and one they should support.

Mike with colleaguesat the WCG in Cologne

So with it pretty much down the pan TNWA came in and acquired the X-League TV brand…

That’s exactly what happened. I was hanging around Portland going to events on my own and filming stuff, because I could get equipment for free, so I was still helping out with some one off productions. Then I heard that X-League was being bought by TNWA, fronted by Paul Sulyok. We’d done some stuff with EnemyDown in the past. We had a handshake agreement that EnemyDown would run a lot of the PC stuff that we did.It made sense as there was no point in trying to compete directly in the UK with things like ED or ClanBase. We did the Packard Bell tournaments with them, which was an experience…

So we all got told TNWA were buying it and I think they did that because they wanted to start creating video content of a good quality. I don't know how much they paid for it or anything... but it did seem like a very odd acquisition at the time.

What did you know about TNWA prior to them picking up X-League? You said you’d had a few dealings with them in the past, but did you have any idea who they were or what they were about?

I really didn’t know anything. ED had been doing some stuff with us but I hadn’t really talked to a lot of them over at TNWA. I mean, their operations were based all around the country. You had a couple of them in London and they were helping with the first phase of Project Gamers, which people will have heard of through UKeSA. That’s how I got to know Paul.

I was involved with TNWA at that time and my experience was that they had money and a lot of ideas but they didn’t have any clear vision of how to achieve them and they were completely out of their depth in a lot of areas. I mean, one week we were supposedly acquiring 4kings, the next it was Cadred… It just seemed to change all the time.

Oh man, it was a chicken with it’s head cut off. When I started working there I think it was at the “right time” because at least they seemed to have a plan, but I totally agree with what you’re saying. I don’t even know what money was there or whether it was a lot or whatever, but they did seem to be all over the place when it came to what they wanted to achieve.

When you saw that maybe they were going about things the wrong way did you ever try and give them a nudge in the right direction.

I gave them all kinds of suggestions but it was just crazy… I got brought in December 2008 and was meant to be the media guy. You know the stuff, podcasts, top ten plays of the month videos, that kind of stuff. Immediately I knew I’d be putting out that content to very little traffic because the EnemyDown.eu site was very new and obviously had its problems. My thinking was that by having this content it would drive non-competitive gamers to the site and they were supportive of that, but they weren’t very supportive of getting the video content up and running. That seemed odd given that they’d got X-League for that. But then they started to load me up with really bizarre jobs… Doing press releases and that sort of thing, which wasn’t really in my area and in a lot of instances wasn’t necessary. They were treating it a little too professionally for what it was and I was trying to keep the e-sports mindset but with high quality content.

Studio work with Jay Atkins

The background they all came from, as I understood it, was they were all straight businessmen and I can quote one anonymous TNWA staff member at the time saying that they wouldn’t “know the difference between a game of Call of Duty or a game of spin the bottle.” What were they doing involved in e-sports exactly?

The CEO Paul Sulyok, I don’t know his background at all. He was in the military and he was working in finance and he seemed to have a good track record of getting backing, even if the businesses didn’t always work out. He started up TNWA… Well, the original TNWA had already folded once, I don’t know under what terms, but that was when Prizefight was up and running. I didn’t know about the history of what had gone before… Behind him you had a guy called Spyro and he was a venture capitalist. He was just putting money into his investments and TNWA just happened to be one of those. He only really got involved with the decisions when it came to spending a lot of his money, so when they were pushing the enemydown.eu site people had to get his approval because we were going to hire a bunch of people and spend a lot of money. Ultimately though, everything went through Paul… He was the main guy.

A lot of people say that there’s no point in investing in e-sports if you want to make a quick buck. You know, they say you have to think long term, or you have to really love the scene, or the game, or whatever. Yet I think these guys were trying to do that. It looked like a profit driven venture – what do you think?

I don’t know. I got to work with Spyro quite a bit late in the day and that didn’t seem to be his mindset. As I understand it venture capitalists aren’t looking to make a quick buck, they’re looking to make a buck full stop and they usually know how long it’s going to take. The huge problem was that company was run like a blue-chip company. The salaries that some people were on were ridiculous. I couldn’t quote you exact figures but I do know that compared to other companies, like say Turtle Entertainment, which is a good comparison in the same area, the salaries were ludicrous.

I mean they had programmers for obscure languages like RAILS because of the enemydown.eu site so they were paying out big money to guys without even realising they could have got it cheaper, or could have got people to volunteer, or done it in a more widely used language at least. I think if they’d have known basic stuff like this they’d have got further.

So it wasn’t a “jobs for the boys network” similar to what people alleged about CGS? I mean one thing that seemed to be consistently said about the heads of TNWA was that they didn’t know what they were doing, but they were able to keep securing backing and support from people by having the appearance of knowing what they were doing. To do that they needed respected names within the scene on board…

The Packard Bell stuff they ran with XLEAGUE didn't run very smoothly. That should have been a red light for me but I went into it thinking I could help them improve. There was a huge lack of communication throughout and this was a consistent problem because people who were getting paid were scared to say what needed to be said. A lot of the lower tier staff there were people who had been involved in competitive gaming for a long time, many of them dedicated and hard workers from what I could see. So what you had was this split – you had people who cared but weren’t really listened to or didn’t feel able to say anything, and then you had the others who were just comfortable, safe in the knowledge they were going to get paid and they didn't appear to be putting the effort in.

So what was the deal with the move to the enemydown.eu site anyway? I mean, it clearly wasn’t fit for purpose and it was a former news site – Devotii. It lacked key functionality for running a league so whose decision was it to use it?

When I arrived the site had just gone into beta and it was nowhere near ready to go. People would be saying this and all we got back was “go go go – get it launched” and we didn’t really have any control over that. We had a big meeting up in Scotland, me, Peter Simpson, Andy Taylor and Simon Green and we spent two intense days brainstorming what we needed for the site to actually work. We came up with this list and rolled it out to the guys and Paul was like “sorry, we don’t have the time or the resources” so all that work was washed away.

Mike and company were good at thinking up ways around red tape

Then they announced UKeSA – At the time I was like “I can’t believe these guys are being given this chance to do something this big” especially with their track record of what I think many would perceive as failure. I think a lot of people felt the same but wanted to believe that the ideas could be followed through. Were you ever apprehensive about the UKeSA project?

I was excited about it when it was announced. I’d worked under Ray Mia at X-League where he was my boss for a year and a half. Right before X-League was all shut down we were looking at a proposal about how to get round OFCOM rules. For those who don’t know OFCOM is the governing body that watches over TV, makes sure it meets the correct standards and no laws are broke and so on… The big problem we had was because we owned the website that was running the competitions and the TV channel it was hard to get sponsorships to work properly without breaking laws.

So for example if you wanted a Halo 3 show sponsored by Microsoft’s Halo 3, you couldn’t do that, that’d be illegal. You could have the Call of Duty show sponsored by Halo 3 but who’s going to do that? It just wouldn’t make any sense. So the way you get around that was to create the equivalent of an FA, a governing body, and this is why UKeSA was based around football. We rolled out the model to Ray and said “this is how we can get around OFCOM and get more sponsorships” and that is how UKeSA was born.

We started the first steps of UKeSA ourselves at X-League, unbeknown to most people, but once it went under it seemed to be over. Then when TNWA bought X-League the idea was resurrected. I don’t even know why TNWA bought X-League TV because nothing ever happened with that and I am still dumbfounded by it. So it was down to Ray who was convincing them that they wanted to follow through with the governing body idea and we could focus on TV again later.

Everyone has been thinking about governing bodies in e-sports for a long time but no-one had gone through with it, or attempted it in any meaningful way. The sole reason why UKeSA came into existence was to get around OFCOM rulings.

Be sure to check out the second part of the interview, which charts the rise and fall of UKeSA...