I’ve been playing the PC since the late 80’s, but it was with the arrival of the first online games that something different took in me. Imagine two teenage brothers, a 33.6 modem, and the first Diablo in the far 1996/97. She was alone with her mom pushing the cabin and a very expensive passion for the time, so that we were paying the bills to break the walls and bring the tools to the shipyards.
It is from the most sweaty passions where, however, the greatest satisfactions arise. In the years to come, my brother Edoardo and we were the pioneers of the MMORPG genre initially with Ultima Online, then Everquest, Dark Age of Cameloth where I’ve been to the top of the ladder for months, and finally World of Warcraft where I got great results both in Vanilla and in The Burning Crusade (Rank 14 and Gladiator S1).
Finally with Warhammer Online where I also led the best European Clan here, the RAGE also here at the top of the ladder. Since Diablo I have always been actively participating in community life, writing a tide guide and even piano piano was pre-youtube, so warcraftmovies can find my videos even by 100,000 views.
However, the years were not ripe and a degree in communication with the thesis on gaming industry was not enough to be able to live this and so I made a career in communication and the web, put on home, family. Now I’m married and I have a baby of almost five years.
But passion has always been there, perhaps sometimes even somewhat suppressed by the needs of everyday life. And in the meantime, the phenomenon of exports and powerful channels of communication such as youtube and twitch grew and within me I thought “if I had these things” …
So from thinking I decided to act:
I’ve always been fond of the Blizzard titles and so when I saw the overwatch presentation at Blizzcon in 2014 and I was so excited that I thought this was the right game to come back. On December 31, 2015 was the first video on my youtube channel H82 Overwatch.
The title was Overwatch: Why should I be interested? Less than two weeks later, Overwatch’s Blizzard community manager contacted me very much in my work and started my new adventure.
Let’s talk about the situation of Italian Exports now: do you think it has grown in recent months and what could still be done to bring the competitive movement to the levels of that, for example, American?
Italy is a different world in my opinion: many attribute it to a negative meaning. It’s easy to make comparisons with the United States where all this was born. Let us not forget that the US is a much wider country than ours, more populated where everyone speaks English, one of the most spoken languages on the planet. More people mean more public, more public means more budget and therefore huge events.
America speaks to the whole world, let’s not forget it. But we are a small country, we have our own language and our traditions: we must start eSport living in our way is useless to imagine things that we are not and we will probably never be at least for the next 50 years.
There are very strong eSport countries that have created their identity and are very strong as South Korea and France. We too should start taking our way, many of us exponents of the eSport world we understand and we are rushing in this direction, trying to take from the more experienced ones the technical side, the direction and the organization. As creativity and personality, however, we Italians are armored and we are slowly beginning to emerge, just to see the great results made with Heartstone, Call of Duty and also the new Overwatch.
We have to make eSport a great Italian party and open it to everyone without elitism and preconceptions. As creativity and personality, however, we Italians are armored and we are slowly beginning to emerge, just to see the great results made with Heartstone, Call of Duty and also the new Overwatch. We have to make eSport a great Italian party and open it to everyone without elitism and preconceptions.
As creativity and personality, however, we Italians are armored and we are slowly beginning to emerge, just to see the great results made with Heartstone, Call of Duty and also the new Overwatch. We have to make eSport a great Italian party and open it to everyone without elitism and preconceptions.
