Audio interview with HuskyStarcraft - A Commentator like none other

Polygon reVue proudly presents: 29 Minutes with HuskyStarcraft - The Man of the Hour with the Camcorder. This very ambitious commentator is fairly new to the scene compared to some of the oldtimers previously interview on this site, but Husky has proven that he’s in a league of his own in terms of creating exciting and unique material for us all to enjoy. With loose hair, precise knowledge of the game and seven buckets of humour he makes the game of Starcraft: Brood War accesible and fun to everybody - and he can sing, too! Enough said, time to let the man speak. Click the Youtube-windows below to listen in, or download the interview as mp3 here - or just scroll down to read it all as plain old text.

Welcome, Husky, to yet another interview with Polygon reVue. How are we today?

I’m doing awesome, thanks for having me again. You interviewed me before but we lost the audio file so hopefully we’ll get it right this time and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Indeed - this interview will be available both as a Youtube-video, podcast and this written transcript. Again, it’s a pleasure having you, and I though I’d ask you some questions about Starcraft, Starcraft 2 and eSports in general.

Let me kick off with the fact that you have been very, very productive - having your own Livestream which is becoming increasingly popular and publishing content on Esportsreport (Husky’s second Youtube-channel) as well as singing very popular songs. How do you do it all?

Well, the way I schedule is that I usually leave a couple of days of from work and college - because unlike popular belief I do go to college and I do work a part-time job, I’m not a total bum just living in the basement of my parents’ house or anything like that. But I do leave my schedule open, at least a couple of days, and once you just sit down and do something productive you can get quite a bit done in a day and so it’s pretty much my hobby that I just love doing. When I’m at work or in school I’d rather just be at home, commentating games or singing Disney-songs - whatever, it’s what I like to do, it’s a lot of fun and I really look forward to doing it as much as I can.

So, like you said, the Livestream is one of my new things, it takes up a lot of time - I have been uploading a little bit less content because I do the Livestream. It’s a lot of fun, I think the most visitors I have had was 158, which was pretty cool. It was featured on the homepage of Livestream and all that good stuff - it was a lot of fun. At the time of this interview (2nd of October, 2009) I did another live cast which lasted until about 10pm Pacific Standard time, so most of the world was already asleep but we still managed to get about 75 people or something like that, so it’s a little bitof fun which I really enjoy doing. It’s my hobby, I put all my free time into it - it’s a blast and I absolutely love it.

Well, you’re a nerd-inspiration to us all and your content is both very enjoyable and qualitative, I must say. Looking forward to seeing more of it. Can you tell us anything about your future plans, where do you want to go with things if things go the way you want them to?

If everything goes perfectly they’ll just make me the CEO of Blizzard and then I’ll have a cushy job for the rest of my life, but other than that - the whole goal is to do anything that’s related to eSports. I mean, all the more power to it - I’ve had offers from about five or six different web sites trying to get me to moderate their forums and write up articles. I don’t have that much free time so I can’t please everybody, but I don’t know - for now it’s just sticking to the commentaries and I’m working on Esports reports which I’ve mentioned a lot. It’s youtube.com/user/esportsreport, and it hasn’t launched yet because I just recently moved a couple of days ago so I’m still getting all the cameras set up and the lighting and I have to get a green screen and all the basic stuff out of the way.

It’s going to be my Youtube-channel that I use to be a partner with Youtube, because my current account with commentaries (youtube.com/user/huskystarcraft) - and a lot of people ask this without realising the answer - but to become a Youtube-partner and get the little ads at the bottom that you make money from every time someone clicks at them, in order to do that your videos first need to be pretty popular. Mine are, they exceed the threshold of minimum popularity, but you have to also own all the content on your page, and I technically don’t own the videos I cast. The only way I could own them was if I was watching replays of Starcraft on my own computer, recording them and uploading them with my own banners or something. But since I’m commentating over videos from Korea, which is the only way to really get that content, since that kind of stuff isn’t available on TV here in America - I don’t really own it and can’t become a Youtube-partner.

Of course, Youtube keep sending me emails like every two days, asking me to become a partner even though I can’t. So anyways, the reason I made Esports Report was to become a partner and try to make something that isn’t really out there. There are a couple of eSports shows on Youtube already, I would really recommend checking out DJ Wheat’s show. Mine’s gonna be different than his, though - DJ Wheat is a commentator who does a lot of first person shooters and games like that, and he’s actually not as popular as he should be, he’s really good at it. He has an eSports show, but his is more kind of a talk show - that’s the only way I could think of to explain it. He’s got one of those old Youtube-accounts so he can upload really long videos, and each episode is like an hour and a half long, and that isn’t my goal to have that long videos. That’s just not something you can sit down and watch for like eight minutes to get a recap of everything, you kind of just have to plough through for over an hour.

My show is going to be more focused on maybe eight or nine minutes once or twice a week, and it’s going to mainly focus on Starcraft 2. That’s why I’m not super worried about launching it ASAP. The first six or seven minutes will be SC2, and there will be reviews of other eSports - like Smash Brothers and Team Fortress 2, DoTa, Counter-Strike. I mean, I love all eSports - I have played pretty much all games there are, especially if it’s a competitive one, then I’ll have at least played it casually. That’s the whole point of that, there’s gonna be a whole bunch of different segments, and a lot of fun. We already have the intro made, I’m still working on the sound effects for it and we have a sweet logo that a fan made. A fan also made the intro, people have been helping me out a lot on that, and I can’t wait to launch it. It’s still a bit way off, I have about a millions of things going on, but that’s pretty much what’s in the nearest future for me, aside from continuing doing commentaries - I will always do that, because that kind of is the one reason people visit my channel so everything else are more or less side projects.

Well, best of luck with that - we can’t wait to see what you do with it, and everyone should make sure to visit the home of DJ Wheat and subscribe to both your Youtube channels - HuskyStarcraft and Esportsreport. The DJ Wheat show is very good in its own right, though there’s definitely room for more shows that are similar to it but different from it, I would say.

Moving on to the fact that you went to BlizzCon with a cam corder, managing to capture footage of Ma Jae Yoon, “sAviOr - The Maestro of Zerg”, drinking alcohol with all the Teamliquid-guys among other things. Can you tell us about your experiences and observations from BlizzCon, in and outside the game.

Yeah, BlizzCon was great. I actually didn’t get as much footage of Starcraft 2 as I wanted, but once I was there I just really wanted to experience a Starcraft 1-tournament, because SC2 is going to be around for about ten years so I didn’t get the first footage of people gaming but I mostly was there to enjoy the Starcraft 1-championship. The chances of there being another major Starcraft-tournament in America are pretty slim, there might be one more, but the Starcraft 2 Beta I hope will be out by next BlizzCon. Of course, they’ve been saying that for years but hopefully it will be out by then so people will really focus on that and it will bring in millions of millions new people - and really, I think Starcraft 1 tournaments are going to fade away apart from among the hardcore fans, because they love it and the game is awesome. The focus will be on Starcraft 2, especially at BlizzCon because the whole point of that event is to market and sell their products. I mean, they don’t really talk about Rock ‘n Roll Racing or other old Blizzard-games because they don’t make their money out of that anymore.

So when I was there I was really enjoying the Starcraft 1 tournament, any time they were playing games - which was quite often - I made sure to watch that and then of course the Teamliquid after party on day one was absolutely hilarious. I have most of that uploaded, I believe to Esports Report. There’s Ma Jae Yoon drinking some American liquor with Incontrol and all that good stuff. That was the kind of stuff I was there for, just enjoy the atmosphere and meet the progamers, kind of getting a feel for what eSports should be like and what it’s like in Korea. A lot of people were less excited since I didn’t get that much Starcraft 2 footage, but really - there’s going to be so much SC2 content the day the Beta hits. Thousands and thousands of videos, more Starcraft 2 content than you can swallow - so that’s why I was focusing on other stuff.

Overall, BlizzCon was really fun. There’s a huge focus on World of Warcraft, which didn’t really surprise me, but it was kind of frustrating also. Starcraft 2 was pushed back because Blizzard pretty much took all their developers off SC2 and put them on working on Wrath of the Lich King, the new WoW-expansion. I mean, a lot of people know I play World of Warcraft, and I’m not exactly angry but it is a little frustrating that Starcraft 2 got delayed for that reason and that WoW was so dominating at BlizzCon.

But other than than, it was really fun. I got to play Starcraft 2, which is going to be an amazing game. I’ve already mentioned on a couple of different web sites the few concerns I have about SC2, mostly having to do with the spectator side of it since I am a commentator and I like being able to see what’s going on on the screen. Otherwise, it is a really fun game, and people ask me all the time about SC2 specifics, but I really did not pay that much attention to build orders, timings, health points of units or abilities, etc - I wasn’t focusing on that, I was just going through it all, reading all the tool tips and all that. I think that overall I played about ten or twelve games of Starcraft 2, and I pretty much intentionally maxed them all out in terms of time just to get to test all the upgrades and spells and all that good stuff.

From what I experienced Starcraft 2 was really, really fun and any bugs of balance issues of course are going to be fixed by the time the Beta comes. I don’t really talk to much about balance, they’re gonna change everything so much, I mean - how much has the original Starcraft changed over the last ten years? It has changed a lot, and they still patch it sometimes, so I’m just really looking forward to the game coming out and BlizzCon was a blast. If you’re thinking of going it’s definitely worth it, just know that you’re gonna be around a bunch of WoW-people because that game is the main focus - that’s what made Blizzard the huge conglomerate that it is. Either way, it was fun - the goodie bag kind of sucked, there was no beta key but what can you do, I went there for the fun. And yeah, I went there with the HD cam corder that 100% paid for through donations from fans, which is going to be used for every episode of Esports Report.

It sounds like an awesome time, indeed, but if I can stay on the topic of Starcraft 2 a while longer - do you feel that the beautiful and crisp graphics of the game makes it less visually clear than Starcraft 1? One of main reasons that the original game is such a good spectator sport is of the course the fact that you very easily can follow all the action, but would you say that this is not as simple in Starcraft 2?

There is a huge thread on the Teamliquid forum, which is the place I visit the most to follow Starcraft-discussions because there’s where most of the “hardcore SC players” are who analyse pretty much everything about the game, that deals with this. I don’t know how many hundred of pages of replies it has, but there are a lot of arguments going back and forth, but either way - not to say that my own opinions are right - but personally I felt when I was at BlizzCon and watched the official 2vs2 matches that it was really fun to watch but to be perfectly honest it was pretty difficult to tell what’s going on. Part of that is because we are not used to watching Starcraft 2 yet, but a lot of it is due to things like highly artistic animations (as opposed to ’simplistic’ and ‘easy to see’) and the tile sets themselves. The level of detail that is now incorporated into the maps themselves is extremely high, all the cracks and shadows are so beautifully rendered that it’s actually quite hard to see the Zerglings running by them.

But on the flip side, for the observer tools, there’s going to be multiple unit selection which you can’t do currently in Starcraft 1, and there’s also new unit counting tools so you can kind of tell that way what’s going so that you can easily read how many Zerglings are on the screen right now and things like that. As far as just looking at it if you don’t want to pay attention to all the fancy unit counting stations and stuff, it’s kinda hard to tell what’s going on. Other than that, I think a lot of the problem lies in the tile sets, so I think the Korean map makers will just use whatever type of map and tile set that are easiest on the eyes. Because in Starcraft: Brood War, they really don’t use the snow tile set at all since all the white hurts your view. The Koreans will figure that out and help make it more accessible, and the only other thing as far as spectating goes is that the units and buildings are in 3D so it’s now possible to actually hide units behind things. Like for example, the Protoss colossus is a huge unit, and you can actually put other units behind it in some blind spots so that they are invisible on the screen. I don’t know it that’s gonna be a huge deal, we’ll have to see, but units can sometimes be behind buildings and you don’t know that they’re there which is quite frustrating for the spectator. What I think they’ll do is to give a unit a real small outline if its positioned behind something so you can tell it’s there.

Other than than, actually playing the game - it’s amazing. Anyone who bashes Starcraft 2 has obviously not played it, it’s really fun and it’s going to be the best real time strategy-game ever, aside from Starcraft 1 of course. I’m really looking forward to it, they had to drag me out of there. I was playing the game until the very last moment when they were closing down and were throwing people out so it’s definitely worth the wait. As far as it being a spectator sport I think it will be fun, they just have to work out a few kinks but hey man, it’s Blizzard - they know what they’re doing.

Yes, the problem is in good hands indeed. However, moving on the existing Starcraft, there is this issue in the community - an uncertainty - involving GomTV and what’s happening there. We don’t know very much, but what do you think is going on?

Like you said, we don’t know too much - the only info we’ve heard has come from Daniel ‘SuperDanielMan’ Lee, I made a thread about it on Teamliquid. It’s got at least twenty pages of replies, but I haven’t read them all so I don’t know if there’s any more hidden information there, but from what I’ve heard so far it’s just the Twitter-messages sent by SuperDanielMan that’s the source. He pretty much says that there’s a lot of KeSPA (Korean eSports Association) drama. They are the governing body of eSports in Korea and pretty much controls it all, and so they have a lot of influence over the teams. If a tournament isn’t sponsored by KeSPA it seen as kind of a waste of time for players, from what I understand of it, it’s seen as not as important because then you’re not being ranked for it. A player want a high ranking because then they get more money, essentially. Last season, SK Telecom 1 (the leading pro-team) wasn’t taking part in GomTV, and now more teams have been pulling out. If that’s due to influence from KeSPA or not I don’t know, there’s really no way of knowing both sides of it.

But right now, as it all stands, there’s no Gom Season 4 - as far as I know, sorry if that’s wrong. They’re trying to work out to either have an all foreigner-league - which in this case means everyone outside of Korea - that’s one thing SuperDanielMan has said is on the table. Another idea is to have a GomTV season where everybody could just join, which I think is what they should do, trying to have a fourth season if they can get one team do it - at least have something to reward those players for just looking past the drama and being able to just play the game.

I mean, personally, my favourite league is Gom - it actually doesn’t have anything to do with Tasteless, who of course is awesome, but the reason I like it is that it’s like a normal tournament. You start out with 128 people, or whatever number they had at the start, and if you lose - you’re out man, you’re gone, better luck next year. Unlike the individual leagues, OSL and MSL, where there’s qualifying rounds for months and months and then they play like hundreds of games and - I mean, I like watching those too - but the reason I like GomTV is that it’s just a straight-up and brutal, hack ‘n slash fest. Whoever manages to not lose a best-of-3 ends up in the final, so - we’ll have to wait and see, I really do hope they come up something. I know for a fact that GomTV has made Starcraft expontially more popular.

I’ve always played Starcraft, all people know that, but I really got into eSports right around the first season of the GomTV Classic - that’s only like a year or two ago - and ever since then I could definitely see Starcraft growing a lot. If there was a thread about Teamliquid-popularity it has been through the roof - it wasn’t even since the announcement of Starcraft 2, it was more since GomTV got started. So really, I think Starcraft is in a pretty good place, a much better place now than it has been in a very long time. I would say that about 95% of that is because of GomTV, they hired the best of the best - Nick ‘Tasteless’ Plott of course, he gives Starcraft a friendly face, making it easy to understand so that anyone can watch it and enjoy it. That’s kind of what I’m hoping for the future of Starcraft and hopefully for GomTV they’ll still give poor Nick and SuperDanielMan a job, but as far as we are aware we don’t really know if there’ll be a season four.

Yes, GomTV has been excellent fun and has clearly boosted the popularity of Starcraft in all the of the world that is not Korea, and we can only hope that it will continue that way. Click here to view some of the best games ever played on GomTV.

Hoping for the best in terms of that, we’re moving on to other more established, and KeSPA-sanctioned, leagues. The seasons are about to start again - Proleague, MSL, OSL - any thoughts or predictions or hopes?

Oh man, I think this season will be just crazy. I think that a lot of gamers realise that Starcraft 2 is on the horizon and so no one knows exactly what’s going to happen but as of right now it seems like this will be the last big 100% Starcraft: Brood War-focused league season. Because once the Starcraft 2 Beta comes out, a lot of people who are now watching SC1 will instantly focus on Starcraft 2. All the new people that are coming into the scene will do so as well, and they won’t be like “hey, what’s this Starcraft 1-thing that everybody’s talking about?” - they’re just gonna care about Starcraft 2. This is gonna be the last season, no SC2 in the way, there’s just gonna be Starcraft 1 - everybody’s going to be watching. That’s why I’m really excited about this, I’m expecting players to just practice their brains out, more so than they already do.

There will loads of epic games, I can’t wait to see Stork and Sea again - Sea is definitely one of my favourite players, one of the lesser known ones but who’s still been around for ages - A Terran-player on the team MBC Game Hero. Also, from what I’ve heard, that team has got their old coach back. Last season, if you were following the teams, MBC Game Hero was like among the bottom three. They actually used to be a really good team but what happened was that they had really good coach who either got fired or quit, I don’t know the exact story, but he wasn’t the coach anymore and they got some new guy who apparently got a terrible practice scheme or whatever. And so, they just went down, down down - and Starcraft is all about practice, practice, practice. That’s why they play eight hours a day easily, because even if you’re good at Starcraft you still have to practice all the mechanics. Now they got their old coach back though, so I hope that MBC Game Hero can make it into top six so that they can be in the play-offs for the team leagues.

As far as for the individual leagues, as I said I can’t wait for Stork and Sea and I really want to see, of course, players like Bisu, Jaedong, sAvior, Flash - always so fun to watch because they’re so, so good. We will have to see how it goes, I’m really glad that Calm won an individual league last season. If you look at his record from last season, you see that Calm deserved it - a lot of people are talking smack about him, but he is just a ridiculously good player. Maybe he’s a little bit late to the Starcraft-scene with Starcraft 2 coming out, but I think that this season Calm is just going to decimate a lot of people and hopefully there will be a bit fewer haters for him. He won an individual league, the MSL, and you can only get so lucky in doing that and a huge part of it is definitely skill.

I’m super stoked for the new season, the down season was absolutely killing me, because there were just a bunch of filler-games on super-unbalanced maps with B-teamers - which were pretty fun but hard to commentate because they were just so baaaad. Like having three games in a row where the same players loses to Mutalisk rushes every time, something you don’t usually see in high-end Starcraft. The new season will be an absolute blast, I’m expecting nothing but way better than last season. So definitely stay tuned, I’m gonna be commentating as much as I can. I can’t get every game, but will try to upload as much if not more than the other commentators - I’m looking forward to it.

As are we - I’ll make sure to link to the MSL-finals between Calm and Kwanro. However, staying on that topic - there was an interview on Teamliquid recently with FireBatHero, the Bad Boy of Starcraft and the Dancing Terran. He says he will rummage through Proleague and also that he wishes that there were no Protoss in Starcraft. Do you think he’ll be able to make it this season?

I actually haven’t read that interview yet, but I definitely will - I got it bookmarked. What I know about FireBatHero is that he is what I think America would be if we were into eSports - just totally goofy, he loves the attention, just likes to gloat over his opponents. A lot of people complain about it - whatever, get over it, it’s good entertainment. If it makes you hate him it gives you something to feel happy about if he loses, so I think it’s a win-win. As far as how will he do this season - last season he kinda ran out of gas or something, I guess he had been busy practice his dancing ceremonies that he forgot to practice Starcraft. So we’ll see, I think it’s fun that he’s saying that he wishes there were no Protoss in the game because last season Protoss were by far the worst race in the amount of games won compared to the amount of games lost. No one can really dispute that last season was not the golden age of Protoss - unlike the season before that, but right now they’re having a tough time.

Historically, Protoss have always been strongest against Terran, so maybe that’s why he has an issue with them. I do find it funny that he says that though. I’m not sure about how he will do, he didn’t show us any crazy play, he pretty much lost most of his games as far as I’m aware - but I’m a huge fan of anyone who doesn’t take themselves super serious and just likes to have fun with their job, essentially. That’s why I always try to catch FireBatHero-games, the last game I saw with him he had been having eye surgery and was wearing these huge women’s glasses, I think that was in the World Cyber Games Qualifiers, and that alone was just very entertaining. That alone is what I think will happen in America when eSports go mainstream, because the USA is all about standing out and just taunting your opponents so it’s good to see a little bit of that in Korea as well since they’re otherwise so shy in a lot of cases. I’m always rooting for FireBatHero no matter who he’s playing.

As are most of us, let’s hope he does well for the fun factor, at the very least. To round off this interview, do you have any statements, rants of famous last words you want to share with the world?

Other than being super stoked for the next season, all three leagues, lots of games I’m looking forward to and will cast as many of them as I can. Just mentioning my new channel Esports Report, I will keep on doing commentaries - that is still going to be my main focus. Esports Report is probably gonna be like a once or twice a week show, about eight or nine minutes long, so go subscribe to that on Youtube if you haven’t already - it already has about 1200-1300 subscribers though I haven’t really uploaded that much. There’s a huge interest in that show so I can’t wait to get that started and other than that I still plan to do fan-events, like the Heroes of Newearth one I did, and after that I will doing Starcraft fan-games and Team Fortress 2, all that good stuff. That’s pretty much what’s in the future, I hope you guys enjoyed the interview, and that you didn’t sleep through it or anything. Thanks for having me - and I’m as always looking forward to uploading as many videos as possible.

Well, thank you very much, Husky - we are all looking forward to your future endeavours. Best of luck, can’t wait for your next commentary - and good game to you!

Thanks for having me, it was awesome!

See you around

I hope You enjoyed listening to the voice of HuskyStarcraft outside of the usual setting, stay tuned for more interviews here on Polygon reVue. As always, Your feedback and comments are much appreciated. GG!

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