At 5 a.m. Beijing time, there was a moment of silence at the “StarCraft 2” IEM 2022 World Championship Finals in Katowice, Poland.
Li Peinan left the keyboard with both hands, clenched his fists, and then raised his head and smashed it into the air. In the face of such a huge success, he was somewhat at a loss. Little bowed.
There was a small step between the player’s bench and the trophy, but Li Peinan staggered when he walked down. He knelt on the ground with his hands on the ground, and quickly adjusted his posture to stand up, ready to accept the interview that belonged to him.
All the lights on the Katowice arena were turned on, the milky white beams of light swayed in mid-air, the star-shaped lights gathered together flashed blue fluorescent lights, and the cold light fireworks on the podium sprayed into the sky, everyone’s eyes They all turned to the figure on the podium.
When the host stepped forward to ask questions, the champion, who should have answered the questions with complacency, knelt down with his head in his hands.
From becoming a professional player to being on the podium that only belonged to one person, this player who has been in the professional arena since he was fifteen has walked for eight full years.
Of course he was lucky. No matter what kind of sports players, the “world champion” is the flower in the mirror and the moon in the water that may not be able to touch following exhausting the most precious years.
But he wasn’t so lucky either. Even following he won the championship, many people still don’t know what kind of game “StarCraft 2” is.
After all, this is a “Dead Game” that was sentenced to “death” a few years ago.
Time goes back to 2020 three years ago.
On July 27, 2020, the game “StarCraft 2” ushered in its 10th anniversary.
Blizzard timely updated the new “Commander Prestige” system in the game’s “Cooperative Mode”, allowing many players to see the possibility of the game continuing to operate.
For this ten-year-old RTS game, players’ expectations for Blizzard are not high. Expanding the “cooperative mode” of the PVE part of the game, and appropriately adding some leisure, is enough to make players excited. After all, most players are no longer young, not only do not have so much time and energy for PVP, APM may not be able to keep up with their former self.
But what no one expected was that on October 16, less than three months following the 10th anniversary, a more or less obituary-like announcement appeared. Paid content like war chests”.
Obviously, for the “StarCraft” series, which is basically impossible to have a “3”, “StarCraft 2” is likely to be the last swan song of the series, and “stop producing new content” is undoubtedly a tribute to this difficult game. , sentenced to death.
My colleague Diandian teacher once described Blizzard’s operations at that time as “the new content for the 10th anniversary made everyone feel that it might continue for a few more years. I didn’t expect Blizzard to pull out the oxygen tube with a backhand.”
In 2020 when “StarCraft 2” was “unplugged” by Blizzard, Li Peinan was 20 years old.
As a professional player of “StarCraft 2”, Li Peinan is already well-known in China. In the early morning of October 12, four days before the Blizzard announcement, he also defeated the Korean protoss player Zoun with the old ID of TIME, helping the team KZ succeed Won the “StarCraft 2” Golden Team League Autumn Championship.
But only four days later, this professional player with better and better grades was greeted with the announcement that “StarCraft 2” would stop updating content. He was so stunned that he posted on Weibo, “What’s all this?”
Faced with such an irresistible “stealing house” incident, Li Peinan was more or less dispirited, “Youth always has regrets”, but he felt that it was a pity to give up like this, “dedicated the best years to this game”, so he decided to “finish the three-year ESL program”.
Obviously, at this time, “StarCraft 2” is already in decline.
For national server players, the “day” is especially “thin”.
In 2011, when the national server of “League of Legends” was launched, it exceeded 600,000 players online at the same time, and the peak number of domestic online users of “StarCraft 2” in that year was less than 100,000.
This was only ten years ago. As for the story in the past ten years, how MOBA games have crushed the RTS category in all aspects from the scale of the event, the treatment of professional players, and the number of players, and even the mobile terminal has opened and harvested highly popular e-sports events. We Nature knows better than anyone else.
Regardless of whether it is RTS or MOBA events, in e-sports, Chinese players have a difficult mountain to overcome-Korean players.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, South Korea has emerged as an “e-sports powerhouse” in the world’s e-sports field. They are all Asian players who are proficient in calculation since childhood, but the growth environment of Korean professional players is obviously not only one star and a half higher than that of domestic players.
Whether this point is only related to the speed of the network or not, every player knows it well.
In the “StarCraft II” event, Korean players almost dominated the World Championship. In this IEM2023 World Championship, except for Li Peinan, a Chinese player in the semi-finals, the other three players are all from the Korean competition.
From the quarter-finals, almost all the players represented the strongest players of “StarCraft 2”. , in the first human civil war in the finals, Li Peinan even crushed the world’s number one human player Maru 4-1 and won the first world championship of a Chinese “StarCraft” professional player.
After not even having a game server, a young man who had lost successively in the previous competitions, and even the supporters and seniors were not so optimistic, won the world championship that symbolized the highest honor of competitive games.
If it is said that Li Peinan was still able to “stretch” and answer some questions rationally when answering the host’s questions in English, then when sending messages in his mother tongue to the supporters who stayed up late watching the game from afar, the young world champion, It’s really hard to hold back.
Li Peinan on the podium broke down in tears, “Last year was really difficult”, and once thought “‘StarCraft’ is over for me”. The same is true for the supporters in front of the screen. Brother Bird was crying in the live broadcast room. I offer the most sincere blessings to this champion who has never been seen before and is likely to have no one to come.
This is the 25th year since the “StarCraft” series was released in 1998, and domestic players have been exposed to “StarCraft”.
This is the 8th year since the “StarCraft 2” professional player Li Peinan became a professional player.
This is the third year that StarCraft II has stopped updating new content.
This is the 20th day since Activision Blizzard and NetEase officially ceased cooperation, and all Blizzard games on the national server were suspended.
It was also the first day when Li Peinan became the champion of the IEM 2022 World Championship.
All Chinese “StarCraft” players, and even Blizzard game players, will remember this day.
Under the gaze of the whole world, the boy broke down in tears and held up the trophy high——
“Even I can win the world championship, what else is impossible.”
