Q: Can you tell me the story of how you began making money from playing video games?

A: When I was in highschool, there wasn’t a real association. I started playing videogames pretty early on. It wasn’t serious. It kind of happened upon a group of friends that played video games and we were all on the same grade. One of the kids lived down the street to me and we formed a Halo team. We also formed a Halo Club at school and we had a teacher as a sponsor. We would play tournaments in his room after school every couple weeks. It was a lot of fun. We went to our first big tournament in Chicago in 2007. The company that ran the tournament is now known as MLG or Major League Gaming. Basically, we all went to a hotel and everyone brought their own Xbox and we would just played video games. We placed 15th out of a couple hundred teams and we won like $300. It wasn’t a big deal, but we realized we had potential at that point. None of us really played sports at that time. I played soccer in the fall. It was just kind of a coincidental thing. We ended up practicing more and over the course of a couple years, we went to tournaments. I made a couple hundred dollars just from playing video games, something I love.

Q: Did it affect your schoolwork?

A: I treated like a sport. We practiced

I always knew what academics were and I knew academics were the reason I was in school.

Q: Do you think that video games in this day and age is an addiction?

A: Absolutely, the same way sugar and caffeine is an addiction. You would see kids come in with 30 oz of coffee to school in the morning. There are addictions all over the place. I think videogames are a big pitfall. But we all have to learn how to deal with them in our own ways. It sounds dumb in comparison of addictions with hard drugs, where people can really derail their lives from.