As Exciting As Hockey

On Saturday, I went out to Yongsan (a district of Seoul) to go see a live game of 'professional-level' Starcraft. Starcraft is an incredibly popular game (easily the most popular) in Korea, and has been for almost 10 years. To this day, you can still watch 'pro' games being televised 24/7. Those 'Pro' players make great money, have many sponsorships, and evidently have pretty large fanbases.

They're essentially the same as any hockey player playing at the NHL level in Canada.

The television-spectacle happens on the top floor of 'i-Park Mall', a gigantic electronics mall. The bottom 8 floors house seas and seas of every electronic gadget that you could think of - cameras, computers, video games, and so on. The top floor is the 'Electronic-Sports Stadium', where a huge room accomodates those who come to cheer for their favorite Starcraft players.

Those players sit in sound-proof glass bubbles, and look pretty damn serious during the game. Announcers also sit in the middle, in between them. It's really entertaining - the crowd really does gasp and cheer, after every major battle in the game - and the announcers look for anything to happen, to start yelling excitedly.

I took a video of the last few-seconds of the game we saw, to get a feel of the crowd reaction. Enjoy!