During their recent visit to CYBERPOWERPC HQ, we sat down with the members of Team Coast Gaming to talk about life as pro gamers and how their partnership with us has helped them as an up and coming LCS team.
Part 2 features Josh “NintendudeX” Atkins. Check out the video (transcription below)
CYBERPOWERPC: Tell us a little about yourself, how you got into gaming and eventually into League of Legends.
NintendudeX: I’ve always kind of liked video games since I was little, I guess my brother got me into them. I played a lot of Nintendo (I guess that’s kind of where I got my name from). He moved on to PC Gaming and even though I was kind of young for it, I did too. I was a little 11 year old kid playing DotA and Warcraft 3 and what not, eventually he moved to League of Legends and got me into that. I was always really competitive with him, but eventually he moved on to do college and stuff, and I just kind of kept playing it because I was in high school and didn’t have much else going on. I eventually got really good, and here I am.
CYBERPOWERPC: About how many hours per week do you put in to practice and competition?
NintendudeX: The amount of hours is hard to say because it’s basically my whole life. Obviously we play every Saturday and Sunday at the LCS studio, and we usually have Mondays off, but even on my off day I’m still usually playing League all day. That, in addition to the usual grind throughout the week we have practicing, it is probably upwards of 80 hours/week we put in, easily.
CYBERPOWERPC: How did you link up with Team Coast, and what role do you play in-game?
NintendudeX: I’m the jungler for Team Coast. The team formed a while ago and it’s current form now is Team Coast, but it originally formed with a team with me and ZionSpartan called Monomaniac eSports. That was about 2 years ago when we attended our first event. Eventually we kept the team together for many iterations of the same team but essentially the same core. Really I guess I was one of the original people on it so I kind of helped form it so that is kind of cool.
CYBERPOWERPC: What advice do you have for young gamers looking to get into the competitive scene?
NintendudeX: Young gamers that want to get into the competitive scene – it’s kind of hard to just like, drop everything and get into it. I cannot stress enough to keep up with your school work and keep doing what you’re doing – don’t drop everything for this, because in it’s current form it’s not safe to just go all out for it now because it is still growing and what not, but if you’re looking to get into it, just be nice to people I think, because one of the biggest parts to get into the scene is networking. So if you do kick someone’s ass in SoloQ, don’t be mean to them about it, because that might be one of the players that end up wanting you to form a team. You need to make good connections, be good at the game, and be friendly.
CYBEROWERPC: How has the partnership with us helped your team get better so far, and what things are you looking forward to down the road?
NintendudeX: CyberPower has been great to us so far. They’ve supplied us with awesome computers that have been very good, not only for streaming but also very reliable for in-game. We don’t have any issues, we don’t run into FPS issues, they are very high quality computers. That is very good as a pro player. That way we don’t have anything to really worry about in-game. It is kind of hard to explain because once you get used to it you take it for granted, but I used to play on a really bad setup and it was kind of rough playing on very low settings. Now that I get to play on high everything that just makes it so much easier.