VIDEO: Zero-gravity Jersey gamer to compete for $1,000,000

Thursday 05 October 2017

Playing a cross between frisbee and football is hard enough without taking away the gravity and competing in front of tens of thousands of people - but one Jersey gamer is set to do just that, in a team bid to win $1,000,000.

Tim McGuinness, founder of Virtual Reality Jersey, will fly to Hamburg later this month to take part in the European qualifiers of ‘Echo Arena’ - a futuristic sports game played in the VR world.

In it, teams of three - a defender, midfielder and striker - will clash in a zero-gravity virtual world where they’ll aim to throw a disc into each other’s goals.

While it might strike some as a niche audience, last year’s world finals for another VR videogame gained more viewers than the FA Cup Final, at the same time as the eSports industry was valued at $500million.

Video: Tim on a challenging Echo Arena practice-run. (Warning: expletives)

Tim said that eSports, which are played using VR headsets, are the best of the digital gaming world, but with all the strategy, physicality and effort required for ‘real life’ sport - something that surprises many people about eSports.

“My back has been through the works over the past week, especially when we’re playing in the cup matches, which take three to four hours to go through. When we’re playing, we all have bottles of water and towels to hand because it’s a very intense three hours where we’re all throwing ourselves around… There’s no point where you actually get to take a rest,” he told Express.

The former Hautlieu student got into Echo Arena after “dabbling” both in online and offline sports. He had previously played tennis and basketball, whilst also being a long-term gamer, but had never reached his goal of reaching a professional level at either. VR, however, worked out to be the “perfect merge.”

“It had always been a goal of mine to reach a professional level at one of them because I always loved playing and watching, but never found I quite fitted the bill to be good enough to get to that level. Then with VR, that sporting and active background was a perfect match. I now have the skills to be able to play at the top level which beforehand I never quite had with either of them individually.”

That sporting background is particularly useful in Echo Arena, where hand-eye coordination is vital.

While individual skill is useful, more important is finding teammates with complementary abilities. For Tim, those partners came in the form of UK-based Martin (midfielder) and Zogger (goalie) from Switzerland - both of whom he met and has practiced with completely online.

Despite having a great “team dynamic”, making the cut for the Hamburg contest was an intense challenge. “We were joint fourth place with another team and we had to go in a head-to-head game against them in a ‘best of three’ series and whoever won was going to go to regionals. It was down to the wire,” Tim explained.

But striker Tim pulled through - a goal within the final 15 seconds of the first game, and the last 10 seconds of the third game saw ‘Team Gravity’ make the top four in Europe for Echo Arena. “It could not have been cut finer.”

While they’ll be sealed off in VR headsets, Tim said the team were still daunted by competing in front of such a large audience. “It’s going to make me very nervous, I guarantee it… It will be better once we’re in the headset but when we had that final week, I had the shakes between the matches so I imagine it’s going to be 10 times worse when there’s thousands of people watching.”

Pictured: The swanky 20up Skyline Bar in Hamburg, where the team would like to celebrate if they're successful.

He said they were still “really really excited” about competing in such a big contest, and even more so about the prospect of qualifying for the World Finals early next year.

So how will they celebrate if they win the top prize?

“I’ve already been looking at different places in Hamburg. There’s a hotel that has a bar called the 20up which has amazing views - it looks all over Hamburg. I think a couple of drinks would definitely be called for up there if we won!”