Gaming
esports
Why drifting is one of the most exciting esports
You might have your favourite racing game, but have you tried drifting in it? It’s a unique, thrilling subgenre of racing and we got the talented, Ottawa-based MrAeroHD to tell us more about it.
Drifting is a subset of motorsports which prioritizes high-octane battles between drivers. It’s a judged competition, so the criteria for being a top-tier drifter is a little nebulous, but that’s part of what makes it exciting for fans. When it comes to drifting in racing games, a lot of what makes the real-life counterpart so enthralling becomes accessible in a brand new way.
Just like in off-screen life, video game drifters will take part of a racetrack and try to hit lines as cleanly as possible for the best judged score within that section. Many games aren’t built with drifting in mind. It's up to the players, and their communities, to come up with the best tunes for their cars to bend the game into allowing them to enter a turn at 170mph as sideways as possible.
MrAeroHD, known to many as just Aero, is one of the most dedicated drifters you’ll find on the internet. The Ottawa-based streamer has been a racing game enthusiast for almost his entire life. Who better to tell us about why drifting is the most exciting motorsport and esport you need to be watching? We’ve reached out to him to learn a little bit more about what he does, and why we should pay attention.
Who is Aero?
He’s known for his unique choice of a 2012 Jaguar XKR-S in the Forza games, but you’ll catch him doing everything from Let’s Plays of F-Zero GX, to running Assetto Corsa lobbies with Grammy winning, platinum recording artist, T-Pain.
Aero grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, before making a move to the nation’s capital. As a kid, he didn’t have the most diverse selection of video games to play, and that’s probably what put him on the path towards his current life in racing.
“The first racing game I ever played was Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo. I was like two or three and I didn't know there were other games,” said Aero.
“That was it for me until the PlayStation. I vividly remember walking into a Zellers and seeing a copy of Gran Turismo 1 in a clear bag. I didn't know what it was because the cover of Gran Turismo is just a purple tarp over a car. I was like, ‘I don't even know what that is. But it looks cool and I want it.’ So, being a six or seven year old, I just cried a whole bunch. My mom bought me Gran Turismo and then that was the next year and a half of my life.”
In the late 2000s, Aero became a big fan of Call of Duty commentaries from YouTubers like SeaNanners. He tried emulating that content over footage of N64 games and even Call of Duty as well. With his passion lying in racing, he realized that not a lot of well-worded content was being uploaded for Forza, his driving series of choice. This gave birth to his “Build it, Drift it, Kill it” series of YouTube videos which, after a little success, made him consider taking content creation seriously.
Nowadays, though, his home is on Twitch. He still uploads some content to YouTube, but prefers the interaction afforded to him by live streaming. He streams 5 days a week and keeps a schedule, similar to a traditional job, with broadcasts in the 6+ hour range. Sometimes he plays non-racing games on a secondary Twitch channel, but knows his audience wants to see impossible angles at high speeds, so he makes sure to focus on his passion for drifting.
What is drifting?
While scrolling your timeline, you’ve probably seen footage of drifting at one time or another. Most of us vaguely understand it, but haven’t taken the time to look further into what turns the gears of this compelling motorsport. Drifting in games tries to emulate real life as much as possible. Just like its real world counterpart, video game drifting usually has three judges (whoever qualifies to be a judge is determined on a competition by competition basis) looking for criteria that changes based on the track. Under normal circumstances, scores usually come down to line, angle and style. Aero broke down the three criteria as follows:
- LINE is how you enter the corner. In typical racing, you'd enter from as wide as you can to as tight as you can. That's your apex to turn as little as you’re able and carry as much speed as possible. Drifting sometimes deviates from that just for the show. You'll have inner clipping points which are your more traditional racing lines and you’ll also have outer clipping points where, instead of going tight onto a corner for max speed; the judges might say, ‘Hey, you know that K rail over there? We want your rear bumper as close to that as possible because it looks cool.’
- ANGLE is judged by how sideways your car is, while still being in control. Obviously, you could throw your car in basically backwards on almost every corner, but you're probably going to almost come to a stop. It's like, ‘How much angle can you pull?’
- STYLE is super subjective. It isn’t about how smooth you are or how much speed you carry through the course: It’s about how exciting your run is. Sometimes tire smoke is judged as well, which is interesting but kind of hard. There is also proximity to your opponent. A head-to-head is, basically, one driver leads and one driver follows. It’s not a race so passing isn’t encouraged and your performance is rated on getting as close to the lead car as you can, while following what they’re doing.
“If the judges can't decide, they'll just send you again. I've seen, in both real life and in gaming, people go to what’s called a ‘one more time’ or ‘sudden death’. I've seen three or four one more times where guys are too evenly matched. It's a regular single elimination bracket, normally, where whoever wins, wins”, explains Aero.
“Third place normally goes by qualified score which is where you do two runs, and they score you out of 100. Some series factor in your speed, and some don't because people will just like throw 2000 horsepower in the car and go, ‘look how fast I am.’”
Is it Esports?
Aero has been involved in many aspects of competition. From participating in Esports Drift Association Events, to the Underground Forza Drift Competition presented by Ryan Literal (who drives the Koruworks Powerstop Brakes 350Z in real life Formula Drift events). Aero even runs his own series of online drift events called the Outrun Open.
Esports fans may not immediately put racing games side by side with competitive mainstays like Counter Strike: Global Offensive or League of Legends. Sim racing has managed to build up a following, but doesn’t have the same market share as more traditional esports titles. Drifting takes up even less of the pie, but it's only a matter of time before it fully comes out to the world, according to Aero.
“Drifting is a one versus one competition where the winner moves on in the bracket and the loser loses. What does that sound like? If you thought fighting games, then you’re correct. I try to base our model off of that, especially since I have people like the Ottawa FGC to look to,” says Aero who, while not competing himself, likes to keep an eye on the local fighting game and Smash scenes.
“A lot of the people are super interested in it and it's an established scene that’s been around forever. Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel and come up with some wacky way of running things? I'm like, let's just do what EVO, AdrenaLAN or whatever other major tournament does. It works, right? So, I would say, we have the same model of esports.”
Beyond the game
While digital racing is what he spends the most time doing, his love for cars goes beyond what comes down his ethernet cord. He’s known for pushing a Jag in Forza, but the ideal drift car he’d like to own one day, if he had a spare $10,000 or so lying around, would be the Nissan Silvia S14. His love for that car started in the pages of the Initial D manga when he saw its predecessor, the S13, driven by Koichiro Iketani, friend of series protagonist Takumi Fujiwara.
He loves racing media and even attributes the first 'The Fast and the Furious' movie as influential. Aero calls the movie cheesy and dorky with cars that didn’t age well but, as the first movie he saw in theatres with his stepdad, it’s sentimental and served as his introduction to import culture.
He started with watching Formula 1 and Nascar, but the neon tinged nitrous fueled visuals of The Fast and the Furious along with his discovery of the Need For Speed: Underground games caused him to adjust course and get into drifting events like D1 Grand Prix and Formula Drift.
He didn’t just stay as a passive viewer on the other side of the screen. Aero tries to make the pilgrimage to Formula Drift Atlanta each year. You know he really loves cars because he fully makes an event of the 18 hour drive, picking up friends along the way with stops in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, taking in sights like the Dale Earndhardt memorial in Kannapolis.
“Ontario's where I grew up. I never thought I'd have the chance to be in North Carolina, let alone be within an hour of [Dale Earnhardt’s] hometown,” says Aero.
“We’ve checked out Charlotte Motor Speedway, a bunch of NASCAR, and there's the the USA F1 team that's there too, so we checked out their shops while we drove down. When we’re in Atlanta, we know everybody there now because I've been going for so many years. It's like one big party.”
Shout out the Hot Boiz
His Atlanta connections even led to him getting to play a bunch of Assetto Corsa with Mr. Buy You A Drank himself, T-Pain. As Aero tells it, T-Pain had bought himself a drift car, the Pickle Rick Nissan, and had been learning more about all aspects of drift culture: including gaming. While streaming one night, a mutual friend said he was going to invite T-Pain but everyone in the lobby assumed that was just someone else using the popular singer's name as a gamertag.
Lo and behold, it was actually the man himself, and it became another exciting night in Aero’s stream.
“We forced him into a big entry competition where you just use one corner and basically whoever does the sickest entry wins. He's like, ‘I'm not doing it,’ and my buddy and I just bullied him into doing it,” says Aero about hanging with T-Pain, who he calls very humble and serious about learning in game.
You only sort of know what you’re going to get when you drop by Aero’s stream, and that’s what keeps his fanbase, affectionately dubbed the ‘Hot Boiz’ tuning in day after day. One day, it's a tournament judged by Ryan Litteral, other days it's playing with T-Pain and, sometimes, it's raising a whole lot of money for Charity.
Iracing holds a 24 Hours of Daytona race every year and he drives the whole thing himself, marathon style. The event is supposed to be a team event between multiple drivers so, by taking it on himself, he actually gets disqualified and does not have his time recorded. In 2020, him and a friend, who also chose to take on the entire 24 Hour run solo (leaving them both disqualified) raised nearly $4,000 for a mental health fund in the UK.
Closer to home, he has done long Extra Life streams in support of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and even participated as a featured streamer at local gaming bar The Blurry Pixel in support of the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. Every time he does one of these streams the Hot Boiz comes out in full force to support him, and it shows in how successful he has been with raising funds.
The name ‘Hot Boiz’ comes from a car term for people with super low cars and big wheels that just look “ignorant” according to Aero, “Not so good on the track but you sacrifice to look cool.” If you ever take the time to tune into his stream, you’ll see why they’re so dedicated. Aero is a funny guy, and also a skilled drifter. The respect for his viewers shines through, and he’s very thankful for those who keep watching, allowing him to stream full time.
“I don't know what I did to deserve this. But we've built a little, little family of misfits that can do real good things when we put our minds to it.”
