Gaming
We caught up with the BTS founder to discuss the past and present of the fan-favourite Summit LAN.
The Summit has been one most eagerly anticipated events in the Dota calendar ever since its creation and with a great line-up for the fifth edition this week fans can expect more fantastic Dota. The tournament this week welcomes six teams competing at TI in August as well as Greek team Ad Finem and North American team FDL. The tournament being played out this week will provide a final look at just what teams think is strongest going into the biggest tournament of the year. The event has grown substantially, much like the studio that host it. We managed to grab David ‘LD’ Gorman, the co-founder of Beyond The Summit to find out more about this month’s event and some of his fondest memories of past editions.
This is the fifth Summit now, how did the event come about? If we go back to the origin of The Summit you have to cast your mind back to where BTS were at the time. Back in June 2014 when we ran our first Summit we weren’t running any of our own content. The only thing we were doing as a studio was broadcasting other tournaments with English commentary. When David ‘GoDz’ Parker and I first started out, GoDz organised the first ever tournament including Asian teams, the Gigabye Dota Masters and shortly after that the BTS World Tour which were both in the run-up to TI2.
We really missed running our own events, but at the same time we didn’t feel comfortable running a full on stadium event and we wanted to do something different. We wanted to fill a niche in the Dota market that wasn’t previously being occupied, so we settled on something different that did not have the audience component and didn’t have a stage. Of course, those events have their place and they’re great but we just wanted something different.
We assessed our skillset and the resources at our disposal before deciding that there was a lot of room to run something in the Dota space akin to the HomeStory Cup in Starcraft, as that was becoming really big. We loved the basis of the event and it was a great way to see different players and personalities. In Dota, even though the players are very popular fans don’t necessarily know a lot about them. You only get a snippet of their personalities from interviews but in the time leading up to TI4 we realised there was very little behind the scenes exposure and content. Our aim was to bring that to the fan.
When you hosted the first Summit, how many people ran the event? Did it go as well as you expected? The first one was in 2014 and we had no idea what to expect if I’m totally honest. We had never run our own event, we had never sold sponsors for events before on any appreciable scale and we had never done things like host and produced a Russian stream at the same time as an English stream. The whole event was a huge learning experience for us. I guess the main thing I remember from the event was just how much we didn’t know and just how much we had to learn and solve on the fly. It’s always the case when you do something for a first time and we were aware that it was likely to be the case. I didn’t sleep from 10am the previous morning as I was our main tech guy at the time. I was running all of the wires across to the cameras as well as plugging everything into the video mixer and various other tasks. At the time we only had four full-time employees and each of us had several tasks such as catering, organisation of accommodation and so on. We did bring in volunteers to help us shuttle players between event and hotel as well as someone to guard the door in case crazed fans came along – which a few did.
There’s a clip in one of the videos that Na’Vi made at the event which shows Bryan ‘Kpoptosis’ Herren telling me several times to just go to sleep. Not only was I running the tech but I was hosting the couch and casting all day as well. There were points in the games where I kept dozing off on the couch due to exhaustion. The event turned out great, though, and fans look back on the first event with significantly rose tinted goggles as there were a lot of technical issues but I am very glad it was memorable. It was a truly awesome event.
What’s the scale of operations now? We now have 10 full time employees and work with 10 to 20 contractors regularly around the world and in the USA. We’ve gone from casting out of our bedrooms to having a temporary studio in our house to where we are now. We’ve got an events house as well as our own offices here in Southern California so we’ve grown a lot. I would now class us as a legitimate business and now events are more comfortable for us to run.
Do you have anything special planned for this upcoming Summit? We are really looking to push the boundaries of production value for the upcoming Dota events. Our new features are something different from what PGL did, but they really raised the bar and it’s now set extremely high. We have something a little different planned but it is going to revolutionise the landscape but that’s all I can say at the moment.
You’ve got some amazing teams coming to the event. What are your predictions? Looking at the team list, there is no way that you can’t say OG are the favourites. They should be the favourite going into any big event. There’s no doubting that they are the number one team in the world at the moment as they have done nothing but win continuously. The team that may push them furthest is Liquid, who I would say are just above the bulk of the field.
Na’Vi, Digital Chaos, Ad Finem, Wings and Fnatic are all around the same level which is still exceptionally high. Na’Vi looked strong going into the qualifiers but then had a direct invite anyway so we haven’t seen much of them lately. Since then we haven’t seen much from Na’Vi so I think they still have a lot to prove, but I am just not 100 percent convinced by them yet. DC have had some strong performances but at the same time have looked extremely vulnerable at times. Wings have come on hot lately and got to the final at Nanyang as well as winning the qualifiers. I would say Ad Finem are probably the underdogs of the bunch but Fnatic are so hit and miss – they are the one team that still drafts themselves into holes regularly. Individually, though, Fnatic have fantastic players. FDL are probably going to get annihilated but it will be a great experience for them nonetheless.
Who has been the best personality you’ve had at the event? Why? All of the players are an absolute pleasure to have at the event, except for Arteezy. On a serious note, it’s hard to pick a single player but if I had to say one person who has made the biggest difference to the event it would be OG’s n0tail. He has casted copious amounts of games and always takes part in our extra video content at each event. The most standout individual performance for me may have been Black^ at The Summit 3 where he did a cast with KotLguy and Merlini, which was fantastic. Puppey, n0tail and H4nni had a great cast as well and the fans loved it.
Beyond that, in terms of pure willingness to cast, EternalEnvy is great. At one of The Summit events, his team got knocked out early and he spent more time on the couch than everyone. Another memorable moment was having Fng and IceIceIce do a cast even though they’re normally pretty shy guys. The more these guys come to our events the more comfortable they feel and then the casts just get better and better.
Do you have any bizarre stories that stand out? Are the players ever hard to work with? We’ve had players ask for just about everything under the sun. They’ll ask for absolutely anything but it doesn’t mean they’ll get it. I think the craziest thing that happened was when Arteezy took one our doors off its hinges and delivered it to our garage. It was very fun but not a service we required from him or a service we requested. The biggest issue is that they all just want to play Dota. They all want a computer and we now provide at least one per player so they can always play pubs, play scrims or mess around when they want to. As long as they have a computer they’re not very high maintenance at all.
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