Ollie swapped the abacus for Sonic on the SEGA Mega Drive at neighbor Frank's house at an early age and has never looked back. With thousands of hours in Dota 2 (and no ability to show for it), he still clings on to the hope that one day, he will replicate Natus Vincere at gamescom 14 years ago and lift the Aegis of Champions. Ollie has been at the intersection of video games, esports, and gambling for over ten years and has also worked in consultancy in the gambling industry. Ollie's work can be found on the likes of: BBC, Red Bull Gaming, Esports Insider, CasinoBeats, PC Gamer, Green Man Gaming as well as his own thought-leadership substack "Esprouts" looking at specific studies and stories where games meet gambling.
Image Credit: Esports World Cup “There were many times where we would have to just throw everything away, like literally everything,” recalls Bowen “Monsoon” Fuller , his voice unwavering. The 28-year-old Apex Legends World Champion has come a long way from where he was, but there’s humility behind every word he utters.
“We’d go to a flea market for the last three days, and we’d sell everything we had. We would put a price tag on everything that I grew up with, everything that I used every day,” he tells me. Once his family had made enough money, they’d use it to buy a hotel room, so that they could return to the flea market the day after to continue flogging everything they owned.
When they were set to leave, the boom of “a dollar anybody, 50 cents a piece” would echo, with speakers, DVDs, toys, playing cards, and anything else being sold, before moving on to where Bowen vaguely describes as “where we needed to go.”
Pretty much every material possession had a price – except one thing. “The one thing that I did manage to keep throughout it all was this little fucked up computer with no top. The power supply was soldered with aluminum foil, and it had the side sticking out and shit,” he tells me. “It was small enough to fit in my backpack, and that’s why I was able to keep it. We were in this little 5-person Honda hatchback, and I sat in the trunk. We were six people deep all the time.”
The computer, with a soldered power supply and bits hanging off the edge, epitomizes Monsoon’s life growing up. He watched longingly as an ordinary childhood passed him by. I can feel the ache as he describes vividly how he’d often slip away from a friend’s garage to sleep in the car, where he’d just cry all night.
“The thought of all the people that I was growing up with, friends with during school. They were still going to school. They still did their thing. They were still growing and learning, and being with each other,” he says.
“The thought of me as this young, impressionable kid, who just wanted to have friends, kind of getting left behind – that kind of sucked a lot, actually. That was pretty difficult,” he admits, the pain still evident behind the words.
“The one thing that I did manage to keep throughout it all was this little fucked up computer with no top”
Wherever the five-seat hatchback took his family, the battered, backpack-sized computer went too, and with it his fervor for gaming. All that was required was some power.
“Anytime that I could, whether it was fast food restaurants, or hotels, or gaming cafes and PC bangs, I would just do anything I could to boot up any of the games that I could play,” he says, his face lighting up as he recalls his early gaming. The lack of internet didn’t stop him either…