SPUNJ

I know ESL people talk about it in the context of some of their positions as well.

Like, at the end of the day, like, you can't control the games.

And, like, incredible games are going to do the best thing ever at making an event prestigious.

Yeah.

But that's what I mean.

That gives you that first step that you need to build upon.

I think that's like the like the great thing that ESL has done over the years, because I think if you look at like Katowice and even even Cologne to an extent, but like I feel like they almost kind of like cheated themselves in early on to being prestigious, like by default, like Katowice in the early days of esports was like basically every game's world championship.

Right.

They had Starcraft.

They had League of Legends was there for a while.

Yeah.

They had the big trade show.

So it was a huge industry event as well, which made that all of a sudden an event that was going to have a shit ton of attention on it from every single angle.

Counter-Strike, non-Counter-Strike, public, you know, like within the scene, outside the scene, everything was already going to be there.

And then you kind of build upon that as you took other games away.

Cologne, the first big event we ever had in Counter-Strike in CSGO in 2015.

an arena that we'd never seen Counter-Strike in the scale of a building that big before.

So that automatically is going to blow everyone's socks off.

And then it was a major and then it had great games as well.

But the continuation of developing that whole Cologne event is really like the incredible work that ESL did of continuing to build upon the theme of the cathedral, which, by the way, was just an offhand comment from Red Eye while he was stagehosing that they latched on to and kind of built that theme.