I come from an Indian background and our upbringing tends to be more work orientated than normal. My parents always encouraged me to do well at school and it paid off in the end with the Cambridge degree and immediate job offer at JPMorgan. To be honest I never really asserted much ambition to get to that point, one thing just seemed to lead on to another and since it was all working out well I thought I’d leave it alone and enjoy life. Morgan had sent me to New York on ex-pat benefits which meant daily expenses to cover all food, transport and entertainment as well as providing one of their amazing apartments bang in the middle of Manhattan (66 & Broadway), just a block away from Central Park. So there I was, hardly needing to touch my salary, working at the JP Morgan office on 60 Wall Street. I guess that’s why all the journalists ask why I gave it up!

I’d been playing the original Quake (that’s the first one before all these sequels arrived!) since qtest was released back in 1996. When I returned to University in October with my room plugged straight into the leased line, I ended up playing practically all the time. It was such a buzz back then, everything was new and the people were always friendly. I’d be playing and chatting to these guys all night and skipping lectures the next day. As it happened I also turned out to be pretty good at the game too, and won various competitions in the UK as well as doing lots of travelling abroad to take part in Quake competitions around Europe. It was pretty rewarding to see my name #1 in the QuakeWorld rankings.

When I started work at Morgan in 1998 I figured that would be the end of gaming for me – time to grow up and join the real world. Of course, that didn’t last long. First of all I got a call from TGi to take part in what was slated as the ultimate Quake tournament where players like Lakerman, Kane and Xenon would be duelling for the title of Quake champion. While I hadn’t played much Quake in the run-up to the tournament, what with working at Morgan for 5 months, I figured that I had to go anyway! I brushed up my Quaking as much as I could before the tourney but only came away beating 1 of my 4 opponents. Still it was a great experience. Later, when I was posted in New York I started hearing about the CPL tournaments being held around America. This was a totally new concept to me, particularly the part where the winner received a $10,000 cash prize! Sure there had been prizes before, but here was something that would really make a difference. I decided I’d take part and after a little crash course in Quake 3 I managed to place 3rd. Of course I think I should have won the tournament if it wasn’t for the ‘crowd incident’ (I was winning by one frag with five seconds to go and the crowd gave away my position to the other player) but I guess we’ll never know. In any case a friend of mine, Hakeem, won the next CPL tournament in Dallas and we teamed up along with the Swedish legendary player, Xenon, to start a pro-gaming company: XSReality.

The company was fantastic for the first few months. We received our sponsorship cash each quarter from the main sponsors (Razer and Gameplay) and moved to Stockholm, Sweden where we could practice our game with the other great Swedish players in the area. Eventually this meant myself and Hakeem joined Clan 9 so that we could play in team games and share the Clan 9 HQ – a basement complex in the middle of town equipped with a blinding 100Mb leased line. The website went from strength to strength, particularly with the efforts of coder, bds, and journalist, Izn0. Everything was looking rosy back then.

Of course nothing lasts… In the third quarter of 2000 all the companies we were working with seemed to go bust. First Razer, then Gameplay, and later even our website hosts and advertisers, Spray. XSReality pretty much stopped there until I later decided to try and bring the site back on my own.

After the CPL Asia tournament in Singapore I’d pretty much got fed up of the game. Quake 3 was fun while it was new, but I was getting bored of it after a year of playing. That would have been around August 2000. Also not long after that I ended up in LA with no facilities to even practice so there wasn’t much point continuing playing. If the original Quake had been the game that went pro I think I would have had a lot more endurance because I truly loved to play it.

I’ve not given up pro-gaming for myself, I’m just in hibernation waiting for a new game that make me want to play seriously again. I don’t have a whole lot of time to play games right now, but recently I’ve been getting into Jedi Knight 2, and now I’ve just started Warcraft 3 and loving it. Ok, I am extremely bad at the game, it’s actually a pleasant experience to be the newbie learning something every time you play.

What have you been doing in the last year?

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