Amateur night
Angel Munoz talks about the recently announced "Midtown Madness 2" tournament, which is being run by the CPL in association with Gateway computers
Until recently the CPL was best known for its big Quake tournaments, including the $100,000 Razer-CPL event held in Dallas six months ago. Now they are branching out though, with the popular Half-Life mod "Counter-Strike" becoming a staple of CPL events, and a recently announced "Midtown Madness 2" tournament in the USA marking the CPL's first real break-out from the first person shooter genre. According to CPL founder Angel Munoz, this is an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, and to extend the idea of professional gaming to include amateur players as well.
"I think that no one in the world has done a good job yet of building an amateur level of entry. The CPL since 1997, has concentrated on the professional area, and I think to expect people to come from very little gaming experience to playing Quake, it's a little bit of a jump", Angel explains. "So that's why the league wants to do an event that's not so professional. This event will have over 2000 winners, the top prize is only something like a $3,000 dollar computer and $5,000 in prize money. So it's not anything you can make a living off, but it definitely introduces people to the concept of competitive computer gaming, and that's what we wanted to do."
"We're [also] in discussions with a lot of people that would like to run an amateur league for the CPL and we've actually secured the rights for the Cyberathlete Amateur League, or CAL. When we find the right partner, we'll license CAL to them, so they can operate as an amateur league, having amateur events, and bring people to the professional arena, and capture the portion who're left out from our events. The CPL, as the name implies, should really only be dealing with the professional players. We're right now serving both areas, because there's no one out there really doing a good job with the amateurs."