Rise and fall of the ‘Dream Team’ part 1

Oh boy, writing this brings back some good/bad memories, the good old days of the AMD Dream team. I guess I should start from the year 2000 right after when Hangame’s sponsorship was terminated.


It was our decision to leave Hangame team because of their pay reduction. Giom’s winning rate wasn’t as good as before, so I don’t blame them for wanting to pay him a little bit less, but we didn’t like that very much at the time so I started to look for a new sponsor.  Actually the new sponsor came to us, sort of.

What happened was that AMD was using Giom’s images to promote their product in a website banner without our consent, and Giom first took notice of this on the Internet and quickly alerted me.

My natural reaction was to sue them, but then again on a second thought, if they are using his images to promote themselves it’s obvious that they recognize his market value so we decided to use that angle to get the sponsorship and well it worked.

It pretty much went this way “ I won’t sue you, if you sponsor him”, I said this in a very nice way of course.  We didn’t get it at the flick of our fingers, it did take some heavy convincing because after all there is a great sum of money that is involved in the transaction.

I presented them with two kinds of a proposal, A- was to sponsor Giom and Giom only, basically telling them that I don’t have to tag along, but rather AMD can handle manage, represent him and utilize him to promote AMD, and I am willing to be out of the picture and go back to my life, B-proposal was to add me on to the team to do all that for AMD and Giom.

Well they liked me, or to be me more precise Peter Hwang the marketing director for AMD liked me. If I remember his words correctly “ I like your energy and passion.” Is what he said. This is when I felt like I was tapped on the shoulder or on the head, with the almighty sword, so to speak. Giom was the highest paid player, and I was officially making more money than any other managers. 



My job was to promote AMD any which way possible through Giom, so basically I had two jobs. One was to represent Giom, and the other was to promote AMD through Giom. After the signing of the contract was complete Giom was much relieved, but me? I was in a predicament, let me explain why.

I was jumping with joy for a day but then when I woke up the next day the reality sunk in, which was you see, in the contract I told AMD that Giom will be wearing AMD logos on a uniform in every televised game, but at that time everybody wore space suits, because the TV networks did not allow uniforms to show logos of companies.  In the meeting with AMD, they brought this up, and I told them adamantly “ don’t worry I will handle it” and under those conditions Giom’s contract was signed.

Now during these times in e-sports one aspect of it didn’t make any sense to me.  How in hell are players supposed to get a sponsor if logos can’t be worn?  if player’s livelihood is only depended on prize money, only a handful of players would survive.  The league sponsors didn’t want this, they wanted the leagues to only show their logos, which translates to= we don’t give a damn about the players or their sponsors we just want to promote ourselves.  So here I am lying in my bed with a big headache thinking about Giom’s game in few days on the Ongamenet Starleague. 

AMD’s shiny uniform is all ready for him to wear it gloriously, and I know everybody at AMD is going to be watching TV to see him in the shiny uniform! Well what could I do?! I just had to march in, I felt at the time it was best to not give them prior notice. I had a strategy, I put Giom in the uniform and in both of my hands had gift bags filled with AMD goodies, key chains, t-shirts etc.  I had like 8 gift bags and as soon as I arrived on the scene I passed them out to all of the producers, assistant producers, and even to the make up lady.

Now Giom was very conspicuous because of his sponsored uniform and immediately when the head producer took notice of it told me to get it off, and as I gave him the gift bag I pleaded, got angry and then pleaded, got angry and then pleaded again.

What I said was, first of all if he doesn’t wear the uniform, the recently signed contract will be nullified and 2nd of all if he doesn’t wear the uniform Giom will not be playing.

Giom was the e-sports biggest star, so naturally head producer was in a dilemma, he had to think quick, it was a flank attack by me and you guys know that I quote Sun Tzu all the time in my Starcraft casting that a flank attack must have an element of surprise to succeed.  Well we won to make the longer story short. I had to repeat the process as mentioned above with few other networks.  If you dig up in the video archive and see the old games and you will see that Giom was the first player to wear the sponsored uniform in the Starleague, and also the iTV ranking league (prominent league at the time).

On iTV leagues, players were in casual attires, jeans and t-shirts, which looked very unprofessional. Sometimes Giom was somewhat embarrassed to wear the uniform because no players wore it,  but it was imperative that he wore it no matter what, he was always doing interviews, photographed, playing games and right up until he went back home I did not allow him to take it off. Actually many gamers envied him, in order to wear a sponsor uniform u had to have a sponsor and many gamers didn’t have one.  

I had to report to AMD on a weekly basis on the activities and on what medium Giom gave AMD exposure so you can imagine why I was keen on this.

For almost 4 years I reported to AMD once a week, god I hated writing those reports; I felt like a photographer taking photos of him in action, or I should say gathering evidence that he wore the uniform in his ProGaming activities.

I always had AMD banners and posters available too, so when newspaper or magazine reporters took photos of him the AMD brand would show up also in the back ground.

It was always a condition that I made with reporters and producers, and if for some reason the interview were done over a phone I would tell them to put the AMD logo in the article. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people thought of me as his personal photographer. 

It’s fair to say that back in those days I was SuperAMDman opposed to being a SuperDanielMan. If there is one contribution I had made in the Korean e-sports I can honestly and proudly say that ‘uniformed gamers’ became a common, and trendy fashion starting from Giom, of course this was all possible because of Giom’s superstar status^^.



Related Article:
Read Part 2 here.