The first Warcraft game led this gamer to esports and a lifelong love of competitive gaming

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), the first game in the Warcraft series, was also among the first real-time strategy games to introduce a multiplayer element, paving the way for the style of games that dominate the giant professional gaming industry today. Sean Zhang Xiao Yi, co-founder and CEO of Talon Esports, Hong Kong’s leading professional esports team, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.

I would have been in grade seven, in my early teens, in Australia. I remember fondly our first IT class. Our teacher was a big gamer. He already had it installed, and he passed it around on a floppy disk and showed everyone how to play it.

A lot of students installed the game and for the first time were able to play each other in a room; it was my first exposure to competitive gaming.

My dad had bought me my first computer, a 486, which was how I first got exposed to gaming, but a lot of that exposure was on my own. Back then, we had dial-up internet, so playing online was very hard. The chance to play on a local LAN (a local-area network), like we did at school, was so rare. It kind of drove my interest in gaming and computers and technology in general.

I started by watching my classmates play, and then started to play myself. As I played it, what really excited me was the competitive nature. I had played a lot of competitive sports at school, but never electronic ones. I’d been a gamer my whole life, but never at this level of sophistication.

I loved all the different paths and approaches you could take. You were using resources, trying to survive, attacking each other; there was such a wealth of information available that it was kind of overwhelming, but there was also a lot of excitement.