Professional gaming: The perfect job?

A few years ago, Johnathan Wendel was just another kid in high school with a yen for playing fast-paced computer games such as "Quake III".

Nowadays, the 22-year-old is drawing the attention of MTV documentarians, courting endorsements from major chipmakers and launching his own PC line, all based on those same "Quake" skills.

By most standards, Wendel, better-known as Fatal1ty, is the top star on the burgeoning tournament gaming scene, in which computer gaming buffs compete head-to-head in shooting games such as "Quake" and "Unreal Tournament", gunning for fame and five-digit prize packages.

Wendel was one of the first tournament gamers to go pro. Gaming has been his life the past few years, and he estimates he earns an average of $50,000 a year from tournaments, not counting perks such as free travel to the top tournaments and increasingly lucrative endorsement contracts from tech companies looking to boost credibility with the lucrative hardcore gamer market. Now he's working on plans to sell his own high-end line of Fatal1ty-branded PCs.

But don't get too jealous. He travels too much to settle down and still lives in the basement of his father's house.

Wendel talked with ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com about the life of a professional gamer shortly before he wiped out the competition at the recent Cyber X Gaming tournament in Las Vegas.

How did this get started for you?
Basically, I started professional gaming back in 1999. I went to the CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) tournament in Dallas and won like $4,000 for coming in fourth place. After that, I had a company that was interested and said they'd fly me out to Sweden to play the top Counter Strike players in the world. I went to that tournament, won 18 games straight, lost none, beat three of the top players in the world at "Quake III Arena". After that, I got sponsors and people wanting me to endorse their products. And now I'm going more away from the endorsement side. I'm building my own products, saying this is exactly what I'd want to use.

So you're kind of becoming the Don "Big Daddy" Garlits of the PC world?
It's kind of like what Michael Jordan is to basketball. My name's become kind of valuable, and I want to make sure that if it's on a product, it's really done to my specifications.

This is all new. We're going to create our own stuff -- our own motherboards, our own video cards. Just have everything maxed out for the best performance. We're not just going to tweak the stuff that's out there; we're going to do better than that.

How hardcore were you about games before you went pro?
It was basically a hobby for me growing up. The next thing you know, there's this tournament in Dallas...and it was like, what's the world coming to? I just made $4,000 playing a game. It was nuts. After that, it just exploded. I started making really serious cash. I won 40 grand in one tournament, 15 grand in another. So I just kept going and travelling the world. I've been all over the world and never paid for a single trip, because the sponsors all pick up the tab.

You probably save a lot on computer hardware, too.
Yeah, I usually don't have to buy my own stuff, because companies give it to me for free.

How much of a difference does the hardware make?
It's huge. A couple more frames per second and everything gets really nice. It's all about getting more frames, the computer filling in stuff more quickly and allowing you move around the maps more fluidly.