In honor of the recent release of Starcraft 2 which I may or may not have excitedly preordered months ago, we went into the archives and dug up some long lost (and awesome) footage from our season in Seoul and this interview with the world’s premiere pro-gamer.

In Korea Starcraft is like baseball in America.  A huge audience , multiple professional leagues, and most everyone has or does play it.  Its just part of the culture.  We were lucky enough not only to see a couple professional matches while we were there but to interview the best eSports player of all time – Lim Yo-Hwan aka “SlayerS_`BoxeR`” aka “The Emperor”.

BoxeR as he is more commonly known makes over $300,000 USD a year to play and has endorsements that bring in around an additional $90,000 each year.  That’s right.  Almost a half million dollars a year to play video games.  Oh, he also has a 500,00 person fan club, most of which is female.

Live eSports match. Feel the intensity.

In Korea there are actually two e-sports channels and at any time of the day you can flip on the TV and watch televised Starcraft matches complete with three different announcers providing commentary.  It’s so popular that lots of bars will turn on all of the TVs to cover the big match of the week.  Oh, and it doesn’t stop there.

Fans wait for the match to get underway.

This is one of the eSports arena where they film the live matches.  If you show up early entrance is free and they’re always excited to have foreigners in the audience.  The atmosphere is almost like a surreal WWF wresting match, but with clicking instead of body slams.

To try and put this in perspective, competitive Starcraft is so popular that most of the largest companies in Korea have their own teams.  This includes Samsung, Hite (the #1 beer in Korea), SK Telecom, and even the Air Force.  Yep, that’s right.  The Korean Air Force has its own Starcraft team.

SK Telecom mascot gets the crowd fired up.

Oh yeah, they also have mascots.

And the prevalence of Starcraft just keeps going.  Seoul in particular has a number of short stay hotels.  And in these hotels they provide not just the normal amenities, but computers so you and your companion can play games of Starcraft after you get tired of uh, resting.  They also usually have giant TVs so you can both watch and play at the same time.  If you know, that’s what you’re into.

You are never far from a game of Starcraft in Seoul.