roflcopters on the teamliquid forum talk ... people really worship this guy, he's a celebrity. "omg, what kind of apple is that?"
well...
For those playing the home game, this is the audience for a Korean StarCraft match. Don't ask me to cite which match was happening for what tournament/league, I don't know.For some people, competitive gaming is some serious eff'ing business. Korea, of course, takes it to a whole other level.
It's a real, bonafide sport to some (including me). The games have their versions of superstar celebrities (Fatal1ty, Daigo, and Boxer come to mind immediately) as well as the big prizes, and you also sometimes get moments like the
CovLAN Quake 4 TDM finals (or I could post the Daigo Full Parry, HOLY POOPNUGGETS, The One and Only HeatoN, or the Devour 1v2, really any number of awesome moments in competitive gaming) to sweeten the deal for us people involved
And yes, the best of the best actually get involved in endorsement and sponsorship deals with these vendors of "gaming" gear, the two most generous of which in North America would be SteelSeries and Razer. Sometimes (possibly a lot more than even I would assume) these deals can get a little shaky in some ways, and awesome in others, case in point, rapha:
Shane "rapha" Hendrixon is probably the best Quake player in the world right now. He is currently sponsored by SK-Gaming, a franchise company in turn financially supported by companies including SteelSeries. Now of course when you have a sponsorship like that, you, as a player's sponsor, want the player to represent your brand and products right? So why wouldn't you want players to be using your gear? Well, rapha doesn't use a Kinzu, Xai, OR Ikari, even though SS want him to, he uses a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical 1.0, but being the best player in the world, he has a bit more clout to throw around and say, "You know what? This is the mouse I use, this is the mouse I win with, asking me to use something I'm not used to is asking me to play with a handicap." So he gets away with it, but he has to put a Steelseries sticker on his Microsoft mouse (I've seen this in-person at QuakeCon), some players aren't so lucky, like when Razer started putting pressure on Cypher to start using the Cypher DeathAdder, granted that, IMO this was justified, since this was really the first time a player's actual name had been put on a product since Fatal1ty created his own brand/company, but Cypher's results definitely suffered because of it.
Man that last paragraph is kinda a cluster****, but you might be able to glean some sort of useful information from it, so I'll leave it be.