I was reading gotfrag.com today catching up on all that is new in 'eSports'... lol do they still call it that? I ran across some old "history" articles on the first few years of eSports. Very brief and a bit oversimplified but interesting nonetheless.

http://www.gotfrag.com/portal/filters/336/

Anyways, I started thinking back to old times, it's getting close to 10 years ago that I hopped on a NQ CTF server with my good buddies for the first time. I was lucky in that I had a friends that were in clans like Thresh's clan Legends, Archon's Minions, EG, Clan Gib which allowed me to talk with a lot of the great team leaders and players at the time. All the while being a terrible player that barely could use a mouse.

In Early 2005 I had a chat with Ben Dobbs - Former Leader of Archon's Minions and Western Alliance. I don't think there is a "top teir" player from back in the day that is still around. But I had a nice chat with Ben, intresting stuff about the West coast DM scene.