Duty Calls - Video gamers to invade Longmont for tournament

By Quentin Young, Longmont Times-Call

Longmont, CO., May 02, 2008 – If you want to get a taste of what it feels like fighting insurgents in Iraq, there are videos on the Web that offer an uncensored view of the war.

Or you could play the video game “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.”

Released by Activision Publishing, “Call of Duty 4” is a first-person shooter game that drops players into battles whose look will be familiar to anyone who has watched the news in the past five years.

The game’s visuals abound with bombed-out cars, palm trees, the lingering smoke streaks of RPGs, the rapid jots of tracer fire and urban destruction on every side, all apparently inspired by present-day warfare in the Middle East. Within this setting is digital bloodshed of an unparalleled quality. Players enjoy the unflinching realism of blood-bursts from exit wounds and the jerking of bullet-impacted torsos.

If you achieve five kills in a row, you earn an air strike. A pair of planes roar in overhead and attack the enemy. Delivered in 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound, the experience for the player is “pretty insane,” in the words of Jesse Grinde, coowner with his wife, Melinda, of Play N Trade Video Games, at Pace Street and 17th Avenue.

Play N Trade is hosting a “Call of Duty 4” tournament May 31.

The winning team of that event will return to the store June 7 to compete online against “Call of Duty” players throughout the country.

The Longmont Play N Trade video game company offers regular local and national tournaments — it hosted “Halo 3” and “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” contests last month — and the Grindes believe their store is the only one in the metro area outside Denver that offers organized, advertised video game tournaments.

The popularity of “Call of Duty 4” has exploded since its shock-and-awe arrival on the scene last November.

“It’s the game right now,” 20-year-old Jason Terranova, who works at Play N Trade, said. “It’s bigger than Halo.”

In February, “Call of Duty 4” was named overall game of the year at the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

Also that month, Longmont resident Cole Cook was part of a team that won Play N Trade’s first “Call of Duty 4” tournament. The 17-year-old junior at Skyline High School has put together a team that intends to compete in this month’s tournament.

Cook said he began playing video games as a child with his older brother and, despite his mother’s initial resistance, got his first console, a Sony PlayStation 2, when he was 13.

Today he plays video games up to five hours a day on weekends and three hours a day during the week, which he admits violates his parents’ Monday-Friday prohibition against video games.

He is part of a “clan,” or team, called “Reality Check” that includes members, who he has never met in person, from Iowa, New York and other parts of the country. The clan plays “Call of Duty 4” online against other clans from around the world.

“I would love to become pro,” Cook said. “But it’s a very slim chance to become pro.”

The chance is slim mostly because of lack of time for Cook, not for lack of opportunity in the burgeoning video game pro circuit.

The Play N Trade video game trading corporation is offering $2,000 to the national “Call of Duty 4” winner.

Video game competitions are increasingly frequent and their stakes are growing. Some professional gamers earn handsome incomes, and several pro leagues have formed.

New York-based Major League Gaming claims to be largest organized league. Last month, at MLG’s “Halo 3” competition in the Meadowlands, N.J., a team called “Final Boss” won a first-place prize of $20,000.

Among the most famous pro gamers is 27-year-old Johnathan Wendel, who goes by Fatal1ty and plays “Quake III” and other PC games, as opposed to those designed for a console like PlayStation.

“He’ll be the godfather of professional gamers,” Marc Camron, who writes a gaming column for Day & Night, said.

Fatal1ty has collected about $500,000 in gaming prizes, according to one estimate. He is now an on-air analyst for the Championship Gaming Series league, whose events are carried live on DirecTV and other outlets. He also has his own line of products, including Fatal1ty mouses, motherboards, headphones and sound cards.

Though most video athletes are in their teens or 20s, video games increasingly enjoy appeal across generations, partly due to the availability of family-oriented titles, such as “American Idol.”

Terranova said he has seen fathers and sons come into the store shopping for games to play together.

“That’s a great way to get some bonding time with your kid,” he said. “You can turn it into family bonding night.”

Melinda Grinde also has noticed that customers represent a spectrum of society.

“We’re seeing more and more women, girls. They’re getting more and more into it,” she said. “We have men in their 60s and 70s saying their grandkids got them into video games. Now they’re gamers.”

The Grindes said that for about two years they studied various franchises, including food shops and car washes, before deciding a new video game store in Longmont could be successful.

They opened their store last July, and their decision appears to have paid off.

Asked if business is good, Jesse Grinde said, “It might even be better than we expected.”

Quentin Young can be reached at 303-684-5319 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .