Where do the geeks drink?

"You’ll drink whatever the hell I tell you to drink."

The bartender grins as she leans over the taps to chastise me. She isn’t sheepish – rather, she maintains an air of authority as she finishes filling a glass with an adjacent beer to the Nickelbrook variety I had requested. My neighbour, who seems better acquainted with the bartender than I, leans over. “You’d better just drink it, I think she’s in a mood,” he suggests with a knowing smirk, although the bartender is already filling a glass from the correct tap.

Beer, computers, and a giant DotA2 match

Raiders eSports Centre isn’t what I expected from an e-sports bar. Most notably, it’s a bar: the stereotypical video game hallmarks are absent. Nowhere are the basement-dwelling geeks whose waking hours exist solely in binary. Instead, gregarious patrons jibe each other about the events transpiring on the TVs – which presently host not video games, but the ongoing Leafs vs. Bruins match, and the suspended state of near-catastrophe that is Red Bull: Crashed Ice. The only indication of video game pedigree is a single, diminutive CRT television hooked up to an old Nintendo.

This bar isn’t just nice relative to the internet café stereotypes. It’s a nice bar, period. The draught beer selection isn’t enormous, but it contains a variety of Ontario’s best craft brews. Along the counter behind the bartenders, green and blue LEDs illuminate large, spigotted mason jars full of mysterious fluids surely required for some mixed drink or other.

Towards the back is where the e-sports connection becomes more apparent. Black and red sports-car-bucket-style gaming seats replace the front’s dark smoking lounge chairs. The long tables here are mostly empty, but a couple gamers sit engrossed at the computers on the far edge of the room. For a Saturday night, the bar is on the busy side of empty. I came here wondering how the antisocial world of computer gaming could cohere with the outward nature of bar culture. Perhaps it doesn’t. I have a soft spot for e-sports, and I’m hoping tonight will illuminate this bar’s purpose in Toronto.

As I sip my hard earned Cause and Effect, a young-looking man sits beside me in the seat to which I was told the bar’s owner would return. I lean over and ask the man whom I hope is Daniel Hu for a quick tour of his bar.

“E-sports are of our generation,” says 22-year-old Hu as he leads me past two arcade machines, the dormant virtual reality station – a projector taking up a good 10 feet of wall space – and the rows of empty bucket seats surrounding black tables. We sit at a smaller bar, privy to the chatter of the gamers in a lower-level pit illuminated by an overhead 15-foot projection of an ongoing DotA2 (Defense of the Ancients II) match. At one end of the polished wooden bar sits a Nintendo 64, idling on the Goldeneye score screen. On the opposite end sits a Super Nintendo, also awaiting enthusiasts to rejoin the action. “This is something we made,” Hu continues, “Our parents grew up with sports, but we grew up with e-sports.”

A veteran gamer, Hu grew up in the early days of online gameplay, and his predilection for the then-budding e-sports genre brought him to the precipice of the professional world. But as he approached university, Hu understood that professional gaming and academia would each require his complete commitment. Hu chose academia over the inchoate and murky pro gaming circuit, though he soon found that his true passion lay somewhere between the two.

The subsequent surge in e-sports popularity has begun not only to lure gamers from their caves, but to attract attention and participation of a broader audience. According to Newzoo, worldwide e-sports audiences grew by 11.2 per cent in 2015 and 13.3 per cent in 2016. More significantly, revenue for those years grew by 67.4 and 42.6 per cent respectively, to $463 mil. in 2016. But how does this surge connect with bar life?

In some ways, Hu’s bar is no different from a traditional sports bar. Fans are fans, whether the characters on the screen are the cumbersome meat-vehicles of the NFL, or the digitally rendered fantasy heroes of League of Legends. “They’re all cheering for their own team, and then they start trash-talking each other in such a friendly way,” says Hu. He views this bar as a necessity for Toronto, somewhere for people to share their common interest – a common language, as Hu puts it.

“You know the Air Canada Centre got packed by League of Legends,” Hu says, referring to a sold-out LoL championship some months back, “we need a venue like this.”

As the night wears on, the bar still isn’t packed. However, the excited cross-talk from the gamers and the LED-lit smiles suggest that, as Hu promised, the patrons aren’t the solitary sort who frequent internet cafes. “There are no barriers here,” says Hu.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if this isn’t the same scene I might have found up the street at Good Game Bar: the midtown e-sports bar closed down after less than a year in operation. By all accounts, it was smaller but no less modern and welcoming than Raiders, and it saw higher foot traffic pass its door.

“It felt pretty casual,” says Mitchell Fort, a midtown local and veteran of the pro StarCraft circuit.

This isn’t a good thing. In gaming terms, a “casual” is a pejorative reserved for those without the interest or talent to become more than mediocre at any game.

“I don’t identify as a gamer, but people who do… they’re spectator and participant. It’s more than a hobby – I got sponsored to play and I was still in school, so the pro leagues feel pretty close for a lot of people,” says Fort, “[Good Game Bar] felt like they were just exploiting the hype. It was a nice bar I guess, and it had some gaming stuff in it, but it wasn’t really a gaming bar like Raiders is a gaming bar.”

Good Game Bar seems to have lacked a clear sense of dedication. Perhaps that’s why they vanished soundlessly, betraying the vibrant optimism of their website that persists in ignorance of its lost purpose.

Purpose lacks neither at Raiders nor from its owner. Hu’s passion is boundless, as are his aspirations – Hu doesn’t just want to create a space for gamers to bond, but to create a staple in the world e-sports landscape.

“Do you know HuK?” Hu asks, “He’s a really famous StarCraft player. He was number one in North America.”

HuK – or Chris Loranger – is still a big name in the e-sports realm, and he is coming on board to coach a Toronto e-sports team based out of Raiders. “The city actually gets an e-sports team,” says Hu, “The Raptors play in the ACC, these guys will play in Raiders.”

Hu clearly has a vision beyond the service industry. E-sports is not a fad for Hu, nor for the devoted customers who came for the 90-or-so events Raiders held since they opened in August. He beams as he shows me a video on his phone from opening month.

On the small screen, crowds line the sidewalks and cheer as two of the top international League of Legends teams slide out of matte black Mercedes G-Classes. A security guard heralds the team through the wall-to-wall crowds who are here in Raiders to cheer for the two teams as they go head to head in the Air Canada Centre. The victor will take third place in the North American championship.

Hu isn’t showing me what Raiders has already done; he is showing me what he intends to do. It was never just about the bar for Hu. While he may not have gone pro, he still intends to make his mark on the international e-sports scene. It’s not a trend – it’s his world.