SK Gaming
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SK Gaming is an international electronic sports team who field teams in many different games and are particularly known for their success in Counter-Strike.
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[edit] History
SK Gaming was formed in 1997 as a German Quake clan named Schroet Kommando by seven young people who all lived in the town of Oberhausen, among them three brothers, whose parents' house became the SK headquarters. Their major international successes came when they took the already successful Swedish Counter-Strike clan Ninjas in Pyjamas (NiP for short) into their organization using their players to create the team. Since then their main Counter-Strike team has been known from then on as SK.swe (SK Sweden). The SK.swe team have won most of the major international tournaments at least once and have been a dominant team in the Cyberathlete Professional League which is one of the most coveted championships in e-sports. Other SK Gaming teams are also notably successful in their respective games.
On February 1, 2003 SK Gaming became the first organization in FPS gaming to contract their players when SK Sweden became contractually bound to the clan. Having begun contracting their players, SK also set other precedents regarding contracts: on May 18, 2004 they were the first team to receive a fee for a player transfer after rivals Team NoA bought SK.swe player Ola "elemeNt" Moum out of his contract.
Things looked bad for them at the beginning of 2005 as SK.swe decided not to renew their contracts and to re-form Ninjas in Pyjamas, because of the distribution of the prize money and disagreements with the management. However, this seems to be behind them now as a new SK.swe team has been formed including several of the old members.
2006 has not been a good year for SK in Counter-Strike. The team failed at WEG Masters, underperforming online in cups like the EuroCup and NGL One League, and most recently not qualifying for the Electronic Sports World Cup. They managed to qualify for the Kode5 finals, beating big name teams such as NiP and Fnatic in the process. At the Kode5 finals, they won two matches and lost to team mibr in the group stages. They then lost to wNv in the single elimination round, placing 5th-8th overall.
[edit] Etymology
When playing Quake deathmatch, one of the founding members used to shout "Schrööt!" (literally meaning "shrapnel") when he took the double-barreled shotgun; they decided to incorporate this into their name and named their clan "Schroet Kommando" which translates into English as "Shrapnel Commando". Recently this has been changed and the clan now refers to itself as SK Gaming stating that this is their name now and not an abbreviation for the original name.
[edit] Notable Achievements
Schroet Kommando have placed in the top 3 at the following major international tournaments: (this does not include LANS such as DreamHack and online cups such as the Clanbase Eurocup)
[edit] Counter-Strike
[edit] 2005
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Winter Championships - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Summer Championships - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: 2nd place (loss vs sMB for the first time)
- Electronic Sports World Cup 2005 - 2nd (SK.dk)
[edit] 2004
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Summer Championships - Runners-up
[edit] 2003
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Winter Championships - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Copenhagen - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Summer Championships - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Cannes - Champions
- World Cyber Games - Champions
- Electronic Sports World Cup - Third Place
[edit] 2002
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Summer Championships - Champions
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Winter Championships - Third Place
[edit] Painkiller
[edit] 2005
- Cyberathlete Professional League World Tour: Spain - Champion (Stephan 'SteLam' Lammert)
[edit] Unreal Tournament
[edit] 2004
- Cyberathlete Professional League: Summer Championships - Champions
[edit] Warcraft III
[edit] 2005
- EuroCup - First Place - SK.Hot (Ukraine)
[edit] 2003
- World Cyber Games - First Place - SK.Insomnia (Bulgaria)
[edit] Trivia
- Benjamin Reichert, aka Burke, a long-time member and founder of SK Gaming,[1] is a fairly successful football player, at his pinnacle being a sub for Rot-Weiß Oberhausen in the Second Bundesliga and racking up 3 games on professional level[2] and also had games on the amateur team.
- Their original homepage http://www.schroet.de was hosted on Andreas Thorstensson's home webserver and had 450 registered members and 120 teams. To this day, the site is visited by 90,000 unique IP adresses a month making it the most visited E-Sports site in the world after gotfrag, which caters a world wide audience of almost 200,000 players in 5 different platforms and 6 games.
- Andreas "bds" Thorstensson is the oldest member still in the team today. He joined over 9 years ago.
