The hard part was engineering a plan that would turn a small, yet passionate grassroots endeavour into an international competition that people would happily spectate. The challenge wasn’t envisioning esports as the next big sport, with millions of players, spectators, and revenue alike. “We thought: ‘How could we dress this up to make it look like it could sit next to the NFL and NBA, airing on ESPN, with Bud Light and Ford as sponsors?’” We thought we could apply it to the kids that play Halo in a way that’s more in line with American sports media.” But with all of these kids playing Halo, they’re effectively doing the same thing, but consoles were far and away the dominant gaming platform at that time across North America and the United Kingdom. “Korea’s take on StarCraft was not going to work over here. “It all seemed really interesting but, while I liked playing Quake, it didn’t really translate into the mainstream,” continued Sepso. “We started to look around internationally and had already heard of what was happening with StarCraft in Korea, but hadn’t spent much time thinking about it because we weren’t fans of the game and had no plans of going to Korea. “We would go onto message boards and find people to play Halo against we realised pretty quickly that there was an online and small tournament grassroots scene happening organically,” he said. “At some point during the season, I told Sundance that we made ‘take the summer off money’ but not ‘retire at 28 or 29 money.’ We had to either figure out something to start now or to get jobs.” “We spent that summer betting on games of Halo and going to watch the New York Yankees,” he said. It was a technical development agency where we would build consumer products for telecommunications and cable companies that were rolling out residential broadband across North America and Europe. “Sundance and I had a prior business that we were in the process of exiting at that time with another partner. “I got into esports in the summer of 2002,” Sepso told Esports Insider. Sepso and DiGiovanni are known as one of the most iconic duos in the entire industry, but their working relationship started before the legacy they built with MLG and are looking to continue with Vindex. What happened in that period that saw them evolve from zeroes to heroes? When they first started working together back in the early 2000s, they couldn’t convince anybody to invest in their ideas.

In October 2019, MLG co-founders Mike Sepso and Sundance DiGiovanni launched a new venture, Vindex, with $60 million (£46.6 million) in funding.

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