What’s a SMITE?
I could talk about SMITE for hours.
Keith Geiger
Me: What do you want for Christmas, Keith?
Keith: How about you pay for my ticket to the SMITE World Championship?
Me: Sounds good. What’s a smite?
Keith Geiger knows focus. Or more accurately, Keith Geiger knows focus about the things he cares about. During the course of his twenty years circling the sun, I’ve seen my youngest son assemble and organize an unfathomable (to me, at least) amount of data on dinosaurs, Rock Band, computers and cross country running. But they all pale in comparison to the latest object of his laser-guided fascination: an online video game called SMITE.
What is SMITE, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “SMITE is a third person action multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed and published by Hi-Rez Studios.” In search of a description a technologically-deficient father could understand, I clicked over to the Hi-Rez Studio website which said simply, “SMITE is the online battleground of the gods.” Got it.
Thanks to living under a rock, I’ve missed this whole online video game phenomenon. I sat stupefied this past October while a father told me that his son’s entire company, a major player in the video gaming industry, was traveling to South Korea to watch the 2014 League of Legends World Championship in South Korea. “How many people does this company employ?” I asked. “About 4,000,” he said. After picking my jaw up off the ground, my next thought was who does one call when they need to charter a fleet of 747s? And how, prey tell, can they afford it?
For three days beginning this Friday, Keith will be planted at the Cobb Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, GA watching an enormous video screen while eight teams from North America, Europe, Latin America and China compete for a prize pool of $2.5 million. This fact is notable for two reasons. First, last year’s inaugural SMITE World Championship (described as a “launch tournament”) featured only a $200,000 prize pool. Second, this year’s winning team will receive half the pot, with each member of the five-person team receiving a cool $250,000. TWO. HUNRED. FIFTY. GRAND. Not a bad take for a game that’s been in existence a whopping three years. Keith himself has only been playing SMITE for less than a year (he’s known in the SMITE community as “Ozy”, a nickname derived from a poem called “Ozymandias.” Don’t ask, because I don’t know), and while he isn’t quite up to major league standards, he can definitely play at the AAA level.
Shortly after returning home for winter break from his programming studies at Carnegie Mellon, Keith said to The Pretty Blonde and me over a steak at Ruth’s Chris, “I could talk about SMITE for hours.” After listening to him while devouring my ribeye, I realized Keith spoke with the same enthusiastic intensity as me and my dopy friends do discussing the minute intricacies of fantasy football. And truth be told, there is very little difference between the two. It was one of those moments in life where one of my sons hit me over the head with a verbal two-by-four.
I love it when they do that.
Click here to learn more about the 2015 SMITE World Championships.