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- Apr 10, 2017
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(Original version in Brazilian portuguese: https://www.maisesports.com.br/lenda-age-of-empires-riut/)
Written by Maximilian Rox (https://twitter.com/forkxx)
Translated by myself - I already apologize for any mistakes you find.
Proofread by robo - Thank you!
His boss was a millionaire from Dubai. His rival is from Serbia and his coach was a Korean with the gift of strategy. He woke up everyday at 5 am to train the talent team which reached the world top of Age of Empires 2.
And Daniel “RiuT” Lima didn’t hide his excitement by telling his whole story to Mais Esports.
“I put it on my resume that I was an Age of Empires world champion”.
“I didn’t have anything, right? I was just starting and I was in college, so I had never worked. I remember in the interview with my leader, he took [the resume] and started to ask about the game and I told my story. That’s why he hired me as an intern there at the time”.
RiuT by taking third place in the 2015 World Series of Video Games, which took place in the Maldives.
A 26-year-old paulistano (the person born in the city of Sao Paulo) and currently working as a chemical engineer in Sao Paulo, Daniel recalls he has always been the youngest in the Age of Empires community.
“RiuT is almost a name. I remember a teacher emailing me the materials and there was: daniel_riut. He knew my name was Daniel Cassiano and he was: ‘where’s Riut? Isn’t it your last name?’ Then I had to tell him the story”.
And what a story. It goes from Brazil to China, passes through the United Arab Emirates, the Maldives Islands, Black Forest and also crosses the timelines until it lands in the Huns’ kingdom - the civilization that spiked RiuT’s name among the best players of Age of Empires 2 in the world.
Dark Age: The beginning in Age of Empires
Reproduction: Deviantart / JonasJensenArt
All empires start in a simple way. Around here, Daniel saw a lot of his older brothers play a CD borrowed from a friend.
“I remember well, that was 2003. I was 10 years old. I remember watching him play and saw the elephants and stuff and said: ‘wow, amazing!’. I would pull the chair and watch him play until he started getting me to play too. That’s where the whole story began”. Both his brother and his friend were the first opponents to be beaten.
The beginning was like many of us: slowly playing against the computer; learning and evolving. And gradually going to the real opponents, starting between the two brothers, who played in LAN. From then on, the contact with the community on the internet became more frequent.
RiuT: the youngest next to his four brothers.
Part of the community played Age of Empires 2 through mIRC - a sort of ancestor of internet chats. Yes, we need to explain, after 20 years since the game’s release.
The process was simple: the players were on mIRC and shared the ip of the room, simply using the information to connect within the match. But RiuT met the other players on Microsoft’s official platform: the Zone.
“We started to getting into forums, understanding more and getting to know people. At Zone, we joined the clan of my brother’s friend. It was called Chaves, the acronym was CH. I was a CHT, until today people play with it. CH [the clan’s name] e T from ‘training’. “I was, like, pretty bad,'' he jokes.
In 2005, RiuT participated in a championship at a LAN house in Sao Paulo. It was the beginning of his contact with the competitions. “I didn’t play this championship, I remember my brother played. I was just watching, I was only 11 years old. That’s where I fell in love, the championship in LAN house was very crazy, right?”.
RiuT started to play online matches. The ranked system on the official platform was different: they all start with a score of 1600. “The guy who get 1800, he already knows how to play. Above 2K, the guy is already an expert. Top players came in at 2500. That was always the point reference. And at that time I reached 1800, almost 1900”, he explained.
“I reached a good level for my age, that’s when I participated in a second tournament. In that I was already beating my brother, I had already started beating him”. In this competition, even, RiuT manage to finish around the seventh position, beating the Winners Bracket’s runner-up.
Shortly thereafter, Age of Empires 3 was released.
Feudal Age: The knights on the battlefield
“By then, at Age 2, I had reached a good level, but nothing much. A very weak level even in the brazilian scene. And in Age 3 I remember that I reached the top 10 in the world. It was in 2006 or 2007.
“I remember I was playing against grunt, he was a reference. I played about 10 matches, I lost nine and won one. Okay, that made my day,” he jokes.
Here we can take a break and talk more about Kang “iamgrunt” Byung Geon. To this day, he is the player who has won more money in both Age 2 and Age 3 in the world: he has accumulated over $ 89,000 in in-game awards.
“The guy was a legend. Both in Age 2 and Age 3”, adds RiuT. The Korean also spiked his name at the top of the Age 3 with the most money earned, but the community was not excited about Age of Empires 3. RiuT himself gradually left the game to focus on chess, especially after his main disappointment in game at the time: not being able to travel to a WCG championship in Mexico because of his age.
It was through the influence of other members of the Brazilian community that RiuT returned to Age of Empires 2, especially Guilherme “dogao” Pippi. “He was playing a lot. Wow, I went back to Age and became his fan. His team game wasn’t like in 1v1, his team game was beautiful to watch. I already got it as a reference, I started training with him too, and in that I was already at the good level”.
RiuT returned to the old team after a few clan changes, but his nickname was not that one at the time. It all came about as a joke by the name of his old clan, Riot. At a face-to-face meeting in Sao Paulo, some friends made jokes with the name of their rivals. They spoke “riut” especially to provoke Daniel.
“Then when I wanted to go back to CH the guys said: ‘Okay, you can come back, but your nickname will have to be RiuT’. And I was pissed, that ugly f****** nickname. I hated it. But a few months went by and I loved it. Today my email is riut, it’s almost my last name. I bought the idea” he recalls.
In 2008, RiuT played in the Master of the Huns online championship - a tournament where players only played matches with Huns in 1v1.
“Brazil was never very strong in 1v1, except when I was very young. Then in my time the scenario was great, but there was no one to sponsor championships. There was no LAN championship anymore. The game was half dead, you know. It’s amazing how alive it is to this day”.
“I had never done well in any championship. I remember I started winning and passing, winning and passing, and I reached the final. Out of the blue. I was playing super well. But no one even knew me on the world scenario. And I reached the final against my idol. Then it got complicated.
RiuT has always shown admiration for Serbian Darko “DauT” Dautovic.
“Man, I watched his game, I took a paper and kept writing it down. Villager, villager, where he came from, the time he left, where he went. I knew memorized. To this day I remember a game he played against a German player, it must be from 2002 or 2003. My memory is a bit bad, but I remember every detail of the map of this game. Where he placed every building, time, I memorized everything”.
And he swears DauT was in his best shape possible. No one could stop him. “He had a South Korean coach name kkab, and you will hear more about him, he is very important in my life. And he coached DauT”.
The result was no different: in Bo7, RiuT lost 4-0. “But that ugly 4-0, I got pissed off. I never liked to lose”. The final result, however, drew community attention to the 15-year-old who had come so far in the championship.
Weeks later, the Brazilian faced the master from Serbian on another occasion: The Brain Champion Cup 3, a group format championship. “If I’m not mistaken, it was Bo9 and I won 5-2. Unbelievable. I went out and I didn’t believe I beat DauT, a guy I’m superfan. That’s when I was world champion”.
An award of almost US$ 5,000, courtesy of a crazy Japanese who sponsored the scene for a long time. One of the millionaires who helped keep the community in competition to this day.
Castle Age: Kings gain power
“Age wasn’t so good at that time. 2010 I finished high school and I won this championship, so in 2011 I took it and made a college preparatory course”. The title money helped to fund two years of this course, but RiuT always came back to play. The second year he had to focus even more on studies. “2012 I dropped Age completely, I didn’t play anything. At the end of the year everything went well, I managed to go to college”. He started to study Chemical Engineering at UNIFESP.
But for a series of strikes and delays, classes would not start until May. That’s when he opened that naughty window to play Age of Empires 2 again. “The famous The Viper was already emerging. I was the best in the world when he was starting to play, the darned. In 2013 he was already the best in the world. He was way better than me”.
“That’s when something crazy happened,'' he recalls. The Norwegian was on a team called TyranT, which emerged in a championship in 2011. At the time, RiuT and some Brazilians lost to them.
TyranT was a team coordinated by Korean Kim “kkab” Heesang and initially brought DauT, grunt and Japanese Akihiro “Halen” Nakamura. “The guys were retired for a long time, they weren’t even playing very well anymore, you know? And even like this, kkab made them beat our team.
From left to right: Grunt, Yanzi, Kkab. Masters of AoC in Villablino, Spain, 2003. Reproduction: AoEZone
“He was amazing. If you ask who was the best Age coach, it was kkab. In addition to being a coach, he used to play. His game was no big deal, he was kind of the basics. He sacrificed for the team and worked out the strategy and that’s it. The guys won. He was very smart. I remember facing him and my level was much better than his. I did the basics of the game and he made a counter that was impressive. Even in gameplay being worse, in strategy he was sensational”.
Later, the TyranT clan added The Viper and the German Marco “JorDan_23” Bloch, bringing together a team of stars from the Age of Empires world. “Then kkab came to talk to me”.
In August 2013, the South Korean asked the Brazilian to help train TyranT for a match against a Chinese team. And he did. “Then I started helping and all, and then came the invitation. He came to talk and said: ‘The boss here doesn’t just want a top team, he wants two top teams’, he says.
This boss was a millionaire living in Dubai with an ambitious goal: in to the best team in the world, he wanted to own the second best team in the world. A team that beat the Chinese. May it beat all who passed before it.
And they wanted RiuT to be the leader of this team. [TyranT] Warlords appeared.
Imperial Age: Conquering the World
While RiuT was still building the team, he had one of the most insane opportunities of his life. “Kkab said, at the end of March 2014: ‘hey, get a passport and take a picture’. So I said: ‘what?!’. And kkab added: ‘you come to Dubai’. And he meant it, he was living in Dubai because the rich sponsor lived there.
“The next day the passage appears in my email. I already had the Business Class ticket. Then I said: ‘damn it, it’s not possible. What’s going on?’. In April I traveled there and there I met the sponsor.
“He was very, very rich”.
RiuT stayed for almost a month at two of Dubai’s best hotels, including Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. There were DauT, Jordan and The Viper. “Then when we got to his house there were several computers. It was like a LAN house at his house. It was almost Neymar level, the guy there. It was like another world. You can’t compare with a rich from Brazil, there’s no comparison”.
There, they went karting, parachuted and played some Age of Empires. Entitled to a waiter offering drink. “It was unbelievable,'' he recalls.
[TyranT] in Dubai. From left to right: RiuT, Jordan, The Viper and DauT.
When he returned to Brazil, RiuT finished setting up Warlords. He took a long time to officialize, but each member was carefully chosen by RiuT: Bien “BacT” Ha, Chris “slam” Gregson e Helenês “F1re” Romano.
“I called these three guys to the team: a Vietnamese, a Canadian and a Brazilian. A detail: the Vietnamese was playing very well but he didn’t speak English at all. And I had to make this team the second best in the world” he recalls.
Supported by kkab as a coach, RiuT still taught English to Vietnamese. It was all in Team Speak, where the Brazilian kept repeating the English words for BacT to learn the way they spoke during the match. “And that was it, practicing English with the guy and then we trained with TyranT’s main team”.
“In 2014, our sponsor made the biggest Age of Empires championship ever. Coming from his own pocket”. It was War is Coming, with $ 110,000 in prizes. “It was a giant team championship. And that’s where the goal to get first and second”, he adds.
The difficulty was to gather all these people in a time to train - after all, in the same group were people from Europe, Vietnam, Canada and Brazil. The solution did not end well for both Brazilians. “We trained every day at 5 am. I remember once I missed the schedule and it was sad. It was the first complaint I took there”, recalls RiuT.
Another picture of RiuT and his teammates in Dubai.
Despite this, they receive sponsor support to train all this time. “It was a lot unfair. You see how money influences. Because if you saw another team, they would practise once or twice a week and go look at some map, think some strategy. We basically had the best team at our disposal and trained against them three, four hours a day. We just took a beating, but we learn from the beating. And I remember that we started to earn more than lose”.
The first phase was online and only the finals would be in person in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He struggled to get another trip to the country of his team.
And they reached the finals against the other [TyranT] team.
“It was me, F1re, slam, BacT and the others who had gone the other time. Except they were unlucky. This time, the rich guy was very busy. We barely saw him. Sure, we stayed at the hotel, enjoying, but we had no contact with him, only on the last day. There was no comparison.”
www.youtube.com
“An that was the last time I spoke to him. After that, he kind of quit Age. I don’t know if he got palled, but he disappeared from the game”. They only knew the millionaire by his first name, Mac, and he was described as a very mysterious person. The orientation was not to talk much about him. It was like a “shadow on the professional scene”, as RiuT says.
In 2015, RiuT got an opportunity to compete in another international championship: the World Series of Video Games, whose finals would take place in the Maldives. “I was playing well back then, although I was never number one again. When I came back, Viper was already dominating Age and he always beat me. He had a style that ended with mine. I lost every time”, he recalls.
In this championship, RiuT made it to the Winner Bracket finals but lost to The Viper and Chinese Yo. He took third place.
Another travel opportunity came in 2016, when he and his teammates went to China.
“Tyrant was kind of broken, we had undone Warlords and basically I want to Legends. kkab didn’t play anymore and I teamed up with Viper, DauT, slam and F1Re. It was a team championship and the final was in China. The final was sponsored by a Chinese guy there who was also very rich”, another millionaire supporting Age of Empires 2.
The Clan Masters: The Final Showdown was fought between them and the Chinese SY clan. “I remember we lost by one game. I got very angry. I remember that I was playing very well and precisely Viper, who was the best in the world, did not play very well that day. And he was decisive, if he’s ok, we win, if not, we screwed”.
When the game was tied and only the decisive map was left, RiuT brought together all his teammates. He wheeled like he was on a basketball court and did the captain’s job to boost everyone's spirits, including Viper. It even made a battle cry. “The Chinese crowd loved it and clapped”, he recalls.
The picture below was taken after that moment.
The future and the Age of Empires 4
“From 2017 it was just decay. There were some guys who were playing very well, then came some new versions of Age with new civilizations. And since that came along, I’ve never been the same”. In addition, a new system of civilization bans debuted in the competitive, but college and work also weighed heavily.
“I still consider myself good because, even after a time without play, I will play against someone who is playing every day and I can take a game or another against them”, he says.
And the Age of Empires 4 announcement, made in 2017, moved the player a little. Just like the Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition.
“What a desire to be new, pick up and spend 15 hours a day playing to reach the top level. If I had been born ten years later I would choose to be a gamer”. But to play to satisfy the desire, ah, he will play for sure.
Some say that after a chess match, the king and the pawn return to the same box. And I like to imagine that, over there, the most experienced pieces pass on the wisdom for pawns to promote themselves in the next match.
“It’s always trying to play against someone who is better than you. It is for losing that fear. I remember I was very afraid of ELO, of rating. It’s very stupid because you care about it and you don’t grow up. The Viper was a lot like that, when he grew up he wasn’t afraid to play anyone. And me too”.
“When you take a beating is when you learn”.
Words from Maximilian Rox at the end of the article: Although he doesn't participate in competitions so often, you can follow RiuT's work on his channel on both Twitch and YouTube. Special thanks to Márcio Medeiros for helping in this article. (I only helped him get the contact of the Brazilian players he interviewed or will interview: RiuT, dogao, miguel, feage, F1Re, Goku, St4rk, Alive.)
Written by Maximilian Rox (https://twitter.com/forkxx)
Translated by myself - I already apologize for any mistakes you find.
Proofread by robo - Thank you!
His boss was a millionaire from Dubai. His rival is from Serbia and his coach was a Korean with the gift of strategy. He woke up everyday at 5 am to train the talent team which reached the world top of Age of Empires 2.
And Daniel “RiuT” Lima didn’t hide his excitement by telling his whole story to Mais Esports.
“I put it on my resume that I was an Age of Empires world champion”.
“I didn’t have anything, right? I was just starting and I was in college, so I had never worked. I remember in the interview with my leader, he took [the resume] and started to ask about the game and I told my story. That’s why he hired me as an intern there at the time”.
RiuT by taking third place in the 2015 World Series of Video Games, which took place in the Maldives.
A 26-year-old paulistano (the person born in the city of Sao Paulo) and currently working as a chemical engineer in Sao Paulo, Daniel recalls he has always been the youngest in the Age of Empires community.
“RiuT is almost a name. I remember a teacher emailing me the materials and there was: daniel_riut. He knew my name was Daniel Cassiano and he was: ‘where’s Riut? Isn’t it your last name?’ Then I had to tell him the story”.
And what a story. It goes from Brazil to China, passes through the United Arab Emirates, the Maldives Islands, Black Forest and also crosses the timelines until it lands in the Huns’ kingdom - the civilization that spiked RiuT’s name among the best players of Age of Empires 2 in the world.
Dark Age: The beginning in Age of Empires
Reproduction: Deviantart / JonasJensenArt
All empires start in a simple way. Around here, Daniel saw a lot of his older brothers play a CD borrowed from a friend.
“I remember well, that was 2003. I was 10 years old. I remember watching him play and saw the elephants and stuff and said: ‘wow, amazing!’. I would pull the chair and watch him play until he started getting me to play too. That’s where the whole story began”. Both his brother and his friend were the first opponents to be beaten.
The beginning was like many of us: slowly playing against the computer; learning and evolving. And gradually going to the real opponents, starting between the two brothers, who played in LAN. From then on, the contact with the community on the internet became more frequent.
RiuT: the youngest next to his four brothers.
Part of the community played Age of Empires 2 through mIRC - a sort of ancestor of internet chats. Yes, we need to explain, after 20 years since the game’s release.
The process was simple: the players were on mIRC and shared the ip of the room, simply using the information to connect within the match. But RiuT met the other players on Microsoft’s official platform: the Zone.
“We started to getting into forums, understanding more and getting to know people. At Zone, we joined the clan of my brother’s friend. It was called Chaves, the acronym was CH. I was a CHT, until today people play with it. CH [the clan’s name] e T from ‘training’. “I was, like, pretty bad,'' he jokes.
In 2005, RiuT participated in a championship at a LAN house in Sao Paulo. It was the beginning of his contact with the competitions. “I didn’t play this championship, I remember my brother played. I was just watching, I was only 11 years old. That’s where I fell in love, the championship in LAN house was very crazy, right?”.
RiuT started to play online matches. The ranked system on the official platform was different: they all start with a score of 1600. “The guy who get 1800, he already knows how to play. Above 2K, the guy is already an expert. Top players came in at 2500. That was always the point reference. And at that time I reached 1800, almost 1900”, he explained.
“I reached a good level for my age, that’s when I participated in a second tournament. In that I was already beating my brother, I had already started beating him”. In this competition, even, RiuT manage to finish around the seventh position, beating the Winners Bracket’s runner-up.
Shortly thereafter, Age of Empires 3 was released.
Feudal Age: The knights on the battlefield
“By then, at Age 2, I had reached a good level, but nothing much. A very weak level even in the brazilian scene. And in Age 3 I remember that I reached the top 10 in the world. It was in 2006 or 2007.
“I remember I was playing against grunt, he was a reference. I played about 10 matches, I lost nine and won one. Okay, that made my day,” he jokes.
Here we can take a break and talk more about Kang “iamgrunt” Byung Geon. To this day, he is the player who has won more money in both Age 2 and Age 3 in the world: he has accumulated over $ 89,000 in in-game awards.
“The guy was a legend. Both in Age 2 and Age 3”, adds RiuT. The Korean also spiked his name at the top of the Age 3 with the most money earned, but the community was not excited about Age of Empires 3. RiuT himself gradually left the game to focus on chess, especially after his main disappointment in game at the time: not being able to travel to a WCG championship in Mexico because of his age.
It was through the influence of other members of the Brazilian community that RiuT returned to Age of Empires 2, especially Guilherme “dogao” Pippi. “He was playing a lot. Wow, I went back to Age and became his fan. His team game wasn’t like in 1v1, his team game was beautiful to watch. I already got it as a reference, I started training with him too, and in that I was already at the good level”.
RiuT returned to the old team after a few clan changes, but his nickname was not that one at the time. It all came about as a joke by the name of his old clan, Riot. At a face-to-face meeting in Sao Paulo, some friends made jokes with the name of their rivals. They spoke “riut” especially to provoke Daniel.
“Then when I wanted to go back to CH the guys said: ‘Okay, you can come back, but your nickname will have to be RiuT’. And I was pissed, that ugly f****** nickname. I hated it. But a few months went by and I loved it. Today my email is riut, it’s almost my last name. I bought the idea” he recalls.
In 2008, RiuT played in the Master of the Huns online championship - a tournament where players only played matches with Huns in 1v1.
“Brazil was never very strong in 1v1, except when I was very young. Then in my time the scenario was great, but there was no one to sponsor championships. There was no LAN championship anymore. The game was half dead, you know. It’s amazing how alive it is to this day”.
“I had never done well in any championship. I remember I started winning and passing, winning and passing, and I reached the final. Out of the blue. I was playing super well. But no one even knew me on the world scenario. And I reached the final against my idol. Then it got complicated.
RiuT has always shown admiration for Serbian Darko “DauT” Dautovic.
“Man, I watched his game, I took a paper and kept writing it down. Villager, villager, where he came from, the time he left, where he went. I knew memorized. To this day I remember a game he played against a German player, it must be from 2002 or 2003. My memory is a bit bad, but I remember every detail of the map of this game. Where he placed every building, time, I memorized everything”.
And he swears DauT was in his best shape possible. No one could stop him. “He had a South Korean coach name kkab, and you will hear more about him, he is very important in my life. And he coached DauT”.
The result was no different: in Bo7, RiuT lost 4-0. “But that ugly 4-0, I got pissed off. I never liked to lose”. The final result, however, drew community attention to the 15-year-old who had come so far in the championship.
Weeks later, the Brazilian faced the master from Serbian on another occasion: The Brain Champion Cup 3, a group format championship. “If I’m not mistaken, it was Bo9 and I won 5-2. Unbelievable. I went out and I didn’t believe I beat DauT, a guy I’m superfan. That’s when I was world champion”.
An award of almost US$ 5,000, courtesy of a crazy Japanese who sponsored the scene for a long time. One of the millionaires who helped keep the community in competition to this day.
Castle Age: Kings gain power
“Age wasn’t so good at that time. 2010 I finished high school and I won this championship, so in 2011 I took it and made a college preparatory course”. The title money helped to fund two years of this course, but RiuT always came back to play. The second year he had to focus even more on studies. “2012 I dropped Age completely, I didn’t play anything. At the end of the year everything went well, I managed to go to college”. He started to study Chemical Engineering at UNIFESP.
But for a series of strikes and delays, classes would not start until May. That’s when he opened that naughty window to play Age of Empires 2 again. “The famous The Viper was already emerging. I was the best in the world when he was starting to play, the darned. In 2013 he was already the best in the world. He was way better than me”.
“That’s when something crazy happened,'' he recalls. The Norwegian was on a team called TyranT, which emerged in a championship in 2011. At the time, RiuT and some Brazilians lost to them.
TyranT was a team coordinated by Korean Kim “kkab” Heesang and initially brought DauT, grunt and Japanese Akihiro “Halen” Nakamura. “The guys were retired for a long time, they weren’t even playing very well anymore, you know? And even like this, kkab made them beat our team.
From left to right: Grunt, Yanzi, Kkab. Masters of AoC in Villablino, Spain, 2003. Reproduction: AoEZone
“He was amazing. If you ask who was the best Age coach, it was kkab. In addition to being a coach, he used to play. His game was no big deal, he was kind of the basics. He sacrificed for the team and worked out the strategy and that’s it. The guys won. He was very smart. I remember facing him and my level was much better than his. I did the basics of the game and he made a counter that was impressive. Even in gameplay being worse, in strategy he was sensational”.
Later, the TyranT clan added The Viper and the German Marco “JorDan_23” Bloch, bringing together a team of stars from the Age of Empires world. “Then kkab came to talk to me”.
In August 2013, the South Korean asked the Brazilian to help train TyranT for a match against a Chinese team. And he did. “Then I started helping and all, and then came the invitation. He came to talk and said: ‘The boss here doesn’t just want a top team, he wants two top teams’, he says.
This boss was a millionaire living in Dubai with an ambitious goal: in to the best team in the world, he wanted to own the second best team in the world. A team that beat the Chinese. May it beat all who passed before it.
And they wanted RiuT to be the leader of this team. [TyranT] Warlords appeared.
Imperial Age: Conquering the World
While RiuT was still building the team, he had one of the most insane opportunities of his life. “Kkab said, at the end of March 2014: ‘hey, get a passport and take a picture’. So I said: ‘what?!’. And kkab added: ‘you come to Dubai’. And he meant it, he was living in Dubai because the rich sponsor lived there.
“The next day the passage appears in my email. I already had the Business Class ticket. Then I said: ‘damn it, it’s not possible. What’s going on?’. In April I traveled there and there I met the sponsor.
“He was very, very rich”.
RiuT stayed for almost a month at two of Dubai’s best hotels, including Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. There were DauT, Jordan and The Viper. “Then when we got to his house there were several computers. It was like a LAN house at his house. It was almost Neymar level, the guy there. It was like another world. You can’t compare with a rich from Brazil, there’s no comparison”.
There, they went karting, parachuted and played some Age of Empires. Entitled to a waiter offering drink. “It was unbelievable,'' he recalls.
[TyranT] in Dubai. From left to right: RiuT, Jordan, The Viper and DauT.
When he returned to Brazil, RiuT finished setting up Warlords. He took a long time to officialize, but each member was carefully chosen by RiuT: Bien “BacT” Ha, Chris “slam” Gregson e Helenês “F1re” Romano.
“I called these three guys to the team: a Vietnamese, a Canadian and a Brazilian. A detail: the Vietnamese was playing very well but he didn’t speak English at all. And I had to make this team the second best in the world” he recalls.
Supported by kkab as a coach, RiuT still taught English to Vietnamese. It was all in Team Speak, where the Brazilian kept repeating the English words for BacT to learn the way they spoke during the match. “And that was it, practicing English with the guy and then we trained with TyranT’s main team”.
“In 2014, our sponsor made the biggest Age of Empires championship ever. Coming from his own pocket”. It was War is Coming, with $ 110,000 in prizes. “It was a giant team championship. And that’s where the goal to get first and second”, he adds.
The difficulty was to gather all these people in a time to train - after all, in the same group were people from Europe, Vietnam, Canada and Brazil. The solution did not end well for both Brazilians. “We trained every day at 5 am. I remember once I missed the schedule and it was sad. It was the first complaint I took there”, recalls RiuT.
Another picture of RiuT and his teammates in Dubai.
Despite this, they receive sponsor support to train all this time. “It was a lot unfair. You see how money influences. Because if you saw another team, they would practise once or twice a week and go look at some map, think some strategy. We basically had the best team at our disposal and trained against them three, four hours a day. We just took a beating, but we learn from the beating. And I remember that we started to earn more than lose”.
The first phase was online and only the finals would be in person in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He struggled to get another trip to the country of his team.
And they reached the finals against the other [TyranT] team.
“It was me, F1re, slam, BacT and the others who had gone the other time. Except they were unlucky. This time, the rich guy was very busy. We barely saw him. Sure, we stayed at the hotel, enjoying, but we had no contact with him, only on the last day. There was no comparison.”
WiC Tournament - Grand Final 4v4 | TyRanT Legends vs TyRanT Warlords | Game 1
Casted by Katsuni, Memb, Ra (2015-03-08) -- Tournament Forum: http://www.aoczone.net/viewforum.php?f=836 -- Watch live at http://www.twitch.tv/vooblyofficial...
“An that was the last time I spoke to him. After that, he kind of quit Age. I don’t know if he got palled, but he disappeared from the game”. They only knew the millionaire by his first name, Mac, and he was described as a very mysterious person. The orientation was not to talk much about him. It was like a “shadow on the professional scene”, as RiuT says.
In 2015, RiuT got an opportunity to compete in another international championship: the World Series of Video Games, whose finals would take place in the Maldives. “I was playing well back then, although I was never number one again. When I came back, Viper was already dominating Age and he always beat me. He had a style that ended with mine. I lost every time”, he recalls.
In this championship, RiuT made it to the Winner Bracket finals but lost to The Viper and Chinese Yo. He took third place.
Another travel opportunity came in 2016, when he and his teammates went to China.
“Tyrant was kind of broken, we had undone Warlords and basically I want to Legends. kkab didn’t play anymore and I teamed up with Viper, DauT, slam and F1Re. It was a team championship and the final was in China. The final was sponsored by a Chinese guy there who was also very rich”, another millionaire supporting Age of Empires 2.
The Clan Masters: The Final Showdown was fought between them and the Chinese SY clan. “I remember we lost by one game. I got very angry. I remember that I was playing very well and precisely Viper, who was the best in the world, did not play very well that day. And he was decisive, if he’s ok, we win, if not, we screwed”.
When the game was tied and only the decisive map was left, RiuT brought together all his teammates. He wheeled like he was on a basketball court and did the captain’s job to boost everyone's spirits, including Viper. It even made a battle cry. “The Chinese crowd loved it and clapped”, he recalls.
The picture below was taken after that moment.
The future and the Age of Empires 4
“From 2017 it was just decay. There were some guys who were playing very well, then came some new versions of Age with new civilizations. And since that came along, I’ve never been the same”. In addition, a new system of civilization bans debuted in the competitive, but college and work also weighed heavily.
“I still consider myself good because, even after a time without play, I will play against someone who is playing every day and I can take a game or another against them”, he says.
And the Age of Empires 4 announcement, made in 2017, moved the player a little. Just like the Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition.
“What a desire to be new, pick up and spend 15 hours a day playing to reach the top level. If I had been born ten years later I would choose to be a gamer”. But to play to satisfy the desire, ah, he will play for sure.
Some say that after a chess match, the king and the pawn return to the same box. And I like to imagine that, over there, the most experienced pieces pass on the wisdom for pawns to promote themselves in the next match.
“It’s always trying to play against someone who is better than you. It is for losing that fear. I remember I was very afraid of ELO, of rating. It’s very stupid because you care about it and you don’t grow up. The Viper was a lot like that, when he grew up he wasn’t afraid to play anyone. And me too”.
“When you take a beating is when you learn”.
Words from Maximilian Rox at the end of the article: Although he doesn't participate in competitions so often, you can follow RiuT's work on his channel on both Twitch and YouTube. Special thanks to Márcio Medeiros for helping in this article. (I only helped him get the contact of the Brazilian players he interviewed or will interview: RiuT, dogao, miguel, feage, F1Re, Goku, St4rk, Alive.)
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