How good a gamer is Razer CEO Tan Min-Liang? We challenged him and found out

Tan Min-Liang hates Tim Cook and Jack Dorsey.

Or more precisely, the kind of early-morning routine that the CEOs of Apple and Twitter favor: gym workouts, yoga, runs, and meditation performed when most people are still in bed.

“A lot of tech CEOs wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, they meditate, and then they go for a run,” Tan, 42, co-founder and chief executive of gaming hardware maker Razer, said in a recent mid-morning interview. “I hate all those CEOs. I cannot do that.”

Tan wakes up at 8:00 am most days if he has “no choice,” checks email in bed before “dragging” himself to work. That last comment is misleading, given how the avid gamer built Razer into a global business with a cult following in the gaming community. One fan even tattooed Tan’s likeness on his calf. Many more have inked themselves with Razer’s logo of three intertwined snakes.

Today, Tan is arguably one the most high-profile tech entrepreneurs from Singapore since Sim Wong Hoo, the 64-year-old founder of Creative Technology, the company behind Sound Blaster audio cards.

Tan chose to list his company in Hong Kong instead of Singapore in 2017, raising more than US$500 million and making him one of the richest self-made Singaporeans at the age of 40.

For this interview, we originally wanted to do something other than play video games with Tan, as part of an occasional series where South China Morning Post reporters engage tech personalities in their hobbies outside of work.

What does Tan like besides gaming, we asked his team. “Er, just gaming, he does not have any hobbies,” came the reply. Was that a tactic to ensure the story focuses on Razer and gaming? “Er, no, he really does not have any other hobbies or passions besides gaming,” back came the response.

So together with Josh Ye from our sister news site Abacus, which earlier livestreamed an interview with Tan from Razer’s store in Causeway Bay, we settled down to play Apex Legends, the wildly popular battle royale title that is Tan’s latest obsession. We had proposed playing arcade games like Mario Kart or Street Fighter, but we deferred to his preference.

Tan’s first-ever video game back in the 1980s as a preschooler was Rescue Raiders – where you fly a helicopter and shoot enemies – played on his father’s Apple II computer. The lifelong passion for gaming did not affect his studies. He went on to the top all-boys secondary school, Raffles Institution, where he was a scout, before reading law at the National University of Singapore.

In 1998, Tan, then in university, met his co-founder Robert Krakoff, who was in his sixties, while playing the online first-person shooter Quake. A year later, the two hardcore players created the world’s first gaming mouse, one that enhanced their performances so much that it got them kicked off the server for suspected cheating.

Tan now splits his time between Singapore, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, overseeing a workforce of 1,500. He still spends his nights playing battle royales like PUBG and Apex, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning.

“It’s a bit like, ‘Oh ,I’m just going to play one more game, one more game and one more game,” and after that it gets a little longer,” Tan said. “I know it’s pretty not healthy. But that is how it is.”

But back to our Apex Legends game. I am not a big fan of first-person shooter games chiefly because I suck at them. In our first match, I was responsible for parachuting our three-person squad into a good spot to pick up weapons and armor. I promptly did the opposite.