Insidious Gaming and the Singapore dream

Singapore has a dream. Well, she has many dreams, but her gaming community has one in particular.

Every passionate eSports team or involved individual I’ve spoken to so far in the past four years parrots the same dream. It’s to unite all the gaming organizations and communities on this little island under one banner. It’s a very optimistic dream and it’s a very positive one.

It’s just a little bit impossible.

But Insidious Gaming (iSG) feels otherwise.

We spoke with iSG recently to find out more about this quiet multi-game eSports organization that has been mopping the floor with its opponents. iSG’s World of Tanks team recently took second place at the Taipei Game Show’s TanksAsia Season 2 Grand Finals, going home with a whopping $20,000—and that’s just one of iSG’s many successes.

For this story, however, we’re going back to the beginning.

About a year and a half ago, six gamers sat down and decided to found Insidious Gaming. Among them was Eugene Sia, a former competitive player with one of Singapore’s oldest eSports teams, [Bf.Nut]. The reason for the group’s founding was simple.

Sia used to play competitively, but there came a point in life where he found that, like all professional players, he was getting old. Reflexes were slower, results were harder to come by. What he did have, though, was experience. Having been in the competitive scene for so long, and having experienced what it was like to be in an organized eSports organization, he thought: why not pass these skills on down to the next generation? After all, he understood their needs.

Today there are about 60 people involved in iSG, with its youngest player being just 14 years old. The team has a League of Legends division, a World of Tanks division, CounterStrike: Global Offensive players and CounterStrike Online players. Each week, team leaders submit a weekly report to their division heads, with information on each player’s performance, results, and conflicts, if any.

On top of eSports players, iSG also takes in gamers with a flair for other areas of eSports, such as events management and media production. Their event staff have helped out with a Chaos Online tournament and with the GE3 community event late last year, while the media side produces single-streamer livestreams.

Ultimately, Sia hopes to be able to make the organization profitable. Together with a production partner, he wants to start producing YouTube shows like Garena’s WahBanana clips. He also wants to be able to run gaming events, since there’s no one more qualified to run a gaming event than people who have experienced them. This, however, is an ambition that will take a while to realize.