Tag Archives: Esports

Magic Gaming delivers game kiosks to sick children at Arnold Palmer Hospital

The Orlando Magic’s esports team delivered special gaming kiosks to sick children at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children this week.

Magic Gaming head coach Jonah Edwards and small forward Brandon “ ToXsiK” Raudenbush distributed four GO Karts, which are built by Michigan-based Gamers Outreach.

“It’s always fun to go spend time with them and put a smile on their face and take their mind off of everything they’re going through,” Raudenbush said. “I fell in love with playing games at a young age, so it’s cool to give back and make them happy.”

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Video game pioneer, Pitfall! creator David Crane says esports roots planted 40 years ago

Legendary video game designer David Crane said he probably should have seen the rise of esports way back in the 1980s.

While building games for Atari, a long hallway ended in a sort-of makeshift game room, where programmers would play the latest titles.

These often impromptu sessions would often draw six to eight people watching the gameplay.

“We, of course, looked at games differently than the average person – concentrating on design issues and technical implementation,” he told The OVG in an email interview. “But it could be entertaining nonetheless. It showed the value of watching an expertly played game.”

Crane would move on to Activision, where he would be the brains behind the legendary Atari 2600 game “Pitfall!,” and “Ghostbusters” for the Commodore 64.

This weekend, Crane will be in Orlando for Free Play Florida, an annual showcase of arcade games that serves as an homage to that classical video game period.

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Full Sail grad, ‘Ratchet & Clank’ vet Shaun McCabe sought chance to explore amazing worlds, characters

When Shaun McCabe joined Insomniac Games near the end of 2003, shortly after he earned a degree from Full Sail University, he jumped into a game that the company hoped would recapture the magic it had discovered with its popular “Spyro the Dragon” series.

McCabe became the sound programmer on the adventure game “Ratchet & Clank,” the story of a Lombax named Ratchet who traveled around with a robot companion named Clank.

Several “Ratchet & Clank” titles later, McCabe continues to build video games for the studio as its head of technology.

“On the technical side, our good friends at Naughty Dog offered to let us use components of the ‘Jak & Daxter’ engine as a foundation for a demo,” he said. “The rest, as they say, is history. It speaks to the true nature of creativity. Great products are often the result of constraints and culture rather than resources and strategy.”

McCabe was recently named to Full Sail University’s Hall of Fame and granted The OVG an interview to talk about his career and his time in Orlando.

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3 industry pros receive Full Sail hall of fame nods

Three video game professionals were among the six Full Sail University alumni named to the Winter Park school’s Hall of Fame class of 2019.

Erin Eberhardt of Blizzard Entertainment, sound designer Mark Kilborn and Insomniac Games’ head of technology Shaun McCabe will be inducted in a March ceremony.

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Florida’s new Call of Duty League team: The Mutineers

The Florida-based team of the brand-new Activision-Blizzard Call of Duty League will be called the Mutineers, the outfit announced on Monday.

The team will host official events for the league starting in January at a yet-to-be-announced home facility.

The Mutineers, which announced Saturday on Twitter that it would announce its rosters soon, are a product of the Misfits Gaming Group, an Overwatch League team based in Orlando and Boca Raton.

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Magic Gaming’s summer tourney earns NBA recognition

The Orlando Magic’s esports outfit took home hardware in two of the league’s four categories of its end-of-season awards last month. The team received the Partnership of the Year award for its integration with Orlando Health and Local Activation of the Year for hosting one of the league’s major events at Full Sail University.

It was part of the league’s NBA 2K League Team Business Awards, handed out during the league’s NBA 2K League workshop in Indianapolis.

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