Angel Munoz Interviewed

An interview has been concluded over at the GGL website with Angel Munoz, the president of the Cyberathlete Professional League, regarding the games which were chosen for the upcoming $500,000 CPL World Tour 2007. The gaming community expressed their bad feelings about the fact that the CPL World Tour 2007 will be using FEAR and World In Conflict as the titles to be played.

The interview was made by the well known journalist Michael "Carmac" Blicharz, here's a snippet:

There are rumors floating around that the CPL is not in a good state, fueled by several sponsor logos no longer being present on the website. You also boast a smaller prize purse for the World Tour than the WSVG. What is the current shape of the CPL? It is true that we are no longer working with AMD/ATI as our primary sponsors, but that does not mean we would not work with them on other opportunities. I truly appreciate their support during the 2006 CPL World Season. I personally remain fully committed to the success of the CPL and we have some new ideas that we want to see realized. Our plan is a bit more expansive than just a one year prize purse, and I seriously doubt that tournament money is a good measure of the financial success of one company over another. The choice of games for the World Tour is somewhat surprising -- it seems to outsiders that it was imposed by your new sponsor Sierra. It was only natural that you would not go with, say, an id Software game. The question is, then, did you have any choice at all? Sierra Entertainment, and their parent Vivendi Games, are one of the best companies we have partnered with in ten years. They understand esports, are very familiar with the CPL (having worked with us previously on AvP2 and FEAR) and have offered the CPL unprecedented support in relation to the 2007 World Tour. We hosted a FEAR tournament at our summer 2005 event and they were very excited about what they saw and asked us if we would be interested in holding tournaments for the game. Their level of support was a compelling case for us, and we obviously accepted. During that time, we had heard from David Garpenstahl (Managing Director of CPL Nordic and Dreamhack) about World in Conflict, because it's a game designed in Sweden and built for competition. Chris Moncivalles and Mike Allen have been beta testing the game for awhile and have had conferences with the developers, Massive Entertainment, which are very receptive to our ideas and questions. I asked Sierra if they would be willing to let CPL gamers join a special beta program to experience the game before release and if we could use World in Conflict in our tournaments. They agreed and we decided to include the game in our World Tour. Why are Quake 3 and CS 1.6 no longer viable competitive platforms for the CPL, even despite declarations that they would be used as the main and the side game respectively in 2007. After ten years of using either Quake 3 and/or CS 1.6 some of us at CPL felt we were stagnating and needed some new games. We obviously knew that the community would be disappointed, but we could not see ourselves doing the same things (in the same format) all over again this year. That being said, we have some interesting plans for CAL tournaments that should include these titles.

You can read the whole interview by clicking here.