FNATIC.com: pete layo

Started playing online when AVP2 came out, played around with a few games until I came upon CS:CZ. I then spent the better part of my youth staying indoors playing until CS: Source came out, when I just continued to do the exact same thing.

Teams
GameZERO: blk skiddo tils jackw j^rhead
xciteuk: Spl@tio blk ubj Phunky Rig
xciteuk: tils vpr shivers can’t remember
insertCOIN: iceo dev ? ?

Yeah, so playing Counter-Strike never really worked out for me, no point in going into why really beyond “I was shit”. The best I ever got at a LAN was 5th place at i26 with a team filled with cocaine addicts…

“Journalism”
What I do isn’t journalism, I essentially write funny stories that happen to be true, with the odd serious piece and advertising for shitter UK teams who need exposure on whatever site I’m writing for.

History
When I first started playing with blk and Spl@tio it didn’t take too long to find out that we all lived within about 30 minutes of each other. A very awkward first meet up at LAN lead onto better, funnier things. After i30/i31 (I can’t remember anymore) I decided to do a write up for SourceJunky.com. We had gone to the LAN just to get as wasted as possible, and we did, and because of it Spl@tio, blk and I all became really good friends and still meet up regularly.

It was just to get a few laughs really, but Penguin ended up asking me to do more. So I started writing the kind of stuff I thought I should write, interviews for example, but I’d just take the piss out of whoever I was interviewing during the editing. Sadly the website is down now, but I had some of my favourite work on that site, mainly because I was just writing for the fun of it. A key person I met around this time (during the first xciteuk roster I think) was Dr. Gonzo, who has since made me his protege and has helped me along to better fill the role of Journalist. Initially I played in a mix with him and called him “fucking shit” for walking outside on de_nuke on his own round after round as we called inside rushes. I was told after he was supposed to be my new manager… a few death threats later we became good colleague and close friend.

When SourceJunky.com died we decided that we didn’t want to write for Cadred.org (I think Gonzo had been banned or something) or GotFrag. We got together with Chefinal from TLR and made www.InsideSource.co.uk.

We did have some good times, i33 was our “launch” and the pride I felt for writing a decent 3000 word article on everything wrong / right about the i-series after 3 solid days of drinking and barely any sleep was overwhelming. Not to mention my internet radio debut, where I was quite nervous and decided to drink about 8 beers beforehand which lead the show to become a strange mix of dead air and retarded outbursts. Big thanks to chilli for keeping my only hosted episode on track. InsideSource was meant to be our crowning achievement, but a less than fantastic site, always being behind more established sites, and an eventual lack of enthusiasm from everyone involved the project was laid to rest. At that time I decided to move to GotFrag, and Dr. Gonzo chose to make his GotFrag return.

I would love to have a big section here about GotFrag but I was a random UK teenager writing about EU CSS on a NA CS website… that was never going to work. I had NOTHING go up on that site, not one piece, I did help Gonzo out with some of his pieces but in the end they just didn’t give a flying fuck about my stuff. So it was time for another move.

Cadred
Goodeh had frequently spoken to me about writing for Cadred.org, but I had seen it as the ultimate competition and wanted to better it. I couldn’t, so decided to sign my soul away to the mighty Cadred. So far its been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, I’ve effectively retired from competitive CS: Source - never know with CS2 - and seen some huge changes in the scene (CGS closure etc). With the features section at Cadred beginning to overflow and the salaried set well ahead of mere volunteers, and a big nightmare I am no longer at Cadred.org

I’ve decided to start posting anything that gets rejected from Cadred on my ugame blog.