Meet Thresh, the world’s first professional gamer
Dennis “Thresh” Fong talks to us about battling Elon Musk in Quake in the ‘90s, his undefeated record as a pro gamer, and using AI to detoxify gaming.
You might not know who Dennis “Thresh” Fong is, but if you’ve ever played a video game on PC, you’ve undoubtedly used his config.
Config, short for configuration, describes how a gamer sets up the controls for a specific video game on their keyboard. Today, almost every first-person or third-person game – think Call of Duty, Fortnite, World of Warcraft, etc. – defaults to using the WASD keys to move and the mouse to look around. About 30 years ago, Fong was one of the very first to set up those controls for himself when playing Doom and Quake, two of the earliest first-person shooters. He used those controls to absolutely obliterate his opponents, whether it be his brothers on their local area network at home, players over the nascent Internet, or competitors at early gaming competitions.
Fong’s gamertag “Thresh” is short for “Threshold of Pain,” referring to the ability to withstand suffering and enemy fire. He never had to endure much of either in-game. At his induction into the esports Hall of Fame at QuakeCon 2016 in Dallas, Tim Willits, the former studio director, co-owner, and level designer of id Software, called Fong the “Michael Jordan of gaming.” That comparison actually might be inadequate. Throughout the course of his roughly five-year competitive gaming career, Fong never lost, not even in practice.
And most of his matches weren’t even close. At the final of the Red Annihilation Quake tournament held in May 1997, Fong annihilated his opponent 14 to -1. The victory won him the Ferrari 328 sports car that belonged to id Software CEO John Carmack.
Fong’s skill and fame earned him roughly $100,000 a year in prizes and endorsements back in the mid-’90s. According to the Guinness World Records, that made him the “first professional videogamer.”
Today, there are countless professional and casual gamers. Beyond using Fong’s WASD controls, they can thank him for numerous other advancements, large and small. Fong has launched multiple successful companies since “retiring” from professional gaming in his early twenties. These startups invented quality-of-life enhancements that many gamers today take for granted, including the in-game overlay, in-game messaging, and one-click join – so if you see a game your buddy is playing you can right-click and join them. He and his colleagues were also the first to introduce live-streaming into a game client and voice capabilities into a chat client.
Collectively, the world’s gaming companies account for hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and purportedly cater to 3.32 billion active players. It’s safe to say that Dennis “Thresh” Fong has been instrumental in making gaming and esports the massive successes that they are today. I recently caught up with Fong to reminisce about his gaming career, check-in with what he’s up to now, and see where he thinks gaming and esports are headed.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
RP: What was your first computer and the first game you played on it?
DF: The first computer I had in my own room was a [Compaq Deskpro] 386. We were playing some of the Sierra online games. The first real multiplayer games I played were the text-based MUDs [multi-user dungeons].
RP: After you started playing first-person shooters like Doom and Quake, when did you realize that you were good enough to compete?
DF: When I first started playing Doom, I was a keyboard-only player. So I was just using the arrow keys. I have two brothers; I’m the middle child. My dad worked at a tech company called Hewlett-Packard so we had access to multiple PCs at home that were networked. And so because of that we could play against each other at a time when there wasn’t a lot of online gaming.
So we would play Doom together all the time and for a long time I could not beat my older brother – he’s three years older – and he was using a trackball of all things and keyboard. It was still clearly better than just a keyboard because there wasn’t a fixed, constant rate of turning, which is an issue with the keyboard. But I got to a point where I got really, really close, and it just annoyed the hell out of me that I couldn’t beat him.
So there was one summer, I think I was 14 or 15, where I switched to keyboard and mouse and adopted the WASD configuration. By the end of the summer, I was crushing my older brother – and he was already pretty well known and considered amongst the best in the world. I pretty much never lost after that point. By the end of that summer, I knew I was really good. I didn’t know I was the best in the world. I just knew that no one could beat me.
RP: So not even in a practice match were you defeated?
DF: No, believe it or not. I’m kind of built a little bit different. I am hyper, hyper competitive. I just can’t stand losing. I can’t stand it. Even in practice. At one point I started my own team, and our team was the best in the world. We would practice together. I never lost to any of them. They can all verify the same thing.
If I beat you like 20 to 1 and the next time we played I beat you 20 to 2, I would just be super pissed. I would be so mad at myself. That’s how competitive I was.
RP: Were there any other strategies that you adopted to help you excel? Did you play for hours a day? Did you mentally train? How did you get so good?
DF: I think the main differentiator at least at the time was that I thought about the game very differently than everyone else. I always approached it more like you’re playing rapid chess. So it was really about out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-positioning my opponents.
The games that I played were primarily arena duel style games. These are essentially one on ones, unlike many games today, which are largely team-based. I basically was doing stuff that nobody was doing before. I invented this idea of map-control, because in these games there are weapons and armor that spawn, and there are certain ones that are OP [overpowered], much stronger than any others. Once I got control of the map, I would just lock those resources down. I would run through a certain pattern on a map… and not let them get access to the best weapons and armor in the game, which was why a lot of my matches were very lopsided in terms of score.
RP: I love that. Many people might assume you have faster reflexes. But no, you just took a more economic approach.
DF: Yeah, exactly. Obviously I had very good aim, but I never relied on it. People always think gaming is about reflexes, and I definitely have better-than-average reflexes, but I always said, even back then, if you had to rely on your reflexes, you probably did something wrong. Because the other thing that I was very well known for was – people gave it a term – “ThreshESP”. Because I could always predict what my opponent was thinking.
I was using things which were very common now but less common back then: audio cues to figure out where they are, where they’re headed, what resources they have. Because of this, I didn’t actually have to practice as much as the average person. Obviously I would practice a lot leading up to a tournament, but I would say that on average I’d be playing like an hour or two a day.
Part of the reason why I couldn’t play a lot was that I started my first company in 1996. It was gamers.com – one of the early game portals. I was 19. By the time I retired from competing in esports around 2000 or 2001, gamers.com had 130 employees, we had raised $10 million in capital, and I was the CEO. That was the ultimate thing that caused me to retire. I just didn’t have the time to compete anymore at the level that I knew I could compete at.
RP: Almost every first- or third-person oriented video game defaults players to using the WASD keys to move and the mouse to look around, an innovation attributed to you. Today, it’s almost unimaginable to use any other configuration when gaming with a keyboard. How did you come up with these controls and what did all your competitors use back then?
DF: I won’t pretend that I invented WASD. I don’t know if you can even invent such a thing. It’s probably pretty safe to assume that I popularized it. People used to use the arrow keys and the mouse. My brother used a trackball. Some people used ESDF, which many people actually think is better. Other people used ASDF. People were all over the board to be honest. I just used what was most comfortable for me.
Even today, one of the most common things that people ask of the pro players is “what config do you run?” That was easily the most common question asked of me. I would get hundreds of those questions, almost daily. So it got to be really annoying to be honest, to answer the same question every single time.
I got to be good friends with John Carmack, the creator of id, which made a lot of the games that I competed in. So I was telling him one time how annoying it was, and he was like “Oh, I can just build it into the game.” I said, “That’d be sweet!” So he built Thresh.config.
At the time, PC Gamer was the most popular gaming magazine. I had a monthly column, so I posted my config there. I also posted it everywhere. In some ways, I was one of the first Internet influencers. You know, I had my own blog, I had a lot of people that followed me. I wrote something called the Quake Bible, which contained all of my strategies and the way I thought about the game.
After John Carmack wrote it into the game, then I would just tell people to just type exec.Thresh.config into the console, and it will automatically just run my config. So I think those are all some of the reasons why WASD became the standard.
RP: What are your favorite games beyond the shooters like Quake and Doom?
DF: Obviously there’s a lot of different categories. In terms of RPG, I think the Fallout series is probably my favorite. On mobile, it would probably be Clash Royale. I got to top 50 in the world in Clash Royale. More recent games would be Apex Legends, where I hit diamond, PUBG, where I hit diamond, Valorant, where I hit diamond.
RP: So it seems like you can still keep up with the players of today.
DF: I can certainly keep up with them, but the time required to get to the very, very top I just don’t have anymore. I’m not sure I could get there, but I know I can be extremely competitive. Could I be top 500? Yeah, I’m pretty certain I could be top 500 in any game that I pick up.
I like actually sucking at something and knowing I am getting better. That’s a big part of the enjoyment of playing games and competing for me. I put my mind to it, and a few months later I am better than you — it feels great!
RP: Is it true that you played against a young Elon Musk? Can you describe the circumstances? Was he any good?
DF: It was Quake. At the time, it was server-based play. These were largely self-hosted servers. There wasn’t a central, match-making service. You would just log into servers that were close to you because latency and lag and ping were very big deals. Probably the most popular West Coast server was hosted at Stanford by a bunch of grad students. I still remember its IP: Kitty1.stanford.edu. It was hosted on the Stanford backbone internet fiber, so it was just blazing fast.
And so everyone that was in California played on Kitty1 – it was essentially the entire scene. So I used to play there obviously, and Elon used to play there. He was running a company called Zip2 at the time, so his username was Zip2. So I played against him many, many times.
Was he any good? He was okay. I know he claimed that he was one of the top players. He was definitely not one of the top players. I can confirm that he was a very active Quake player – I saw him a lot. He was on a decent team. He’s a legit gamer.
RP: You’ve consistently been at the forefront of gaming culture – the first pro esports player, founding Xfire in 2003 (arguably the forerunner of Discord), investing in and running numerous successful gaming startups. Do you have any specific predictions for where gaming and esports are headed?
DF: So I think esports as a whole remains somewhat challenged today. There was a ton of hype a few years ago. All of the teams were raising hundreds of millions of dollars at billion-dollar valuations. All of that has pretty much died down. I think what people have learned now is, as a business, esports is somewhat challenged. Because each “sport” is owned by a company, those companies own the intellectual property and are protective of it. So you can’t monetize it in ways that you can with traditional sports. Most of the companies like Riot, even though they’ve done a lot to grow esports as a whole, they still ultimately view it as a marketing expense. It’s user acquisition for their game.
Another problem is that the audience consumes it in different ways. Esports on television, which is where almost all the money is made via broadcasting rights, doesn’t really exist. Almost all of the audience would rather watch it on Twitch. Also, the hometown phenomenon, supporting one’s home team, doesn’t really exist either, because it’s such a global sport.
There’s no question gaming as a whole continues to grow. It’s just going to get bigger and bigger. Something like 40% of the world’s population now are gamers.
RP: Your current company GGWP focuses on improving community moderation in online games and rooting out toxic behavior, which has always been a constant battle. How are you trying to solve the problem?
DF: Most companies still largely use humans to moderate games in particular. Ten years ago, that was probably sufficient. Now, when you’re talking about billions of players, it’s certainly not sufficient. The biggest games in the world receive billions of support tickets from players. That’s how much toxicity and harassment is happening on these platforms. You can’t possibly hire enough humans to respond to this. The typical company has enough resources to respond to 0.1% of the reports that are filed, which means that when you file a report against someone for harassing you in a game, it for the most part is really just going into a black hole.
So what we decided to do a little over three years ago was to use AI to identify and detect proactively when this type of toxicity is occurring. In doing so, you can auto-moderate the vast majority of the stuff that’s happening. Part of the power of AI, which I think some people didn’t believe a few years ago but is very clear now with generative AI and ChatGPT, is that AI is incredibly intelligent. It can understand the context of what people are saying and doing.
Every online game or platform has a ton of data that they collect. So we’ve integrated a lot of that data. We’ll actually look into a person’s friends list in a game. If we see two people being super toxic to each other, and we see that they’re friends, we’ll actually say that they’re probably just messing around. So this data really enriches the context that you have about a particular incident, which helps us be much more precise and accurate. We also use all of that data to create a profile of the user – basically like a reputation score – to reflect historically if they are a good or bad actor. The combination of reputation score and data about the incident allows our system to moderate 99% of the activity.
My favorite part of this experience of running GGWP is what we’ve learned that users can learn. Our goal is really not to be a “banhammer.” It’s to teach people what acceptable behavior looks like and reinforce that behavior. What we’ve seen is that in games which use our systems, the occurrence of toxicity is reduced by 60 to 70 percent. That was awesome to see. We’re not just blocking and censoring stuff. Players learn, and they actually just stop doing that type of behavior.
RP: Purely by chance, we played in the same World of Warcraft Classic guild throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, logging on week in and week out to raid dungeons, grind, and catch up with our guildmates, many of whom we didn’t personally know before playing with them. Do you think that experience helped you mentally weather the pandemic? If so, do you think video games, esports, and gaming streams help numerous others in the same way?
DF: Absolutely. For me, a lot of my gaming is centered around my friends. For this generation especially, gaming is kind of the new golf. It’s a very social activity. Certainly during the pandemic, when we were under lockdown and couldn’t go out, it was probably the best way to stay connected and to socialize with friends. When you’re playing in a WoW guild especially, you make a lot of new friends. I became closer friends with my friends and also made a lot of new friends through that experience.
