This is a story about a certain band of heroes.
The lights flash on in the Seoul OGN studios. It's showtime for OGN Apex, the premiere Overwatch league in the world. Fans turn their attention to center stage, where the two teams facing off are making their entrance. They straighten up at the sight of the first team, Lunatic-Hai, the golden boys of South Korea esports. The team walks onto the stage in sleek blue and white Adidas uniforms, looking into the camera coolly before creating a huddle and performing a synchronized team cheer to the delight of the onlookers from the packed stands.
The Lunatic-Hai fan base overwhelms every other in professional Overwatch. The cheers before each game are indisputably in favor of the team in blue and white, a never-ending line of fans awaiting them after every game day in hopes of getting a picture with their favorite players. They are more K-Pop stars than your everyday professional video game players. Four of the six starting members of the team were on last year's South Korea Overwatch World Cup team that won the tournament without dropping a single map to an opposing country.
"I think our team is the best in the group, and RunAway is [last]," Kim "Zunba" Joon-hyuk says of Lunatic-Hai in a pregame video interview. "I ranked them [last] because they are the worst in [the] group."
In South Korea, professional Overwatch for many means Lunatic-Hai.
This story isn't about them, though.
On the other side of the stage, the camera pans to a team not dressed in traditional sports-looking uniforms. Instead, we see six men wearing bright pink sweaters with their team's name, RunAway, printed on them. The man in the center of the team, the oldest of the group, begins to dance, emulating the character Lucio from the game, and his teammates follow his lead, laughing at what they've gotten themselves into. The dance leader continues to move, shooting his arm outward, and his team follows him once more by layering their hands atop his. He shouts loud enough to match any fan of Lunatic-Hai's, throwing his hand up in the air in unison with his team, high-fiving one of his juniors before entering the booth to play the strongest team in South Korea.
This is RunAway. They have no team house. They have no analysts. They're not supposed to be here on this stage with Lunatic-Hai, but here they are, dancing, to the horror of any K-Pop star who might be watching.
But they don't care -- they're here, and that's all that matters.
"It's been pretty incredible," English OGN Apex caster Erik "Doa" Lonnquist says. "I'm constantly surprised they win. They really shouldn't be [winning]."
On the night that RunAway and Lunatic-Hai faced off in the second round of the OGN Apex Season 2, the unthinkable happened. The team dancing, wearing sweaters like your grandma used to knit, defeated the team considered favorites to win the entire competition.
After tying up the series at one map apiece and silencing the Lunatic-Hai fans, the leader/shot caller/dance choreographer of RunAway, Yoon "Runner" Dae-hoon, leaped out of his seat, going over to each one of his teammates to shake them with the enthusiasm of a proud parent who just saw his child graduate.
By the end of the match, the underdog had won over a part of the crowd, a loud cheer booming at the close of the series. Runner, not knowing how to contain his joy, jumped out of his chair once again, but this time he threw his arms wildly into the air in victory. He did it. They did it. Together, RunAway had knocked down the giant.
Just one problem: In that moment of unbridled happiness, Runner didn't realize the dimensions of the booth in which he was sitting. When he jumped up to commemorate the biggest win of his life, he accidentally punched the roof of the booth, dislodging one the ceiling panels and nearly hitting his head.
The season before RunAway faced Lunatic-Hai in the top eight of OGN Apex Season 2, the upstart team was counted out in the qualifiers of Season 1. But in the qualifiers, RunAway eliminated LW Red, a club that was expected by many pundits at the time to be one of the better teams in Apex. Yet LW Red didn't make it, and RunAway, a team of relative unknowns and amateurs, advanced from qualification.
"When he jumped up to commemorate the biggest win of his life, he accidentally punched the roof of the booth, dislodging one the ceiling panels, nearly hitting his head."
But RunAway's momentum from defeating LW Red was quickly extinguished in Season 1. Although the team won its first match in impressive fashion, RunAway came to a halt in the final two opening group-stage matches, getting knocked out of the league and needing to requalify through a promotional tournament alongside the other lower teams of Season 1 and the best squads from Apex's secondary league.
The player who stood out from the rest on RunAway was Genji specialist Kim "Haksal" Hyo Jong, his name meaning "massacre" in Korean. In a sea of players trying to break into stardom during the first season, Haksal's highlight-reel kills and YouTube montage videos made him one of the few to do so. His play, though, while exciting and breathtaking, was limited. His one-trick pony status with Genji left him exposed after the team's first series, and the length of the tournament worked against him.
Other teams in the league, the ones with funding and sponsors behind them, had analysts and other luxuries RunAway simply did not have. Overwatch usurped League of Legends in PC Bangs for a large part of 2016 when the game was officially released, but the professional scene, still in its infancy, was too new and uncertain for players, especially those of student age.
If OGN Apex was an arms race, the top teams were buying tanks and bringing in Gatlin guns. RunAway was sporting a wooden sword and a whole lot of heart, but that gets you only so far when you're surrounded by steel bullets.
Going into the second season of OGN Apex, after RunAway's requalification into the league, team leader Runner wanted to step away. A former League of Legends streamer for years, Runner was seen as more of an entertainer than a professional player. He was a good support player, almost exclusively playing Lucio, but compared to some of the other players in the tournament, he was lacking. And he knew it.
Runner was ready to give up his dreams of being a professional player -- the dream he chased despite ruining his streaming career -- but his team wouldn't let him. To his teammates, Runner was essential. As Lonnquist said, when the team ultimately made the semifinals after a successful second-round advancement, it went to a fifth and final game against LW Red's sister team, LW Blue. RunAway dropped the fourth game in the set, and Runner, not letting his team quit, motivated tank player extraordinaire Ryu "KAISER" Sang-hoon (the team's other star skill player besides Haksal) and set his mind straight.
"As far as playing goes, we've got better Lucios in the tournament, no doubt," Lonnquist says. "[But] when you see how [Runner] was able to calm KAISER down after the Game 4 loss against LW Blue [in the semifinals] on Route 66, though, you can see he's as crucial to their success as anyone else on the team."
When push came to shove, all RunAway had was one another. Runner, who has a family and a young daughter, has to juggle his duties not only as a captain of an esports team but also as a father and family man. He apologized in an interview with South Korean website Inven after RunAway's win over LW Blue in the most recent semifinal match, saying he had to rush to his daughter, who had to be taken to the emergency room because of a fever.
His family trusted him, though. So did his team.
Runner moonlights as the team strategist and analyst, essentially doing the job of four or five people. He does this as a father. He does this as a streamer. When he broke down in tears after the semifinal win, his teammates embraced him as their leader, friend, mentor and brother.
An aggressive team that is rough around the edges, RunAway is not an unstoppable force of nature. Quite the opposite. Even after its close wins over Lunatic-Hai in the second group stage and LW Blue in the semifinals, RunAway is anything but flawless. At times the team is sloppy. At others, it dives way too hard, devolving into a chaos of ultimates flying at every angle on the screen, and then needing KAISER or Haksal to save a game through sheer individual brilliance.
"I want to show that amateurs can also win in tournaments," Runner told Inven. "I kept telling my teammates that we should go to Korea University [the location of the finals] at least through Overwatch because our high school GPA can't make it there anyway."
At its core, even now, RunAway is still an amateur team. Nonsponsored teams still can't fully jump into the professional scene, and it probably won't happen until further details of the Overwatch League emerge in the coming months.
Overwatch is a game about heroes -- heroes of all races, genders, sexual orientations and nationalities. In this story, it doesn't matter where you've come from or what you look like - all players can be heroes if they strive hard enough.
On Saturday, when RunAway makes it to Korea University for the OGN Apex finals -- which sold out in minutes -- against the very same Lunatic-Hai team for the chance to make history by winning a major South Korea esport league as an amateur team, you'll see different types of heroes go into battle.
Hopefully the roof is high enough to contain them.