Brandon "Aceu" Winn remembers the day that changed the way he played video games forever.
As a teenager growing up in Indiana, he and his group of friends gathered together after school to watch whatever basketball games were on TV that night. One evening, he came across a player that would reshape what he thought playing a sport could be: current Brooklyn Net Kyrie Irving.
"I remember the first time I watched the [Cleveland Cavaliers] play, I saw Kyrie straight cross somebody over, and the crowd exploded," Aceu said. "Just something about the way he moved on the court was so fluid, and I loved it. Ever since then, I've made it a point in my gameplay to have really clean movement. Like water."
Aceu, 25, has kept to those words and in doing so become one of the most-shared gamers on all of social media. His pinned post on Twitter alone has over a half-million views, a montage of his pinpoint accuracy in shooting games on full display, conjuring the same sort of emotions from esports fans as Aceu had watching Irving control the ball like a magician.
His current playground for his virtual ankle-breaking plays is VALORANT, a five-on-five tactical shooter developed by company Riot Games which just went into its closed beta phase. The game, centered around ingenuity and mechanical discipline, almost seems tailor-made for Aceu.
"The small crew that started with this game was really looking to evolve and chase a feeling, the one provided by the tactical shooters we played when we were young," VALORANT game director Joe Ziegler said. "The strong feeling of team play, meaningful decision making, and high stakes/high tension play that we are obsessed with. We wanted to discover how to bring this feeling to a new era of gaming, to a more experienced audience of players, the players of 2020, and incorporate the creativity they can bring to such an experience."
More: What people are saying about VALORANT | Roundtable: How VALORANT looks in its closed beta | Our way-too-early buffs and nerfs for VALORANT
Introduced to video games at a young age by his family, Aceu picked up first-person shooter titles such as Halo and Call of Duty on gaming consoles before transitioning over to playing on a computer in high school. His first love on the PC actually wasn't a shooting game, however; he poured times into Riot Games' worldwide phenomenon title, League of Legends, in the 2010s. He played constantly, eventually landing amongst the best players online in North America.
In 2014, Riot announced a new tier for players known as Challenger: The top 200 players in each region would be rewarded with end-of-year prizes to commemorate their achievement. After throwing himself into the game to try and reach this new mythical checkpoint and a possible passageway of becoming pro, Aceu climbed halfway to the mark, nearing closer every day to his ultimate goal.
And yet, right as he seemed primed to take the next step in his League of Legends career, he fumbled. He began losing, tumbling down the online rankings, and, fed up with feeling like a hamster on the forever spinning wheel, he quit.
"I was like, 'Yeah, I'm done,'" Aceu said, "and I decided to start playing Counter-Strike."
It turned out to be a great decision. Having watched his stepfather play Counter-Strike: 1.6 growing up, Aceu felt a familiarity with the game from the moment he began playing the series' newest iteration, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The game fit Aceu like a glove, and he was invited to join his first semi-pro team after only 200 hours of playing the game.
"I'd [give credit] to my mechanical side," Aceu said. "I'm also a really competitive player. I just really wanted to win. I would do whatever it took to win, be it watching [match replays] or just grinding on end. I was always playing a lot. I just really wanted to win."
Unfortunately, as it was with League, he reached a stumbling block. Aceu, who was playing for eUnited in late 2018, was benched by his squad, and his salary was cut as a result. The FPS pro looked toward streaming to keep himself afloat, playing in minor Counter-Strike tournaments and other games to keep busy.
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In early February 2019, Electronic Arts released Apex Legends, its rendition on the battle royale genre popularized by games like Fortnite and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S Battlegrounds. The game quickly became a hit through social media and streaming websites, and a week after release, Aceu decided to give Apex a chance thanks to his friend and fellow FPS star Coby "Dizzy" Meadows selling him on it.
What could it hurt to try it out for a day or two with a friend and see how it goes?
And as it was when he picked up Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, under two months from when he started fiddling around with Apex Legends, Aceu was in Berlin with Dizzy as part of NRG Esports playing for an overall prize pool of over $300,000.
"He is the rare combo of insane flash and one-of-a-kind movement," Andy Miller, founder and CEO of NRG Esports, said of Aceu. "He does stuff that the rest of us mere mortals can't even attempt. On top of that, he is a super humble, chill guy who is a very hard worker. He deserves whatever he gets."
What was supposed to be a game to pass the time and stream casually transformed into what would finally take Aceu's elaborate career path to where he always hoped it would go. Before long, his streams skyrocketed from hundreds of viewers watching him per broadcast into the thousands. His name became synonymous with Apex Legends, and his highlight reels touched every corner of the internet.
The element of Aceu's game which separates him from a majority of his peers, his aim, isn't like most game mechanics: It can be recognized, understood and celebrated by anyone, from someone who has played video games since the invention of Pong to a grandmother who has never held a controller in her life. It's the split-second reaction time between the moment of nothing happening to everything occurring at all once. To watch Aceu play Apex Legends was like riding a roller coaster, his movements swift and effortless, his character flying around the map while casually gunning down an enemy every few seconds in a rhythm that he would repeat over and over as if it was like listening to your favorite song on loop.
To Aceu, an admirer of high fashion and fashion design, the act of playing a game can be artful with the right touch.
Don't blink. ��
(via @acesu)pic.twitter.com/Dx04rEOL2H
- ESPN Esports (@ESPN_Esports) April 11, 2020
"I think everybody's playstyle is different," Aceu said. "I think, if you do it right, it can be art. It can be like an artist painting a picture, somebody crossing someone up on the basketball court, whatever you do, if you do it right, it can be beautiful. And I want to push the boundaries of what people can do. I want to make people's jaws drop."
Although Apex catapulted Aceu into a new stratosphere of fame with over 10,000 viewers tuning in every time he went live, the game itself, competitively, wasn't progressing the way he imagined. Unlike League of Legends and Counter-Strike where Aceu couldn't clear the final hurdle, with Apex Legends, he had done everything possible to be where he wanted. The only problem was that there was no hurdle -- this time it was a brick wall, the esports scene not having evolved much from the launch of the game.
That's when everything came full circle for a once-aspiring League of Legends pro.
Riot Games announced it was creating a first-person shooting game in October 2019. The developers of the game, then codenamed Project A, were bullish on the game's competitive aspect, even going as far as saying that it might be too competitive for casual players to enjoy. Riot's creation, now known as VALORANT, is a game with the foundation of the old Counter-Strike games its developers grew up loving fused with characters within the game capable of flipping that entire foundation on its head.
Riot's tagline for the game is "Defy the Limits." The team is looking for high-level players to paint on the canvas they carefully built.
"The statement 'Defy the Limits' comes from a feeling that in our game we are asking you to go above and beyond what you've known before and break our game: to create strategies and tactics that defy the odds and overcome your opponents," Ziegler said. "We want you to take the tools we've given you and innovate, create and exceed your own expectations of what you can accomplish. This game is not a game we've made to play only the way we've envisioned it. We know players are clever and intelligent, and we want to see how far they can go."
Aceu wants to be VALORANT's greatest artist. After trips through the competitive scenes of three different games and reaching the pinnacle of play in one, his magnum opus is still waiting to be completed.
"Playing it for the first time was amazing," he said of VALORANT. "I had high expectations going into it, and I was really concerned about overpowered abilities from the gameplay we saw previously, but once we ended getting our hands on it, my mind was blown with how smooth the gameplay was, how well it ran and how well the gunplay felt. Abilities worked and weren't too overpowered. Everything meshed together really well. It was pretty unbelievable, honestly."
Everything that Aceu was looking for in other games, he found in his first few days in Riot's three-day bootcamp for VALORANT, which invited pros, media and streamers to try out the game in late March. Developers (virtually) sat down with Aceu and listened to his feedback on the game as well. The heart of VALORANT's appeal is its need for creativity and feedback; the development team wants players to push the game to its absolute limit and think of new ways to escape the box of a traditional shooting game, even if it means Riot has to fix something in VALORANT down the road.
On the first day of VALORANT's closed beta release, the game got a near-record 1.73 million concurrent viewers on Twitch, and it shattered the single-day hours watched record in a single game category with 34 million on the platform. Among those streaming was Aceu, already considered one of the best players in the early days of the game; YouTube and social media are already cluttered with clips of his stylish kill reels, too. As VALORANT heads toward its planned summer launch and its esports scene begins to be formulated, Aceu, too, is preparing: preparing to go pro in his newfound favorite game with NRG Esports and preparing to dominate a game without the roadblocks he's run into in the past.
"I'll hopefully have plays you'll have never imagined," he said.