Meet Craig Levine, the Pro Gamer Turned CEO Behind the Future of Entertainment
In popular culture, the path from inconceivable to inevitable is seldom orderly or dull, but esports really slid off a cliff for a moment there — like Mario leaping too high, too far, and too fast towards those big gold coins and tumbling down into the scalding red lava (read: red ink).
But unlike numerous, deep-pocketed, trend-chasing outsiders who tucked tail and limped off licking their balance sheet lumps like NPCs in search of the next ill-fatedly frothy venture capital feeding frenzy (including some caught up in Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch underperforming), Craig Levine knew it wasn’t game over.
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Even when selling out would have been much, much easier, the co-CEO of ESL FACEIT Group never took his eyes off fellow gamers. After all, he’s been one for ages, hailing from an elite handful of pioneering OG pro players who basically stitched the scene together. We’re talking way back in the Paleolithic PC period, when you had to dial up the internet from a landline phone and the “World Wide Web” responded with a screeching wail that sounded like your parent’s fax machine had stepped on a rusty tack.
Understanding from deep in his bones what esports was truly about, as well as what it needed to remain authentic, Levine never tried to jam those idiosyncratic gaming circles into square traditional-sports-business-model holes. Uncomfortable with the surge of money and expectations that flooded in — described in his diplomatic words as a “hype cycle fueled by a flawed investment hypothesis” — he focused on keeping the runway clear for the core community of players, competitors, and creators to develop at its own pace, on its own terms, and driven by its own values.
Basically, Levine recognized before most that the only serious roadblock between esports and eventual mainstream adoption was the mainstream itself.
How this guardian of the nascent esports galaxy guided everyone through so much heavy handed hubris is an interesting case study — one paid off by a record year of achievements and milestones, including the Intel Extreme Masters Cologne 2024 in Germany, where 39,000 fans assembled at LANXESS arena to watch six of the world’s best Counter-Strike 2 players battle onstage for a $1 million prize pool — but the why is an even more improbable tale.
And that origin story takes us back to Commack High School, suburban alma mater of sportscasting high priest Bob Costas.
What if you could play video games for a living?
Late 90s. Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong 64 days. Situated smack in the middle of “the island” between Huntington and Smithtown, Commack is an exceptionally good Long Island, New York public school. And Craig Levine was an exceptionally obsessed gamer in a core crew of dudes that coalesced in the honor roll science class, covertly making brackets for their own little mini tournaments. “You know, six or eight of us that just sort of had this interest, and played these games together,” Levine recalls.
It was an obsession ignited by the Commodore 64. Followed by Nintendo. Then Sega Genesis. “Until I eventually found my way into PC gaming, this being the early days of the internet, with CompuServe and so forth,” Levine says. “And once it was about connecting to other players that way, I was just immediately drawn to the competitive nature of it. Right from early games like Command & Conquer.”
But even while conquering the digital thrills of victory (which would soon include commanding $30,000 in tournament winnings at the tender age of 18), what proved even more rewarding over time, as Levine would come to recognize, were the analog dividends. “Growing up with video games, playing them just became an integral part of friends and relationships,” he says.
To this day, it’s why the ESL FACEIT Group creates so many large, immersive, inclusive events tailored to everyday gamers and their playing experiences in addition to the elite pro tournaments they host for sponsors and spectators.
Back when Levine was getting started, it was weekend warriors loading up a car with big CRT monitors and a couple of friends for road trips down to open competitions in Dallas, Texas — a tight knit tournament scene he and his science class pals discovered via early internet chat rooms.
“I soon knew a lot of the top players because we went up against them and got our butts kicked,” Levine laughs. “So I said, ‘hang on, here’s an idea. What if we built a superstar team?’ Then I could go out, get some sponsorships, and finance our way to these tournament events where the money was getting serious.”
Having acquired an informed sense of what it took to compete at the highest PvP level, Levine leveraged that savvy and his newfound independence as an NYU Stern business school freshman in Manhattan to launch Team 3D in 2001. At that point, for proper context, there were maybe five other teams in the entire world that could be vaguely considered “professional” — and only in the sense that they had found someone to underwrite their travel, maybe offer a modest stipend. None of which was yet available to American gamers, no matter how skilled. Forget a real salary and quitting your day job.
But by 2004, Team 3D became what Levine could only daydream about in science class: a career. Not only did he organize one of the first professional esports teams in the world, he managed to structure it like a real business and pay his players accordingly — fulfilling the promise of what the three Ds stood for, desire, discipline, and dedication, and all at the pace of a fourth: dizzying.
Levine and crew quickly became among the most successful Counter-Strike players in North America, taking the top prize at the 2004 World Cyber Games. He even managed to sign Tylenol as a sponsor while adding teams for other titles like Halo and Call of Duty and competing in the seminal Championship Gaming Series before that American-based league wound down in 2009, a casualty of big broadcast TV bets and an even bigger recession.
But what looks in retrospect like a Stern student’s masterful business plan was, Levine insists, anything but; more like a happy accident — an unexpected byproduct of the follow your bliss principle.
“Look, we inadvertently created it all,” he says. “The people I was playing with and competing against, we never had some big masterplan vision. Trust me. I always describe my career kinda like the metaphor where you start with a paperclip, trade up for a pen, trade up for a notebook, eventually get to a laptop, then a motorcycle, and so on. My professional journey was just a day-by-day effort to stay in the game, to keep doing what I enjoyed doing.”
Levine continues, “The opportunities and plans were always about bringing and keeping the community together, because as much as or maybe more than anyone else, I wanted to see what would happen next.”
Headliner status hits home
Levine didn’t really pause much to look around until 2015. He’d rented and sold out the 5,600-capacity Theater at Madison Square Garden — sacred sporting and entertainment mecca atop the Manhattan end of the Long Island Railroad — for a Dota 2 competition called ESL One.
Suddenly the magnitude struck him.
“I had this aha moment,” he recalls. “I’d experienced big esports arena events in Asia and Europe, but this was my iconic, hometown venue. And to finally be able to invite friends and family members who’d never really understood what I was doing and show them the screaming and cheering crowds, like at any other sporting event, was momentous.”
“For a long time,” he adds, “I joked that when my mom walked into the MSG Theater, she looked around and said, ‘Oh, so you don’t actually fix computers for a living.’”
Despite not getting it, Levine’s parents had always been supportive — and people not getting it remains the hardest part of his career to this day. Particularly for those who didn’t grow up with gaming culture, the standard issue skepticism boils down to why would anyone want to watch other people playing video games?
Well, putting aside that Kai Cenat, for one, has 6 million+ subscribers watching him play video games, Levine laughs: “Why would I want to watch someone play golf?”
And meanwhile, though the Saudis are investing in the PGA Tour, they’re also betting big on esports, having just hosted the inaugural Esports World Cup with official operating partner EFG and a record prize pool of more than $60 million. They’re also partnering with ESL FACEIT Group to launch the ESL Saudi Challenge, a series exclusively for gamers located in Saudi Arabia.
But there are more foundationally significant developments for the future of esports that never garner headlines, like the steady growth of collegiate gaming teams and scholarship opportunities.
“The challenge for me was always about making outsiders understand how esports is different from traditional sports,” Levine explains. “For one, it was always more global. And obviously way more digital, which disrupts the standard business models of traditional sports. But here’s the most essential common denominator to sporting success that people forgot about: time. Fandom takes time to grow. You can’t just, you know, Silicon Valley-incubate this thing in a pressure cooker. You have to really seed sports from the ground up, and let them take root naturally.”
Build it (patiently) and they will come
As with many other industries, covid created the space for a reset. “So, it’s not just about these big, splashy events and prize money pools,” Levine muses. “It’s about deeper, broader, more inclusive layers of competition through high schools, colleges, and clubs that people are forming.”
“Think about it. Would the NFL be so popular without all the football infrastructure from these grassroots levels?”
It’s a compelling point — and the crux of what Levine has been focused on seeding, supporting, and sustaining through his journey to the preeminent leadership role that ESL FACEIT Group has established.
“Look, my parents are probably never going to be the target audience for anything that we do with esports,” he says. “But the good news is that with the biggest esports titles, like Counter-Strike, like League of Legends, like Call of Duty, they are all becoming massive, generational IP. If you’re under 42 years old, you likely grew up playing Halo or one of those. And the more time that passes, the more gamers that are out there.”
He also points out how critical the content around driver narratives proved to taking Formula 1 to new audiences. The stories have to be told well, of course, but they also have to happen first. Which likewise takes time.
“Down the line, we will continue to hone that capacity as an industry,” he says. “And then there’ll be a moment where our Michael Jordan emerges — that big, undeniable, mass market storytelling milestone that completes the transition from underground to everywhere.”
And when so many people, for generations, embrace a particular participatory lifestyle from childhood into adulthood, they naturally want to see the next chapter of excellence performed at the highest levels. That consumer demand invariably draws a loose federation of ad hoc contests down the path to professional league competitions, which in turn brings more participants into the tent, and what started out as marginal becomes, to Levine’s point and prophetic conviction, bigger and bigger.
Does it all eventually reach a saturation point? Maybe.
But then try to wrap your head around this math: how many people can spend significant free time surfing, skating, or snowboarding, and for how long, relative to the number of people who can spend substantial free time gaming across their lifetime?
Then consider how early it still is in the evolution of gaming at the same time that it is already so globally huge. The first surfboards were finless slabs of wood. Skateboards started out with clay wheels. Have we come a long way from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox Series X? Uh, yeah. Astonishingly so. But what’s far more remarkable is that, having only just arrived at VR, not to mention quantum computing and MIT-only-knows-what-next, we’re realistically still in the clay wheels stage of gaming. The advent of mobile gaming alone is already a literal and figurative game-changer for esports.
“What I always say to the doubters is that year over year, more people are playing video games. More people are coming to our events. More people are watching our content. And, increasingly, professional gaming is an aspirational career for younger generations,” notes Levine.
Predictions tend to be a losing game, but who can deny that there is so much untapped, fertile soil for today’s already hearty, deep esports roots to expand across the future landscape of digitally-native generations?
“Now there’s been announcements for things like the Esports World Cup or the Olympic Esports, I think more potential mainstream partners will recognize that esports was never a flash in the pan,” Levine contends. “This fandom and culture was always inevitable. It just needed to be nurtured, not rushed.”
As a lifelong gamer embedded high up in the executive ranks, he has kept a watchful eye over that fandom and culture’s core interests with a savvy that’s already proven mutually beneficial.
“And I’m still just floored every day that I managed to be a part of it,” Levine adds with a smile. “That I was able to take my passion for video games from science class, and playing with my brothers and neighbors, to making a successful career not just for myself, but for an entire industry now… I mean, these are pinch-me moments, right?”
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