The second part of Jørgen "XeqtR" Johannessen's last ever Counter-Strike interview sees him guiding the reader from the beginning of the Adrenaline experiment up until his retirement from competitive gaming after NoA's failure at WSVG ISC in 2006. The Norwegian tactical mastermind talks about his Adrenaline team's crucial mistake which cost them a shot at title victories in the Summer of 2004, how the most successful NoA lineup fell apart in the space of one Winter after back-to-back titles and turning down an offer from HeatoN and Potti to create a new NiP team in 2005.

The failed experiment [2003-2004]

Adrenaline (Adren)

4th CPL Winter 2003
5th-8th ESWC 2004

With the the infamous CXG event scheduled for early January 2004 following CPL Winter 2003 by only a couple of weeks team9 attempted an experimental lineup which saw five of the players move to the USA, becoming Adrenaline, to practice for those events together. You stayed in Europe though for your own reasons and only joined the team shortly before the event, as a starter in the lineup. vesslan always felt like you were a game changing player so it's understandable he would make that compromise under the circumstances but do you think that decision undermined the overall experiment and its potential success?

Going into details here isn't really necessary, I was tired of playing again since I did so well that summer. I once again got jaded/complacent and also moved in with my girlfriend in Germany. You could say that moving the the USA wasn't on top of my list of priorities at the time. But I explicitly told vesslan that they should focus on finding a new 5th for me and letting me retire from the team. He refused and said it was ok for me to join up with the team couple of weeks before the event.

I mean I can understand him because it was really hard to find a suitable replacement at the time. So we stuck with the plan of playing with five in the US without me, then I would come and play all the maps while benching one of the guys on some of the maps they had been practising with the team the whole time they were there. It was really not a good decision, and I can't say I supported it either, but that's just how it got played out. But I think if CXG had gone through that we would've done a lot better, since I bet we were the only team that were actually practising throughout the entire christmas period.

Throughout my CS career you can see one consistency and that is that I don't do poorly at two events in a row, up until I retired that is.

Was that Adrenaline lineup capable of beating SK.swe, who are still considered one of the greatest lineups ever, with adequate practice?

The SK.swe team with element is the team who won the most events as a team and had been dominating the scene for the longest period of time, but nowadays I would say that a team like fnatic has been doing the same in a much more competitive field. And I think we could've beaten SK.swe at CXG just because we practised the most for that tournament compared to the other teams there. I had already been in the US a month then.

After moving back to Europe Adrenaline seemed to go downhill fairly quickly with vesslan being removed from the lineup for ESWC and word spreading that your players were just waiting out their contracts and collecting the salary, which was amongst the best in the world at the time. Once Adrenaline died you pretty much disappeared from the spotlight so had the NoA opportunity not come along would you have been retired from that point onwards?

Ok, this is just half the truth. Let me explain what happened after CXG. We came together, we were all kinda grown up at that time as vesslan, quick and I are pretty much the oldest guys that had been playing the game. We sat down and figured out that we were gonna take a long break to recharge our batteries for the upcoming Summer events. Our first appearance was some kind of show match against SK on stupid computers where we were sitting like idiots on a pole-like thing and just playing for fun.

The exhibition itself though was a real wake-up call for the team, we sat down and discussed what we wanted to do and we made some crucial decisions. We figured out that it was time for me to take over as the in-game leader, while vesslan was still going to be in the team and also our leader outside the game managing all the sponsor relationships etc. We also got our five man team settled: vesslan, quick, lucchese notorious and myself, and we all agreed that we were gonna try our best for the next months. So we started practising, and I mean when you have a team with vesslan and me in it nothing was left to coincidence. We played flawless Counter-Strike for the first time in almost a year and we were beating everyone in practise. Everything was going very nicely.

Then Swedish WCG qualifiers came up and since I couldn't participate they decided, and I must say I disagreed with their decision, to participate in the event with a stand-in. From that moment onwards everything went downhill. vesslan got ousted as a player, and wasn't considered "skilled" enough for the new times, and we got snajdan in as a replacement. But we lost something much more important I think and that was the team chemistry of our winning recipe from the Summer of 2003, and while we focused on getting our individual abilities up to par our tactics suffered. I can honestly say that was a mistake on our part, and I think things could've gone very differently if we just had kept to the plan we agreed on at CEBIT.

With element having left SK.swe there was a period of a few months without a clear favourite for all of the Summer's events so why were Adrenaline unable to make a push for that #1 spot?

I lost all motivation to play and for the third Summer in a row personal issues came up. This time it wasn't Potti or vesslan but I that got stuck in a love triangle, I guess it was my turn, and I remember the whole ESWC I was mostly sleeping during the day and staying up at night. As I said, we were getting really strong in the Spring before the WCG qualifiers and I think we could've swept the tournaments that Summer as well.

Reuniting with element to win titles [2004-2005]

NoA

2nd OsloLAN 2004
4th Nollelva 2004
1st CPL Winter 2004
1st WEG s1 2005
9th-12 WEG s2 2005

NoA came to Scandinavia in late 2004 for OsloLAN and Nollelva and needed stand-ins for both of those events, with ahl filling in along with you for the former and shaGuar joining up with the team and you for the latter. How did you end up becoming a permanent part of the lineup and what kind of potential did you see within the team around that time?

Well at the same ESWC event that I was sleeping through NoA came into it with element and with high expectations. I was kinda laid back throughout that event and spent the time mostly socializing with all sorts of people, and especially the Norwegians. We kept a good understanding of what was about to come and when things didn't work out for them that Summer they contacted me. We decided to try things out first and both the LANs went pretty decently for the team, and for me personally they went much better of course since I had just slumped again.

Anyway we figured knoxville's time was up, and he and I were/are great friends IRL, so we decided it was time for some fresh blood into the team and stratcalling. I knew the team had great potential when it came down to individual abiliites, I mean you have shaGuar the most unpredictable player ever, but also the guy who can come up with the craziest clutch moments, and method who can just kill four people without really giving it much thought. Then you had the three norwegians, keeping our positions and our crossfires and killing people in the back. It was really a perfect combination of players.

I remember bootcamping prior to the CPL, I think I havent yelled "CROSSFIRE!" more in my whole life than I did those 2 weeks with method and shaGuar. We were drilling in European style of CS to two guys who had played the American random ass CS style their whole lives and had to do it all in 2 weeks. Pretty crazy, but it worked.

Thanks to the flashbug incident on nuke which cost you most of a half against EYE NoA ended up in the lower bracket for CPL Winter 2004, which set the stage for that dramatic final with the first inferno being a 16-14 affair and the second sealing the title for the team. Taking the flashbug win into account was NoA a cut above the other teams at that event? What can you say to the speculation that the SK.swe who had won Nollelva, with Hyper in its lineup, might have won that CPL had they attended?

I remember EYE coming into the CPL with huge expectations, we had heard rumours from Europe about how they had been crushing everyone in scrims etc. while we were struggling to beat American pug teams in our practises. So before the event I remember driving with Laurent, a great guy who ran the local netcafe tournament that was always held prior to CPL, and told him that I would be happy if we didn't go out in the first round. But I think the best thing that happened for us was getting knocked down into the lower bracket.

We got really warmed up down there, we got our team spirit up, and we were really fighting together. Also we got some invaluable team practise in match situations. We got our communication working and our strats were being polished during those 10 games. I think that made the finals much easier for us. Actually the 16-14 game wasn't as close as the score says, I never felt that we were losing during that final. I think that the EYE team was probably stronger then the SK team at the time, so no it wouldn't have mattered if they had shown up, but that's just me speculating of course.

Fresh off the CPL title NoA headed to South Korea to win the first season of WEG. Then element left a couple of weeks before WEG season two was due to start, seemingly out of the blue. What happened behind the scenes to lead to that and how did the scenario come about whereby fisker was supposed to attend the event with NoA, due to being relegated to the 7th man spot for NiP, but ended up joining SK.swe instead around a week before WEG?

What happened at WEG season 1 was that we basically won the event from our CPL preparations. We had our mentality that we were unbeatable and we really played extraordinarily well as a team. We knew exactly where we had each other and where our strengths and weaknesses lay. But outside the game again thing went sour, this time it was really not my fault... first time! element kinda drifted away from the rest of the team, just being with the Americans, and was clearly unhappy about something. I was jaded/complacent as usual so I was just there playing DotA and waiting to collect the title, and the rest of the guys were kinda stuck there also. The team morale was at an absolute low point but we were professionals so we kept on going throughout the season.

I mean we had 4 weeks break before the finals, I decided to fly to Sweden to be with my girlfriend and I have no idea what the others were doing during that time. Basically we didn't play CS together for a month almost before the final against 4kings, so we kinda used dust2 as a warmup map. We won that event but things weren't great between element and me again, I actually have no clue why, and then he decides to leave the team. Don't even remember what he did after that. I was about to just call it quits, but then my IRL friends had started to get involved in the managment of the team. So I was kinda stuck in it, but I wasn't really looking for solutions so when fisker was available we contacted him and he agreed but we never kept in touch as much as we should've I think. Then he made a 180 on us and decided to join the new SK team instead of going to South Korea with us.

At that time I got an offer from HeatoN to join Potti and him and make a new NiP, and if it hadn't have been for the fact that NoA was now owned by my friends I would've said "yes" to be able to keep playing on the highest level. I knew that my decision to stay with NoA wasn't the best but it was because of my loyalty to the guys who believed in me. We all know what happened in season 2, but the problem was that shaGuar had lost all motivation when we lost element. He stopped believing in the team, then we kinda lost a key player, and quick hadn't been playing at that level for a long time. Nothing bad to say about quick though, he did admirably well considering the circumstances.

It was shaGuar in particular that behaved very immaturily at that time and kinda ruined the team spirit for the whole team with his childish behaviour and open critiscm of the team's choice of picking up quick and not having element in the team anymore. We failed and thus I went on a long holiday with the plan to make a new team. I guess I went to CPL as well with some mix team or something. I honestly don't remember who that was now though, I just know fnatic was behind it and that Sam [zr0] wanted me to make a new fnatic with him but I had to refuse because of my loyalty to my friends in NoA.

Leading up and coming players [2005-2006]

fnatic, NoA and NoA

7th CPL Summer 2005
4th CPL UK 2005
5th-8th WEG s3 2005
1st shgOpen 2006
5th-8th WEG Masters 2006
9th-12th WSVG ISC 2006

The lineup of that fnatic CPL Summer 2005 team was DiGitaL, MegatoN, Magix, solido and yourself but it finished a disasterous 7th at an event barely attended by any top teams due to being scheduled directly alongside ESWC.

Yeah, but I didn't want to keep any of those guys to be honest. There were already talks about dsn and stuff I remember but I had already made a commitment that I had to keep.

The NoA team you created after that was a mixture of less well known players, from team ICSU, and a reunited DarK. What did you think of that speedi, kixer, Red and DarK era of NoA and what is your take on DarK's level at the time?

It wasn't a total failure I think but I guess time was catching up on me. I wasn't on top of the game anymore skillwise so I was relying heavliy on my strategical plays to keep up while the icsu guys were all about playing cs and shooting people in the head.

The good thing about DarK was that he knew exactly what I wanted from a player, and he trusted my calls at all times. I think he was also in a declining phase though, so he and I were kinda keeping to our old rhythm while the new young guns wanted to do it more their own way. It just didn't work out that well with that kind of mix, especially when I was very low in confidence and motivation at the time. It's not an era of my CS career I want to remember well.

But I think things kinda picked themselves up again with the next edition of the team where I had found some new energy again of course, since things had gone crap. It has always been a rollercoaster ride for me, only way I could motivate myself I think. Only thing I regret from that team is that we didn't do better in China [at WEG Masters], and to be honest that wasn't our fault. We were as preprared as we could have been before the event but sadly not two weeks into it because of all the problems. I mean we won a very difficult event at shgOpen beating a very good Alternate aTTaX at that time and fnatic, who obviously were a strong team.

WEG Masters was almost cancelled. They told us it was cancelled two days after we arrived and then we had been bootcmaping at hpx's place just like prior to shgOpen for like a week and we were really ready to play. Then we have to wait for like three weeks to play and then we get knocked out on a bad night on a bad stage where they played incredibly loud music on our terrorist pistol round on train so the whole CT team could come down popdog train and shoot two of our guys sitting there without them hearing them running behind them. So frustrating to think about even now.

WSVG ISC was the last event for you, with NoA finishing 9th-12th, before your competitive career came to a close.

Yup, and then it was over for me when I couldn't even motivate myself even after a bad period. That was the final nail in the coffin for me, I just didn't have it in me anymore to pick myself up again.

That last NoA generation to include you was a hybrid of Norwegian and Danish players, all of whom went on to bigger things. So what did you think of the Norwegians (xione, prb) and the Danes (zonic, hpx) of that lineup? Do you feel as though playing with you had any significant influence on their later careers?

I think they all were great players, it was truly a privilige and a joy to play with that team. Even though we didn't do as well as we could have hoped for we spent a lot of time together on bootcamps at hpx's place, eating the local kebab every day for weeks. Just very nice people who were very good at what they did. I hope that my influence and my teachings were something that they could take advantage of in their own careers after my retirement, but I also know that they were/are great players on their own and they deserve all their accomplishments.

In the final part of the last ever XeqtR Counter-Strike interview hear the Norwegian talk about his team-mates throughout the years and how he weighs up his successes and failures. Find out his full and honest opinion of element. What reasons does he give for REAL not becoming one of the all time greats despite considering him to be "likely the most talented player to ever come out of the forests of Norway"? Who would make XeqtR's team to play aliens for the fate of the human race? All of this and more is discussed in the part 3.

Part 3 will be published on Monday the 29th of March.

Part 1 can be read here.

(Photographs copyright of their respective holders)