Amateur gamer Wade McGilberry won a million dollars after only 90 minutes of playing MLB 2K10. Read on to learn about the big plays and unique strategies that led to a perfect game and one of the biggest gaming prizes of all time.
Wade McGilberry isn't a professional video gamer. He isn't much of a sports gamer either. If you ask him what he's been playing lately he'll probably tell you it's Halo. But on May 2, the 24-year-old tax accountant from Semmes, Alabama won 40 times more what a professional Halo player would get for winning Major League Gaming's national championship – and he did it by playing a sports game.
According to 2K Sports, McGilberry was one of several dozen entrants in their Major League Baseball 2K10 Perfect Game contest, but was the very first to throw a verified perfect game and took home a cash prize of $1 million because of it. How did he do it? For starters, he followed all the contest guidelines and avoided being disqualified for any of the many minor mistakes one could have made when submitting their video proof. But performing the feat itself has been no easy task for many of the game's most avid fans, which makes it even more impressive that McGilberry was able to do it within an hour and a half of owning the game.
"I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to do it, but I was going to try my hardest to," said McGilberry during a phone interview earlier today. "I already told [my wife] that I was going to be taking the TV for the next couple of weeks or so until I did it."
With the pressure mounting and his controller likely covered in sweat, McGilberry entered the ninth inning and took Atlanta Braves' pitcher Kenshin Kawakami to the mound to face the New York Mets' lineup one more time.
"I knew the final inning was coming up and I heard the announcer say it on the game and I was so afraid of a close play and I was really scared of walking a batter. I actually did get to a full count near the end of the game and my pitcher was getting a little fatigued. I had to throw the ball right down the middle just to get a strike and I was just hoping they didn't crush it," McGilberry said. "One of the fly ball outs at the end, [first basemen Troy Glaus] made this leap for the ball running away toward right field and I don't know how he got to it because I thought it was going to barely get past his glove, but somehow he caught it and I was amazed ... it was intense."
But even after pitching a perfect game, McGilberry wasn't sure if he had won the $1 million. He had to quickly submit his entry and hope he was the first person to accomplish it.
"I was thinking, 'alright, I did it, but did I really win the prize?'" said McGilberry. "It seemed like I did it so quickly that someone else could have already done it."
It took McGilberry exactly seven tries and he didn't even listen to many of his catcher's suggestions. Instead it was his unconventional method of trying to throw 2-seam fastballs as weak as possible that won him more than twice the Major League Baseball minimum salary.
"Sometimes I would listen to [the catcher] about the pitch selection, but as far as the location of the pitch, I didn't generally listen too much. My strategy was looking at the hot/cold zones and keeping the pitches low and out of the strike zone." McGilberry said. "Batting was what I was worried about. When I played the demo, I was having a hard time hitting the ball and scoring runs. It was almost a deal breaker in even getting the game and I told my wife 'if I can't score a run with this, there's not much point in me getting it, because if you can't score you can't win.'"
McGilberry admitted that after he scored his one run, he pretty much concentrated on pitching and fielding and tried to get through his at bats as quickly as possible. He said that fielding wasn't as big of an obstacle as he would have thought and that he was lucky that the balls were mostly hit near his fielders for routine plays.
When asked what was the first thing he did after learning he had won, McGilberry paused for a moment and said, "I went and took that check!" The young married tax accountants estimate that after paying Uncle Sam, they'll walk away with no more than $700,000, a sum of money that would make even the world's best professional StarCraft players jealous.
Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Wednesday, May 5, 2010