Eyeballers – "The Kings of Counter-Strike"

Eyeballers during CPL Winter 2004.

Eyeballer's team towards the end of 2005.

Eyeballers had won CPL's summer edition the very same year, and even though they had swapped two players, they were considered the winter tournament's favorite. As a warmup for the Texas event, Eyeballers won DreamHack Winter 2004 without any problems.Prior to CPL Winter 2004, Eyeballers were featured in an article for the Swedish newspaper Expressen. This was not very common twelve years ago. The article had the headline "The Kings of Counter-Strike", and Eyeballers were treated like world champions. There's really no reason to complain about that title, as they had won the previous CPL event. Amongst information about esports and Eyeballers, one could read about the team's goals: "To place in the very top at all the tournaments in 2005, and winning CPL this weekend".The highlighted weekend came, and it was time to play the most anticipated tournament of the whole year — CPL Winter. Everything went according to plan for the Swedes. The tournament was played with double elimination brackets, and Eyeballers reached the grand final via five straight wins. In these five matches they only lost 26 rounds, which gave them a superior 16-5 average result. However, despite coming from the winner's bracket, they fell in the grand final against the norwegian-american NoA with the AWP-superstar Griffin "shaGuar" Benger leading the team.Approximately a month after CPL Winter, Bullen and walle became official members of Eyeballers, which put the final nail in the spiXel coffin. However Eyeballer's run with with the duo as official members was no walk in the park. After being forced to swap players, crashed out of RixHack and failed to qualify for ESWC, things went south. They went to Spain and GameGune 2005 hoping for the cold streak to end, and it actually went okay.At this point, the lineup for the team had changed completely — walle had left for mTw.ATI, Christian "vilden" Lidström had gone to NiP and Fredrik "GudeN" Fransson had gone inactive. Instead of these three gentlemen, Eyeballers had recruited Patrik "cArn" Sättermon, Harley "dsn" Örwall and Conny "Zad" Ryderholm.A third place finish in Spain made for a brighter future for the team, but soon they showed a disappointing performance at the WEG qualifier. After that, the squad went inactive, and Eyeballers called quits soon thereafter.