2017 saw the momentous rise of the now legendary aimer and coffee enthusiast known simply as “nick.” In 2018, nick claimed the world record for every major tracking scenario in KovaaK’s, from Cata IC Long Strafes to Air. One of the earliest adopters of consistent aim training for its own sake, nick pushed scores beyond what was thought possible. Despite the ever-increasing number of top aimers, nick remains a threat on the leaderboards and has maintained a top-10 position on many of the most hotly contested tracking scenarios for the better part of three years.

Early Days

Nick started playing PC games in 1996, but his first exposure to PC gaming was not FPS. Managing to dodge both Quake and Doom, “the first games I played on PC were stuff like Megarace, Myst, Lost Eden, Interstate ‘76, Monkey Island, and other LucasArts games,” he said. After playing Red Faction on the PlayStation 2, nick wanted to try online multiplayer on PC. One system upgrade and jewel case purchase later, and nick was knee-deep in the early 2000’s Red Faction scene. “Online multiplayer was still a relatively new thing back then; it was cool as hell just to be able to play the game with other people (especially internationally),” he said.

After a few months of playing casually, nick decided to join a clan. “At first I just played it for the novelty of playing multiplayer,” he said, “[but] after I started to get involved with some of the communities and clans… I got really hooked.” Clans provided not only a social environment, but also a competitive outlet. Scrims and clan wars, organized over IRC, became an ever-growing focus for nick. He began at the bottom like everyone else: “I was pretty bad and it was a lot of work for me at the time to pass a tryout for a fairly low level clan, [but] getting into that clan felt like an achievement.”

It was at this point that practicing and improving his game, as nick put it, “became pretty much a full-time priority.” He branched out to other competitive titles like Counter-Strike and Enemy Territory, building a more well-rounded skill set and even managing to land a spot on the CAL-IM and CAL-M CS teams. However, nick’s primary focus was always RF. “I spent a lot of… time away from RF playing CS… but never really tried to go anywhere with it, [and] I couldn’t figure out how to get into [Enemy Territory]’s competitive scene at the time.” Despite a falling-out with a clan that left a bad taste in his mouth, the social and competitive draw of the game and the friendships he had cultivated through his community involvement kept him coming back to Red Faction.

Here are some of nick’s reminiscences on his career:

RF Rising

At some point I became interested in joining a clan that ran one of these public servers. They had some fun players that seemed to be really good at the game. It took a lot of grinding but I was able to pass their tryout (which was a dm 1v1) after a few attempts. I soaked up as much as I could from playing with them. I played in a few clan wars with them but it wasn't anything serious. They were not terribly competitive. Some time later I started to play CTF. The clan I was in did not play CTF (there was a large divide in the two communities). I discovered something around this time: The CTF players had better mechanics. It was way harder, even in pubs, to win CTF games or frag out. There was [a] really large disparity in skill. One day I was playing in a CTF pub and laid witness to one player, e)(l-khold finishing a map with ~300 kills. This was in a 20 minute time limit match. He was perfectly spawn killing the entire enemy team and cycling armors. I followed the guy around in-game and tried to memorize as much as possible. Loads of players were accusing this guy of cheating in the chat, so I was curious about that as well. But I could detect nothing foul. He was just ******** on people. I was pretty fascinated by this. (...) I mentioned this player to my clan at the time and they said he was cheating. I didn't agree but didn't push the issue. Later, a player of an even higher skill level was accused of cheating in our server and was then banned. I enjoyed playing with that guy a lot, so this time I did push the issue... and then left that clan and went back to playing more CTF.

Stealer of Flags, Farmer of Frags

A few weeks later I was invited to join Steal our Flag (SoF). SoF was the best, if somewhat inactive CTF team at the time. I was complete garbage in comparison to any of their starting players, but after a few months of playing with them I improved a lot. It's fair to say that my skill began to skyrocket at this point. I quickly became better than everyone in my old clan and better than most of the people playing competitive RF full stop. I spent a lot of time working on my aim. I made [Assault Rifle] and [Precision Rifle] only maps where you'd spawn with full armor in a small circle or box and begged others to play them with me. Only a few people were willing to do so. I had begun playing some CS and ET as well at this time and learned that playing on roughly 3cm/360 with Windows Accel on 60hz CRT was... bad. So that was the first thing that got fixed. The second thing was that I learned the game was meant to be smooth. See, this was my first online PC fps and I thought seeing players jerk around at 10fps was normal. This turned out to be a bug with the game, and, once resolved, it was like playing an entirely new game. It was actually possible to see players movement clearly, and because RF had client side netcode you didn't have to lead to kill stuff. I had for almost a year at this point played a very messed up game thinking it was normal. After a few months of playing with SoF they went inactive in RF. I played some CoD with them on clanbase but it wasn't that enjoyable with 150 ping. SoF disbanded just before 2004 and the leader and myself went back to playing RF. We started a new team in early 2004 (frag4^yourlife) with one other player and started scrimming teams. It was at this point I learned to play flag defense. It was pretty much the perfect role for me. We were more or less destroying every team that would play us in scrims--I rarely let enemies even touch our flag. We picked up two more players and attempted to join a new 5v5 league hosted by one of the teams we were obliterating in scrims. They refused to let us play but their league fell apart after a few weeks. Quality game. Around this time the ESL RF ladder went from German-only to international, so we joined that... [W]e went undefeated for a few months before disbanding due to some internal drama. I deleted most of my screenshots at this point which I deeply regret as we had hundreds of wins and I had a thousand or some odd duel screenshots.

Decline and a Man at His Peak

After frag4 disbanded I started to play with Australian and Polish clans (.iCc and sF) occasionally in scrims and some officials. You could play this game with very high ping thanks to the netcode. (...) I also joined a TDM 2v2 cup with a friend that had many of the best DM players. My friend was not a very strong player but we were able to win convincingly. I don't remember dropping a map. In 2006 I started another team (vivid) with a top player from 2001-2002 and we recruited and trained a bunch of mid-skilled players. We joined up ESL again and climbed the ladder undefeated. But, by this point, the top team on that ladder had farmed up so many points they could afford to avoid playing us indefinitely. This was a complete s***show. I was sick of competitive RF at this point and stopped playing it for that reason. I later helped with the creation of an improved client for the game that resolved hardware and cheat issues but that was not enough to generate much progress in the scene. I still played the game for years after this and even worked on improving my mechanics, but there were no meaningful matches to be had at this point. It was just a way to kill time. (...) Unfortunately, by the time I got really good at the game the only strong competition was my own teammates. (...) I started working in 2007 so that didn't leave much time for me to get into anything else very competitively. I also couldn't get the same feeling playing anything else. The closest game was ET but it appeared to be very dead in NA by this point.

Aim Training Origins

When asked about how and why he got involved with aim training, nick had this to say:

I had always kind of maintained my aim… and even had a friend code a practice bot for RF back in 2009, it even had some minimal dodging profile features. I had known of KovaaK through some Quakeworld demo that I had. (...) When he posted the second video [about his aim trainer] I could tell a lot of progress had been made, so I pretty much jumped on grabbing it. Messing with it kind of made me want to try to work on some stuff that was always annoying to me. (...) Aiming is kind of a fun activity in itself, like juggling. It can be fairly relaxing… [so] I chased a lot of scores to get better but also to kill time.

The grind and pursuit of high-scores came naturally. Just like many other players, nick found it exciting to pursue improvement, but also found aim practice to be relaxing. “Aiming is kind of a fun activity in itself, like juggling,” he said. The high-scores would come naturally as he found himself spending more and more time in the trainer. “I chased a lot of scores to get better but also to kill time.”

He found himself focusing heavily on tracking scenarios. Red Faction has some of the strongest click-timing weapons in any game, but nick always found himself more drawn to tracking weapons. “The strongest weapons in RF are definitely click-timing,” he said, “but if you can control the maps you can usually shut players out of those options. (...) In the end, most of the time, it was better to be good with tracking weapons.” There was also, of course, a more natural catalyst for focusing on tracking: “click-timing scenarios don’t really feel great for me… the few times I grinded them my wrist let me know that it wasn’t going to tolerate that.”

The Future

While he hasn’t entirely dismissed the idea of returning to competitive play, nick said he would find it difficult to make it work in any real sense. “I have an okay career at this point and the enjoyment I find in most new games isn’t remotely high enough to justify pulling time away from that,” he said. Professional play is entirely off the table. “I don’t think I’d ever try to play any game in a professional sense,” he commented. Playing games has become largely social or for relaxation. While competition and pursuing growth is still fun, more emphasis is put on playing with friends. “I spent [the last few] years… just playing MMOs and random other games with friends. Actually, that’s pretty much all I do now.” Casual competition has become more nick’s cup of tea. He expressed no interest in leaving gaming behind: “The future just holds more of the same for me.”



When asked for some parting wisdom, nick provides us with a true gem.

“Take care of your hands, and get the **** out of the left lane.”