Between matches at DreamHack Open Atlanta, VPEsports caught up with John “BLU” Mullen, one of the event’s commentators.

The variety caster discussed his history as a caster, his experience in CS:GO, his expansion to other titles, and more.

You can read the full exclusive interview below:

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VPEsports: As we discussed before the interview, this is your first event since DreamHack Summer. What’s it like to be back at a CS:GO event?

BLU: It feels great. It’s always good to come back to like the first game where I really started my career off. Being able to kind of go back to that and just jump into it once again.







VPEsports: You say it’s where you came from, but didn’t you dabble in other games at the start?

BLU: Yeah, so the first game that I actually casted was called Guild Wars 2. It didn’t really have much of an esports scene ultimately. I think our biggest event ever had probably like 5-10 thousand viewers. That’s the best that the game ever did to my knowledge so obviously it wasn’t going to be something I could make a career out of. About to two or three years into working on Guild Wars 2, I got offered an opportunity by someone at ESEA to go cast for them.

Basically that was the chance I took to start moving over Counter-Strike and learning the game there. Then basically I just grinded it out and that’s how I was able to make my name in Counter-Strike.







VPEsports: Now you’ve expanded, you’ve done Rainbow Six and other games as well – what all have you done now?

BLU: Let’s see – Guild Wars was the first, then I did Counter-Strike…I did Quake for a couple months as well back when they were ramping up to Quake Champions. Then I was doing Virtual Reality League for a while which is like five or six games encompassed in itself. That was one of the main projects I was working on for the last two years or so.

Now I’m doing Rainbow stuff as well, so I’ve been hopping around.







VPEsports: When it comes to Rainbow vs. CS, clearly there’s some similarities with them both being first-person, round-based tactical shooters to some degree. They’re also drastically different though. Which would you say has the bigger learning curve?

BLU: I think from a layman’s perspective, Siege is a mucher higher learning curve simply because you have to know what all the operators do to understand that someone may throw a random grenade into a room and if you’ve never touched Siege before you’re not really gonna know what that’s going to do. Someone is going to have to explain that to you, whereas in CS it’s a lot more straightforward. It’s five guys against five guys and they’re trying to attack an objective and that’s basically it.

The problem is in Siege you have changing objectives, you have the fact that maps a lot more vertical. Imagine if every map was Nuke, but with two other floors on top of that and that’s basically the complexity of a lot of Siege maps. I think that’s where a lot of people kind of get a little lost with trying to learn Siege.







VPEsports: Before the interview, you mentioned you’d made a career move that saw you doing less CS:GO. What was it about CS:GO’s infrastructure when it comes to casting that made it so difficult?

BLU: A lot of that was my fault to be completely honest. I think I made a lot of early mistakes with certain relationships in my career that ultimately I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to come back from.

That on top of the issues with finding a duo and a consistent one at that. It kind of made me think to myself, especially as I was getting towards the end of 2018, a lot of TO’s are happy with the people they use right now, especially the bigger events and tier-one events, so I didn’t necessarily see where I could fit into the top level in this game.

So that’s where I was like it’s time to find a new real focus and put all my effort into that and that’s when I really started looking into Siege stuff.







VPEsports: So now you’re mostly Siege and you dabble in CS:GO when the opportunity arises…would you like it to be more 50/50 than it is, or are you okay with one main thing you can depend on and also being able to explore other games?

BLU: I’m a little bit more free-flowing with it. I don’t have a massive preference either way. I would say I like both games just as much and my focus is always going to be shifted towards whichever one I am more actively involved in.

So right now I follow Siege a lot more actively. If worked picked up for CS, as you said, it could start to tilt more towards the 50/50 spectrum. I think I’m much more committed to Siege now after this last year or so and getting such good reception from the community.

At the same time, I’m never going to say no to a CS:GO event if someone offers me.







VPEsports: Going into CS:GO and what you said about TO’s having their set guys, what is that like as a caster coming up where you know that the biggest events are almost guaranteed to go to those guys? It’s not even a matter of how good can you be to some degree, but more so are they suddenly going to fall off and be bad.

BLU: You could kind of argue that that seems to be what some people may wait for. I think the strategy for new talent in Counter-Strike nowadays has to be; find your place in an online league, definitely get some experience there, now you can build a reel and that’s how you get to smaller LANs. Even DreamHack opens as they’re open to bringing in new talent.

I think that’s a large part of the reason why they run the DreamHack Open is to highlight the player talent and new casting talent as well. Once you’re at that point, I think TO’s will start to see you and I think if you’re new and you haven’t been given a shot at tier-one before, I think that opportunity will come along, it’s more you have to stay in the scene long enough to get that opportunity.

You never know, three months down the line someone may have an opening and they would have specifically looked at you but if you weren’t actively casting that entire time, you wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.

I think that’s what a lot of people mean when they say chase your dreams, it’s the chase. You got to chase it down, you’re not necessarily guaranteed to get it, but when that opportunity comes along you just have to crush it.

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