Nineteen-year-old Austin Etue silently stared at his computer in disbelief. He'd just won $250,000 playing a video game. Before Sept. 3, almost no one in the gaming world had even heard of Etue — he had less than 10 followers on Amazon-owned gamer streaming platform Twitch and was playing against big names like FaZe Clan's "Tfue," who has over 3.5 million Twitch followers. But there he was: He had just defeated 99 of the world's top gamers in the final round of the Summer Skirmish, a tournament for Fortnite, the massively popular multi-player online survival game. Fortnite developer Epic Games put up a total of $1.5 million for the final stage of the competition, and Etue had finished first and was taking home the biggest chunk of that tantalizing prize pool. "I don't think that I've processed how much $250,000 is yet. I don't even know," a shrugging and nearly speechless Etue said in a post-match interview on Epic Games' livestream on Twitch, after seeing the dollar amount of his prize flash on a computer screen at PAX West, the gaming conference that hosted the final stage of the tournament in Seattle. FORTNITETWEETPIC Etue, who plays Fortnite under his gamer alias "Morgausse," was understandably shocked that he'd won. The teenager, who lives with his parents and two younger brothers in Tennessee, was an underdog entering the tournament. He was a relative unknown in the burgeoning world of competitive gaming, unsigned by any professional esports team. Etue wasn't even expecting to make it to the final stages of the tournament, he tells CNBC Make It; he thought he would be eliminated in one of the qualifying rounds that determined which players would make the finals. Instead, he defeated more high-profile players — gamers with professional contracts, like Team Liquid's "Poach" and Ghost Gaming's "Bizzle." "Really earning the respect of all those other players and actually beating them is definitely a crazy feeling," Etue tells CNBC Make It. Players in the Summer Skirmish earn points by winning battle royale rounds as well as for eliminating other players, and Etue finished first in the finale with 20 eliminations and 11 overall points. In his post-match interview, Etue, a skinny kid wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a backwards baseball cap, thanked his parents for supporting his gaming and offered some words of advice for any aspiring Fortnite champions watching at home. "Keep your grind up no matter how hard it gets, no matter how tough the times are, it'll be worth it if you keep it up," he said. FORTNITETWEETPIC The scene was "surreal," Etue tells CNBC Make It, as he nearly instantly went from an unknown to a Fortnite celebrity. After the top finishers were announced and Etue had been interviewed on camera, he says "people were saying they wanted to take pictures with me, and congratulating me. It was hectic, but it was definitely really cool."

You see, it wasn't long ago that Etue wasn't sure if he'd ever have a career as a professional gamer. He graduated from high school in Louisiana (where his family lived before moving to Tennessee) in May 2017, less than a year-and-a-half before winning Summer Skirmish. Over that time, he'd focused almost exclusively on training to be a professional gamer, foregoing college or any other career (Etue's last part-time jobs came during high school, when he worked at a grocery store and a restaurant). "I've mainly just been focusing everything on gaming, just to see if I had the potential in this," he says. His parents supported that plan — up to a point. Etue's father, Keith, who is 45 and works for an energy company, had financed his trip to Seattle to compete in the Summer Skirmish, Etue says, but his parents had also been growing wary that he was putting off the next steps toward adulthood by skipping college to focus on a difficult career path as a professional gamer that might not materialize. "It was getting to the point where it was like, 'Ok, you need to start college classes. You don't have to stop competing, but we need you to look into backup plans,'" Etue says of what he was hearing from his parents before his success at the Fortnite Summer Skirmish. "So, it was really at the end of the line for me, I feel like, to really be at the top of the game," he adds. While Etue would like to one day get his college degree, he also worried that a college course-load would eat into his practice time for Fortnite, effectively making it impossible for him to reach and maintain the level necessary to beat the world's top players. After all, this has been Etue's goal for longer than just the past year. He's been playing video games for nearly his entire life. "I've actually been playing video games since I was, like, 3 years old, to be honest," he says. Etue's favorite game growing up was the Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, an online fantasy adventure game that Etue's father, Keith, introduced to him at an early age. "I spent countless hours [playing it], I've played every expansion, I have definitely a lot of memories of that game," Etue says. He's always been a good player, too. At age 6, Etue says he'd reached an elite level of play in World of Warcraft that earned him a call-out in Computer Gaming Magazine. Etue calls his father a mentor when it comes to playing video games. It was Keith (an avid gamer himself who "still plays a lot of World of Warcraft," Austin says) who first saw Austin's potential as a gamer due to his success at a young age at games like Warcraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

A childhood photo of Austin Etue (R) with his father, Keith. Source: Etue family