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With the Intel Extreme Masters wrapping up in Sydney this past Sunday, we had the opportunity to speak with one of StarCraft II’s premier casters – South Australia’s Leigh “Maynarde” Mandalov.
In part two of our interview, we discuss his approach to esports commentary, how he’s sustained a career in such a volataile industry and how similar it is to traditional sports commentary.
Part one of our interview, where we discussed Maynarde’s journey to stardom, was published yesterday.
The Roar: It sounds like you’ve been able to go from A to B quite quickly in your casting career. How does one sustain a profile and a career as a caster?
Maynarde: The journey from a local caster to an international caster, for me, only took a couple of years. The issue for me was that I was actually working full-time until very recently.
I only quit my full-time job a year and a half ago. It actually doesn’t feel like, now that I say it, that’s not that recent. A year and a half ago I left my full-time job.
[Beforehand] I was using all of my annual leave whenever I had to go to an international gig. I’d be gone for a week, for flight-time and that sort of thing. It was hard to honestly do as much international stuff as I wanted to and it was hard to remain relevant, I guess.
To maintain relevancy, you have to do as many gigs as you possibly can and also not only keep on top of the job and improve yourself as a caster, be objective and look-over your own stuff, you have to also keep up with the game, and the scene, and the players, otherwise you won’t be able to build storylines and you won’t know what you’re talking about.
[Otherwise] You would be bringing things that weren’t relevant. The game changes, it gets patched so often, there’s new maps and that sort of things. The meta for the game really does evolve very rapidly. You have to keep up with it otherwise you’ll be talking about stuff that’s not relevant anymore and you really won’t be adding to the commentary.
You have to really have to have your finger on the pulse for the game, which was really tough with a full-time job. I had to watch it my spare time. You have to put a lot of time and effort into it and take it seriously, which I honestly didn’t for a very long time.
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The Roar: How could someone who wants to get into casting now, not necessarily just in StarCraft, do so and what advice would you give to someone who’s starting out?
Maynarde: A lot of people have asked me that. Whenever someone asks me that question, I start off by saying ‘why are you doing it? Are you doing it because you want to be famous, because you want money, or because you love the game?’ I tell them there is a right or wrong answer to this question, so please get it right before we go onto the next part.
The Roar: I’m guessing it’s the latter.
Maynarde: Exactly. If they’re not doing it because they love it, then they won’t succeed. You have to love it. You have to be ready to put in tons of hours and tons of your own time, money, blood, sweat, and tears into it before you see any return.
I paid thousands and thousands of dollars. I don’t even want to think about the amount of money I spent on flights and accommodations to take myself to even local tournaments around Australia for the StarCraft II circuit, that was back in the day, just so I could go and commentate for free, which is what I did for years.
I did it with my own money because I could afford it and because I loved it. The whole idea of making money commentating didn’t really even process to me until it actually started happening for real.
I tell people, don’t do it to chase fame. Don’t do it because you want to be a big-shot. You’ve got to do it because you love it. Start and don’t stop because if you stop then you fail. If you keep going, then it’s just persistence. You got to keep up with it.
A lot of people start and then get dejected because of how much work it is or how little progress they feel like they’re making. There are a lot of things that I would suggest in that regard.
Don’t feel ashamed to approach anyone in the scene, like the bigger names in StarCraft or whatever game that you follow. Approach them on social media – a lot of them will respond to whoever. They’re not just in some ivory tower out in the middle of nowhere where you can’t actually access them. We’re all accessible on social media.
Access us, send us videos for feedback, talk to us on social media, talk to us on our Twitch streams. A lot of us are streamers as well for the extra revenue and also because we like to play games and interact with the community live.
Interact with us. Jump on board, talk to us. We’ll give you feedback. I give people feedback daily. People either making video content or trying to become commentators themselves, or even streamers.
The Roar: When you are actually casting a game, what are you looking at for mainly when you are casting StarCraft specifically?
Maynarde: One of the hugest features for a play-by-play person in StarCraft II is that you want to see whether or not they’re keeping all their workers at home. A lot of the action, especially Legacy of the Void, came with the worker change. You start with more workers in Legacy of the Void.
In the first two expansions, you started with six workers, [so] a lot of the game would generally start with a player producing workers for a little bit before anything really kicked into gear, so you had a little bit of downtime in the early stages.
Now you sort of build immediately, because you’re good to go – you’ve got 12 workers.
You want to see if they’re keeping the workers at home because there could be an aggressive player, like they’re moving across the maps. You have to look at the game map a lot, the little map in the bottom left corner, to make sure where the players are going.
Your camera only shows you so much for the main view of the screen, but the minimap shows you everything as a commentator.
Also, there’s a lot of information tabs that are very important as a commentator. Production tab is very important; what are they producing? When are they producing it? You’re looking at the clock as well. All of this information is on the left top end side of the screen and the left bottom side of screen.
The main things you want to look at as well, are they producing a lot of structures, are they going for a timely attack, or are they producing a lot of workers and bases and going macro-focused and then bringing those things up?
It could be that or there’s potentially a weakness in their play here, or a weakness [in that] they’re powering up for next level with the other player having a bigger army. All that information’s available on the screen.
The cool thing as a caster is, if you want to see something in particular – if the observer speaks English – you can say stuff like, “I really would love to see the income graph right now because I feel like it’d be really skewed for one player” and then they’ll bring it up. You see that income graph of that spike or that player having a big boost there to their income.
StarCraft II’s esports legacy is still world class. (Photo: Blizzard Entertainment)
The Roar: What would you consider to be the main challenges when you’re casting a game?
Maynarde: The main challenges of casting a game are for me, it’s … I’m primarily known as an excitement machine, where I play hype caster kind of guy. People call me ‘the hype guy’.
Sometimes matches just aren’t hype. Sometimes they just end.
It’s your job to keep people watching. Sometimes a match or even a series will not be very exciting, but you have to talk about it like the other guy has a chance.
Maybe one guy is extremely favoured over the other person and you know that because you’ve seen that player get dominated so many times by that other player and the history is against them, but you always build it up as “streaks are meant to be broken. Surely, eventually it will end, could it be this one?” stuff like that.
Sometimes it’s hard to make the stories stick with a crowd that isn’t buying what you’re selling. They’re not eating what you’re cooking. They’re not picking up what you’re putting down.
It is sometimes a struggle to make those really one-sided series look not so one-sided and give people hope that the other player can come back.
Then those games that are really just kind of over, you explain to the crowd, “Hey guys, sometimes StarCraft games just end and that’s all part of it”.
Sometimes someone goes for an aggressive play and you know that your crowd’s going to be, “Bull. This race is a cheesy race” or “He’s a cheesy player.”
You have to get ready to catch that without even looking at Twitch chat or anything like that. You’ve got to say, “A win is a win. This is a tournament. They’re playing for victory here. That’s absolutely a legitimate strategy to go for something a little dirty.”
The Roar: I understand you do follow some AFL and NFL. How would compare the casting in StarCraft to commentary in traditional sports?
Maynarde: A lot of traditional sports will have play-by-play people who will cover the explosive action parts and then you have your stats people. That’s very similar to commentary in esports.
I think every single esport generally has a colour commentator and their play-by-play commentator. They have someone that has the stats, that has the player knowledge, going through with someone that has player knowledge as well as a little bit of game knowledge, but mainly the ability to not trip over themselves and really eloquently bring the action to someone like they’re listening to it on the radio.
Stuff like that is really, really important. Even though there’s stuff happening on the screen, you still have to talk about it because you have cast it like it’s on the radio, just like most sportscasters would for AFL.
I really look up to Bruce McAvaney as a guy who’s very inspirational from traditional Australian sports to a lot of what of I do. I think he’s a stats man, he’s a monster for stats. He seems to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of players all the way back to the ’90’s and so on.
I strive to have something similar to that, just to be able to whip out player knowledge at any point in time and any tournament and really make everything flow really well as the play-by-play guy. I’ve been trying to up my analysis as well.
I find, as far as traditional sports goes, StarCraft very similar to the NFL in the sense that there is often a lot of build-up and a lot of strategy involved, and then there’s an explosive act and then it calms down a little bit.
It’s like two waves crashing into each other and then they pull back to get ready for the next play. You have your wide receivers going around the outside and that’s like in StarCraft too.
You could be hitting them in one place, making them look over there while you’re hitting them in a different spot, very similar in that regard.
NFL to me is more of a – obviously, it’s a very athletic game – but it’s also a very strategic game as well. Whereas AFL is very much an athletic, mechanical experience. You very rarely are pulling a fast one on the other team.