Interview with bit1.

Published on WinOut.net on the 2nd of May 2009.

The former mibr captain talks about his previous teams, accomplishments and his new team Firegamers

Bruno “bit1” Fukuda has been one of the mainstays of the mibr line-up since early 2007 yet is still only the tender age of 18. With a victory at Dreamhack in 2007, back-to-back high placings at GameGune (2nd in 2007, 1st in 2008) and a 2nd at ESL EM III LA this year the young Brazilian has been one of a group who have shown that mibr is not just cogu, performing as they had done when the core of the team left for CGS. In 2009 he finds himself a member of the rival Firegamers team comprised of a number of his mibr team-mates and they look to fight for the Brazilian crown.

How would you describe the first part of your CS career when you played for teams like Global Challengers, g3x and GameCrashers? You were able to win some qualifiers and score some upset wins but I understand due to your young age you were unable to attend CPL events.

Bruno “bit1” Fukuda: Well it was a great feeling to beat big teams, but at the same time it was really bad for me and my team-mates because we were unable to attend those tournaments. We won our first qualifier in 2003 and I was only 13 years old and I couldn’t go to CPL because I was too young (CPL rules said that only people over 17 years old were able to play) I had others problems as well when g3x asked me to play a qualifier for them, right after the qualifier they asked me to join the team but after many times of trying to talk with CPL to make me able to play, I couldn’t join with them. Things came up for me when CPL ended so i didn’t have to be 17 years old to play in a big team like mibr or g3x, that was when mibr asked me to join them in january of 2007.

Upon joining mibr did you feel a lot of pressure since you were still a young player and mibr had come off a year where they’d won ESWC? How was the initial situation in winning shgOpen over some big name teams?

Bruno “bit1” Fukuda: Yes I did. In the beggining it was really hard for me, we were getting crushed every practice that we played at Inferno-Online before the tournament, we lost an online match to a Danish unknown team and I felt like things just weren’t going the right way but I didn’t think about how good they did in the last year so that helped me a lot.

Winning at my first tourmanet outside of my own country was just AMAZING, we came from the lower bracket after a loss to NoA by 6-16 and we won against many great teams that I had never played before like mouz, mym, NoA, Begrip and PGS twice in the final with a nice match where we came back after be losing by 5-10 on the first half, it was just really crazy.

At ESWC 2007 when mibr faced NoA in the semi-finals people might have seen them win by 2 maps to 0 and imagined mibr didn’t have have it took to win that match while in reality both maps were extremely close. On inferno your team won the first half 10-5 and was up 15-8 in the second half before losing the last 7 rounds and then losing in triple overtime. In one of the overtime rounds you were alive while the bomb was defused out from under you which must have been a shock. Looking back on that map how do frustrating was it to lose in that fashion and what do you remember about that key round?

Bruno “bit1” Fukuda: To be honest I don’t really know how we lost that map, that is the map that I won’t ever forget and will be always on my mind. We had so many map points and I still want to understand how we did it. If I’m not wrong on that round we had the bomb B, they were trying to take it back and there was a lot of guys shooting and talking so me and bruno couldn’t listen the guy defusing the bomb, I was just like “WTF? HOW DID HE DEFUSE THE BOMB?” I could only think that he defused with silent defuse, but on the demo I could see that I couldn’t hear because of the shots.

The second map was also extremely close as you lost on train 14-16 after fighting your way back from being down 10-15 at one point. To lose such closely fought maps one after another had to have been really painful so what is your assessment of that situation?

Bruno “bit1” Fukuda: I don’t remember too much about that map, we were trying to not think about the first map anymore, talking like “let’s go guys, its our map pick now, forget the last map” but I’m sure that it just destroyed us psychologically. It was really sad for us to be out of the ESWC Finals after those 2 maps because we knew we should have won. Watching the grand finals with so many spectators on the stage was a feeling that makes me sad when thinking that I could have been there playing, but well NoA played really good too.

Note: This interview appears to be incomplete.