killzx With In-Depth germaine Interview - Introduction

Having been one of the United Kingdom's strongest players in recent years, Leonidas "killzx" Kyrkos has now decided to not only focus on the gaming bit of his career, as he found the standard interview to be lacking greatly in depth, he took up the challenge of producing an interviewing series that would really give the reader something interesting.

For his opening interview, he chose none other than current LowLandLions star player, Declan "germaine" Elcocks who answers questions about his past, present and future as well as some tactical advice about how to counter teams and what you need to become part of the top tier level in Call of Duty 4.

The interview is entirely created by Leonidas "killzx" Kyrkos, TEK9 is merely offering a platform for his interview to be shown on.

1. Hello Declan, could you give us a brief introduction to who you are in-game and out?

Hi there Leonidas, I suppose in-game I see myself as the consistent AK within our team, calling and predicting what the opposition will do, while trying not to be angry on TS these days! Out of game I'm currently at university in Leicester, studying Computer Science.

2. At what point did you join the Call of Duty community? Was there a period where you played and were totally unaware of the online user community? If so, when did you begin to interact with players on a more intimate level than simply joining a random server and killing them?

I was first introduced to FPS games by a friend at school back in the day that funnily enough was in a "clan" which I thought was amazing, bunch of guys playing together in a war on Teamspeak. I played public with him quite a bit and learnt what the whole idea of what a scrim was; I ended up playing a lot of mixes and publics with him and some other people I'd met online. I never really took anything seriously at all until I picked up CoD4, and even then I picked the game up 5 or 6 months after it was released. I played a load of pickups as by this point I was a regular browser of tek9, and ironically I used to play a lot of pickups with or against ono and constantly accuse him of cheating :D But anyway, I saw all these people travelling to various countries and it really made me want to be as good as them to have the same experiences. I found myself watching some VODs in my spare time as hardly anyone released demos, spending some time on a server, watching my own demos, just trying to improve in any way I could. I think my first CoD4 team was with myzz, Stylez and a couple of others, and here I am, still trying to improve where I can!

3. When in your gaming career did you begin to consider the possibility that you could succeed at the top level of a game, or did it occur organically without much self assessment?

I only really thought to myself that I could succeed at the top level when I joined TCM really, before then I was in a team which had the potential to be one of the better teams within the UK and we were slowly improving, the only problem I saw near the end of the team was that I was scoping! But once in TCM, I still wasn't entirely sure how we would do, I knew Adam, Robin and Phantasy were awesome players, but I had never really spoken to Carl before. We got to i36 with about a week's practice and immediately I really liked them, Carl definitely brought everyone together for the whole team spirit thing. When we crashed out of the tournament in 3rd place despite an awesome comeback against Reason, I was surprised how upbeat the guys were still, and I realised at the event that the team chemistry was perfect, and after coming online after the event, the guys were really desperate to win. But for me, it wasn't me realising that I could succeed at a top level, I see it more like how the team could do.

a face in the crowd, watching the Gamersject Winter Challenge Grand Final...