Space Soldiers

» see spacesoldiers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Space Soldiers was a Turkish esports organization, founded in Istanbul in 2014 by an investor named Bünyamin Aydın and registered as Space Gaming A.Ş. It announced its Counter-Strike team on 17 January 2015: Emre "e1" Biçer, İsmailcan "XANTARES" Dörtkardeş, Cihan "ONLY" Gönek, Tugay "TuGuX" Keskin and Çağatay "DESPE" Sedef. There was a FIFA division as well, and an academy squad under the main roster.

For about three years it did something nobody in Turkey had managed. The roster shifted, as they do, with Engin "ngiN" Kor coming in at the start of 2016 and Ahmet "paz" Karahoca debuting that February, and the results kept climbing. Semi-finals at Copenhagen Games in 2016, then second place at WESG 2017, a global tournament with Chinese prize money behind it. In 2018 they qualified for both Majors, Boston in January and London in September, which is the level at which a Counter-Strike team stops being a national curiosity.

XANTARES was the reason most of the world knew the name. He played an aggressive, unreasonable style that broke tournament brackets open and made highlight reels in languages he did not speak, and the whole organization ran as a frame around him and his captain, Engin "MAJ3R" Küpeli. The coach was Canpolat "hardstyle" Yıldıran. The main sponsor was ByNoGame, a Turkish game-key shop.

~ the record ~

~ before any of this ~

I played Counter-Strike in internet cafes in Turkey between about 2002 and 2005, which is the generation of the game before the one Space Soldiers played. In those places you paid by the hour, the machines were whatever the owner could afford, and the entire tournament structure was whoever was shouting across the room. Nobody was getting paid. Nobody imagined anybody would be.

So the strange part of watching Space Soldiers from a distance in 2018 was not that Turkish players were good at the game. That was never in question in any cafe I ever sat in. It was that the thing had acquired a company registration and a payroll, and that the payroll turned out to be the part that did not work.

~ the fall ~

The reporting around the split is consistent on one point: the players were signed on salaries that were low for the level they were competing at, low enough that the coverage framed it as players not being paid enough to live on. A team attending two Majors in a calendar year has a market value, and the five men on that roster could see it.

On 13 October 2018 they published a joint statement. "However, our long term plans did not match with the Space Soldiers organization. Therefore, we players announce our separation from the organization." They thanked the staff, confirmed they had not yet begun talking to anyone else, and said they would compete as ex-Space Soldiers until they found a home.

~ what got buried with it ~

The organization ceased operations the same day. There was no sale and no quiet rebrand under caretaker ownership. The roster had been the only asset and it left as a unit, which left nothing behind to run. XANTARES signed for the German organization BIG in December 2018 and spent the following years in the Berlin scene.

Turkish Counter-Strike did not stop, but it lost the one organization that had carried a Turkish name onto a Major stage, and the players who did it spent the rest of their careers under foreign logos. spacesoldiers.com no longer resolves.

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