Toto Junkies
Toto junkies.
SpaceCraft 2.
The sequel to the game that created the eSports boom.
These days it gets treated like some folk pastime.
If you were born in the nineties, it would be no exaggeration to say everyone had played it at least once. That was how wildly popular it had been.
Yet it never managed to inherit the stature of its predecessor. SpaceCraft 2 flopped commercially in Korea.
Still, one corner of the scene was doing surprisingly well.
Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul Special City. The venue where the SpaceCraft 2 tournament was unfolding. The familiar roar of the MC kicked the curtain up.
"Please, please…"
"I put my entire fucking fortune on this, man."
For all the hype they tried to whip up, the place never quite caught fire. The air in the stands was a completely different story—anxious faces, people chewing their nails down to the quick, bloodshot eyes staring ahead. At a glance, they looked nothing like ordinary spectators.
"They must be huge fans."
"Fans?"
"They're worried their player might lose, right?"
"Well, I suppose you could look at it that way."
I had come to the arena with Hye-ri. What she said wasn't entirely off base.
If that were true, they'd be healthy fans.
But the people here carried an entirely different kind of heart. Same bed, different dreams. We settled into seats somewhere among them, ready to watch the match.
Before long both teams' players filed into their booths.
"It's been forever since I came to watch a Star match."
"You've been before?"
"I used to love Star. Went once with some school friends…"
Hye-ri chattered on, spinning out her little reminiscences. There was a slight generational gap, but—
Looks like our eras just barely overlapped.
Through the 2010s it had still been the mainstream. Even girls knew SpaceCraft well enough. They would show up at tournaments the way people go to concerts. There had been a time when it was that cool.
All ancient history now. It didn't take long to feel how thoroughly the times had changed.
"Do people still do that these days?"
"Do what?"
"You know—that thing! The big cheering."
Hye-ri waved her arms cutely. It was the classic fan culture of SpaceCraft.
Even early League of Legends scenes took cues from it.
××× Fighting!
The moment a player's face and starting position lit up the screen, the crowd would bellow at full volume. It was a kind of fandom war—seizing the momentum with sheer noise.
"Hard to pull that off when—"
"There really aren't many people here."
"They came for a completely different reason."
"?"
Those voices weren't entirely gone. A handful of true fans still shouted. But it never rose above scattered noise.
Most of them don't give a damn about the players themselves.
What mattered was the win or loss. If that were all, you could still call them hardcore fans who simply loved the game.
The casters' assessment. At the same moment, muttering rose from the seats beside us.
"How the hell is this even?!"
"They're acting like Park Isaac didn't single-handedly tank the Protoss win rate…"
"Even my ass."
They were seething. Nobody hearing them would laugh it off as a joke.
"Lots of salty people here."
"Yeah."
"They ought to sit up straighter."
"When money's on the line, the eyes start spinning."
"Money?"
There are moments when people lose all reason and go pure emotion—when losing would truly ruin them.
Exactly like getting bag-held in stocks.
The spectators watching the match. Most of them clutched phones in their hands. Some checked the screens more often than they watched the game itself. Plenty of phone addicts in the world, so that alone wasn't strange. But considering they had bothered to come all the way to the arena—
"Fuck… the odds are two-to-one."
"This is so goddamn shitty. Why does everything I bet on lose?"
Their purpose for being here was entirely different. SpaceCraft 2 was the hottest eSports toto market around.
『GSL Group B Match 1』
Go Dong-geon (T) 2.40 VS 1.30 Hwang Gwang-jo (P)
Log onto the site and you found the match list complete with odds. A system for putting money on who would win or lose.
"If your prediction is right, they actually give you money?"
"Yeah."
"Wow… but is that even allowed?"
"Obviously illegal."
There was the official sports toto run by the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation—100 percent legal gambling recognized by the state.
But the payouts are pathetic.
The available sports were limited too. For the toto junkies who actually loved gambling, it simply didn't scratch the itch.
"Toto junkies?"
"Yeah. That's what they call people who do sports toto."
"Aren't they just regular gambling addicts?"
"There's a slight difference."
People who enjoyed toto. They were gamblers, no question, yet they weren't simply tossing money on even-or-odd. They believed themselves smart. They were convinced they could make money gambling.
Because analysis is possible.
That was exactly why SpaceCraft 2 had become so popular among the toto crowd.
The match currently underway.
Ssshak! Ssshak! Ssshak!
Terran's baneling drop was pouring in. Widow mines locked onto the workers mining minerals.
BOOM! BOOM!
A ferocious single strike. Workers caught in the splash damage died in a mass slaughter.
That was the nature of SpaceCraft. Early build-order wars could decide the entire game.
BOOM! BOOM!
The dropped widow mines. Unlike the disposable mines of Star 1, these kept firing until they were cleared. The Protoss who had opened with a Stargate was late on Observers. He couldn't remove the mines in time.
Checkmate. A difference in early builds, one tiny mistake, had decided the entire match.
"Variables like that are exactly what the toto junkies love."
"Ohh~."
"The better you know the game, the higher your betting win rate climbs."
"That makes sense."
That was the dirty little secret of how deeply toto money was tangled up in SpaceCraft. SpaceCraft 2 was even worse than its predecessor.
The whole scene basically runs on toto junkies at this point.
People even joked that if you subtracted the toto crowd, there wouldn't be any viewers left. A huge portion of the audience sitting here had money on the line.
"Hi, hihi. You retards."
Two seats down on the left diagonal. A spine-chilling little laugh drifted over. She was the reason I had come all the way to this arena today.
Mm, looking good.
She was more steeped in pure mania than I had expected. Her eyes had that slight unhinged spin—the perfect specimen of a gambler.
A low murmur rose as Match 1 ended and a short break began. In that window I shifted seats. The arena wasn't packed. People sat scattered, so moving around freely was no problem.
"Hey. That's my seat."
"Hi~."
"Not exactly the neighborhood's most famous cool-beauty stunner with an S-tier body who happens not to be a virgin, but—"
"?"
She must have just come back from the bathroom. Finding us in the seat she had been using left her visibly flustered.
Well, the virgin part is already out the window.
Hye-ri waved with a bright, welcoming expression. In reality the girl couldn't have been happy to see us at all, yet Hye-ri's social battery was bottomless.
"Ah~ seniors."
"Your parents called, you know. They said they were worried about a girl wandering around alone like this."
"Major busybody energy."
The opposite of Hye-ri. True to her generation, she walked her own path and nobody else's. First-year economics freshman Shin Da-yul, she had introduced herself as.
One hell of a wild card, this one.
Even at a glance she was not in a welcoming mood. If someone interrupted me mid-scalp on some garbage stock, I wouldn't be thrilled either.
"I already won, so I'm fine!"
"You still have to show up to school while you're doing it."
"Are you my mom?"
"Your mom said the exact same thing."
Even Hye-ri's temper flared a little. Two people performing perfectly legal Talulah were now locked in a staring contest.
Meanwhile the next match started. Match 2 was Zerg versus Protoss, and one of the players was a foreigner.
Still a star in his own right, I guess.
Apparently the game still had some overseas following—enough that foreign players would fly in for the domestic league.
"If I'm making money, what's the problem?"
"You shouldn't make your parents worry."
"If I stay home and lose, are you gonna take responsibility?!"
"Does that even matter?"
There was a certain detailed logic to it. What Da-yul was arguing wasn't completely baseless.
It's the psychological angle.
Foreign players. Their professional spirit tended to be thinner than Korean ones. Individual differences existed, of course, but Waffles was especially known for it.
"And the Protoss guy specializes in long games."
"So what?"
"What do you mean 'so what'?!"
"This girl really doesn't get it."
Hye-ri might have liked Star, but she had never watched it with any grasp of strategy. She had purely enjoyed the fan culture.
Da-yul, on the other hand, seems to have done her homework.
Victory and defeat in a game. Skill alone does not decide everything. Build-order wars do not settle every outcome either.
In the end, human beings play the game. The later the match goes, the more concentration can tip the scales.
"Look at that bastard's face."
"The foreign player?"
"Yeah. He looks like he just chewed a mouthful of shit. He's definitely about to throw some brain-dead play."
SpaceCraft was that kind of game. Even the previous title had been full of all sorts of incidents and accidents.
Like the infamous arterial sclerosis moments.
No matter how winning a position you held, one single stupid move could flush the entire game. And that was exactly what she was betting on.
Realistically the odds were abysmal. It wasn't rational analysis at all. What the casters were saying felt far more grounded.
Thud, thuk!
Brood Lords. Zerg's late-game ultimate tech unit stacked up in a massive cloud. Protoss simply did not have enough army to stop them—not in quantity, not in quality.
Wheeeeng!
It was effectively over. The Protoss player knew it too and tried to throw some kind of desperate gamble. No—it was barely even a joke. He made a handful of Hallucination Carriers and sent them out.
A miracle reverse victory landed.