FalleN, one of the greats

FalleN’s retirement will leave a chasm in the CS scene that no mere mortal could fill.

Not least in Brazil, where his status as an icon is undeniable. FalleN’s isn’t on the Brazilian Mount Rushmore, he’s the stonecarver, the man whom without none of this would have existed. He is the man every IGL tries to be, and the IGL every man wants to play with. When KSCERATO had offers to play with some of the best teams in the world, he instead wanted to play with a FalleN in his twilight years.

That’s gravity.

His retirement, while expected, brought a crashing realisation to every Brazilian fan in and indeed out of the arena that some day your hero has to stop playing too. All of us are mortal, even those who appear immortal.

Even Francesco Totti had to retire eventually, four retirement announcements later.

FalleN will always be remembered as the man who won two Majors for Brazil, found and moulded coldzera into one of the most feared players in history, was one of the best AWPers in the world for a decent period of time and later in his career, became a rifler and found his way back to the top with FURIA, but even before any of that his impact came from dragging Brazil into the top tier of CS by sheer force of will.

His KaBuM team were the first Brazilian CSGO team of any note, and after an impressive performance at MLG X-Games Aspen in 2015 they were invited to a Major Qualifier - obviously a huge step for a team of, at the time, such a small stature and unknown players. FalleN, fer, boltz, steel and zqkS smashed Cloud9 in Aspen to get the shot, and took it.

However, they couldn’t actually afford to go to the Major, and asked the community for a favour. They needed money to get to Katowice, and an unlikely hero stepped out of the shadows. flusha isn’t a favourite player of many non-fnatic fans, but he has always commanded respect in Brazil because he donated over $1000 to get FalleN to the Major.

Without flusha, we might not be writing this article, Brazil might never have won a Major, and FURIA might have biguzera leading them right now. Who knows?

From there, they became Keyd Stars for a little bit, and then most famously, Luminosity, with whom FalleN won his first Major. Luminosity had grown into one of the best teams in the world, but this was their crowning moment and the point at which they wrote their names into history. Again, there are fine margins in top level competition, and none of know for sure how that final may have differed had GuardiaN had his wrist attached to his hand properly (that’s not an insult to the way he played, he was actually injured), or if coldzera’s jumping noscope went wildly askew like it would have done for the rest of us.

But it matters naught - because FalleN’s team, now SK Gaming, went on to win the next Major in Cologne anyway.

Columbus made them champions, but Cologne made them undeniable. They could no longer be written off, and FalleN, fer and coldzera was a fearsome trio. FalleN as a combat AWPer or an early round anti-AWPer AWPer was one of the best in the world, fer has largely gone underrated for years as one of the wildest, most destructive aggro riflers ever to touch the game, and coldzera was a better late game player than Magnus Carlsen.

In Cologne, there was no doubt. There was no ‘what if?’s, no asterisks, no coldzera jumping doubles. They simply were the best team in the world - something no Brazilian team had been before, or has been since.

There was a fall off - perhaps faster than many imagined and certainly faster than the whole of Brazil hoped, but not all of that was FalleN’s fault. coldzera had the fastest decline of any world #1 ever. TACO, without coldzera being the best player in the world, was a sacrificial lamb without a wolf. FalleN had lost his shield and his spear, and with only Brazilian players to choose from, he struggled to replace.

felps was an excellent player but had synchronicity issues with fer and boltz a jack of all trades, but not a master of late rounds like coldzera or a willing sacrifice like TACO. Everyone they tried had some sort of gelling issues, and a lot of it boiled down to their star man burning out.

They still were nowhere near ‘bad’. They top-four-ed at four more Majors as either SK or MIBR, and were often one of the few teams to run that FaZe superteam close. FalleN was still a world class IGL, but his pieces didn’t quite stand up.

Eventually, it was his time to leave the team he had built from the ground up. This… didn’t go to plan, though.

FalleN had a series of doomed endeavours post SK/MIBR - Liquid was a disaster, as it so often is, and Imperial was never truly going to achieve much past Major appearances - and it felt like his career was over. He had dragged Brazil to the top, and now, FURIA had taken over the mantle. They hadn’t quite broken the glass ceiling to become one of the best in the world, but they were an exciting team who in fits and starts found their way in and out of the top 10.

If only they had peak FalleN. Instead, they got the next best thing.

When it was announced that FURIA had paid a pretty extraordinary fee (when one needs a king, one must pay a king’s ransom), believed to be in the region of $700,000 (!), there were many disbelievers. That’s not a fee one pays for a mid-30s AWPing IGL in the modern era. It was a massive waste of money, so they said. He was past his best, so they said. In some ways, the latter was right - as an AWPer, he wasn’t hitting the heights of yesteryear, and the team were struggling.

But, ever the innovator, FalleN saw an opportunity to reinvent himself and his team. They needed a zoomer - both figuratively and literally. A young AWPer with the balls to come into a Brazilian team and make them speak his language; nay, sing to his tune. molodoy changed FURIA to an English speaking team (not technically his language, but he speaks it), changed FalleN into a rifler and turned the team into contenders.

One mustn't forget YEKINDAR, revamped and revitalised away from the graveyard of Liquid. FalleN knew all too well about how it sucks the life out of you, and trusted his gut to bring in the second of the duo from Eastern Europe. The results were magnificent.

FURIA won Thunderpick, IEM Chengdu and BLAST Rivals, and at the start of this year finished 2nd in Krakow. They’ve been superb since the additions, albeit with a little bit of a blip this year.

This was his happy ending - in his twilight years, FalleN reinvigorated Brazilian Counter-Strike and brought it, once more, into the modern day. Everyone is going international now - why shouldn’t FURIA? He recognised he could not compete, and found a kid who could. This is his legacy. Modernising, innovating, crafting the future of Brazilian CS.

FURIA were more than contenders; for a brief period last year, they were the best team in the world. They were favourites going into the Major, it’s easy to forget. It was fleeting, but most magical things are, and it was a brief yet beautiful respite in the tyrannical world of the Vitality era. We’ve seen glimpses that he can do it again, and while the last Major did not go to plan, there won’t be a dry eye in Brazil if FalleN can find one last Major trophy in his final eight months.

Perhaps in Cologne, where his magnum opus arrived back in 2016.

Wouldn’t that be a fairytale ending?