Olympic Esports Series 2023: Lucas 'anon' Malissa wins ISSF Challenge featuring Fortnite shooting event
The OCE Fortnite player proved to be the fastest on the day, topping the qualifying time trial and recording the day's best time before winning the best-of-three final.
Lucas 'anon' Malissa is the inaugural Olympic Esports Series winner in shooting after winning the ISSF Challenge featuring Fortnite.
The Australian was the fastest player in the event through the specially created map in Fortnite, which tested players' aim, accuracy, speed, as well as in-game building and editing abilities.
He was the top qualifier from the time-trial stage, and continued his blistering pace through the quarter-finals and semi-finals, completing the map in under two minutes in both those rounds.
That matched the OCE (Oceania region) man up against NA's (North America region) Alexander 'Boltz' Feyzjou in the best-of-three final. Boltz had reached the final after his semi-final opponent and anon's fellow OCE player, Sebastian 'Suns' Cole, forgot a target and fell way behind Boltz.
The final appeared to draw the nerves out of anon, who put in his two slowest runs of the day. In both games of the final, Boltz was slightly ahead or just behind anon heading into the final stage, the rails, but missed the last jump through the finish line.
"I was really nervous! I'm really happy, excited," anon said. "The two runs, they were not that great – I'm pretty sure Boltz fumbled under pressure. They were my worst two runs out of the five so I guess I'm lucky."
The one-off third-place match between Suns and Andrejs 'Merstach' Piratovs went the way of Merstach, who had been unlucky to come up against anon in the semi-finals. Merstach had clocked a 1:59 time in the semi only to see anon record a 1:56, but gained some redemption by recording another sub-two-minute time in the third-place match, beating Suns to the finish.