Kinguin enters CS:GO with all-star roster

The long-rumored Counter-Strike team with Mikail “Maikelele” Bill at the helm has come to fruition, though not quite in the way it was expected to.

The digital game discount service Kinguin announced today that it had signed a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team. And the team features some of the biggest free agents in the game, several of whom had been tapped to join a new SK Gaming roster.

SK Gaming were once the class of Counter-Strike, but have struggled to field a Global Offensive team worthy of their storied history in prior versions of the game. After Bill’s release from LGB Esports, it became one of the worst-kept secrets in the professional scene that he and Belgian player Adil “Scream” Benrlitom were in talks to form a new team comprised of top players hailing from different nations across Europe.

Portuguese star Ricardo “Fox” Pacheco was soon included in the talks, and things seemed to be progressing steadily forward when LGB announced on their official website that they had sold the rights to Havard “Rain” Nygaard to an unnamed party.

As it turns out, it was Kinguin who ultimately pulled the trigger and pulled the team together, rounding out the squad with Alexander “Skytten” Carlsson. The organization noted that each player on the new team had been signed for the remainder of the year and would be moving into an official team house.

Bill was frank in laying out his plans for the team in an official statement.

“Our goal is simple. We want to play against the top tier teams in the top tier tournaments,” Bill said.

Bill also admitted he’d been planning the formation of a new team alongside Benrlitom ever since his rocky departure from Ninjas in Pyjamas, which could cover Bill’s team spent with LGB Esports. In spite of his own skill, Benrlitom has been without a top team to play with ever since the scandalous breaking apart of an Epsilon team.

The first challenge faced by the new team will be that of basic communication. Combining players from Sweden, Norway, France and Portugal, the aforementioned team house may come in handy just to get each player accustomed to routinely speaking in a way his new teammates can understand.

Illustration by Jason Reed