Justin Groot
Kill Screen
Atlanta, GA, United States
Contact Justin
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Justin:
Building a better shovel: depth in competitive videogames
For a term that gets thrown around so much in videogame criticism, it sure is hard to come up with a clear definition for “depth.” What makes a competitive game deep? It’s not raw complexity: you can make a real-time strategy game with 400 complicated soldier units to choose from, but if one is superior, … Continued → Read More
Both flesh and, somehow, light: Axe Williamson and the electric thrill of Melee
Header art by Gareth Damian Martin. /// Eight-year-old Jeffrey Williamson plays Super Smash Bros. 64 for the first time in 1999. He likes Pokémon, so he picks Pikachu. Soon, he’s beating his friends handily; he thinks he’s pretty good. Two years pass. Super Smash Bros. Melee comes out. Jeffrey plays that too. Eventually he hears … Continued → Read More
Finally, a Dota 2 tournament on a whale-murdering hedonism tanker
Seven years after the then-universal SNL meme-anthem “I’m on a Boat” would have lent the stunt even the faintest scrap of cultural relevance, the organizers who brought you the Nanyang Dota 2 Championships and the Nanyang Dota 2 Championships 2: Revenge of Nanyang Dota 2 Championships—plus a brief but disastrous portion of the much-derided Shanghai … Continued → Read More
GG EZ: Blizzard’s Sisyphean struggle to subdue the darkness within us all
As long as competitive videogames have had chat windows, they’ve had angry players who use them chiefly to hurl slurs and invective. This should surprise no one. If election season has taught us anything, it’s that people of all stripes and political affiliations are, if not inherently mean, then at least prone to saying a … Continued → Read More
Meet Mr. Lz, the 14 year old who's making waves in Super Smash Bros.
When the Smash player known as Mr. Lz won his first major, Paragon 2015 Project M (PM) singles, he was only 13 years old. That’s impressive until you remember that Mozart composed his first symphony at age eight. Still, we thought Mr. Lz’s accomplishments were far and away impressive enough to kick off our community-driven … Continued → Read More
The Meta Review: Dota 2 6.88
Here at The Meta, we believe that every Dota 2 patch is a whole new game. Taking that to its logical conclusion, I am proud to present the first review of an individual Dota 2 patch in the long and illustrious history of Serious Videogame Journalism. Since we’re treading new waters here, I think it’s … Continued → Read More
This weekend, you should be watching Shine 2016
The pitch: Super Smash Bros. gets another major tournament this weekend, as North America’s top players gather in Boston Harbor for Shine 2016. Considering how close the Smash 4 and Melee scenes have proven to be in recent months, it’s likely to be a weekend of upsets and razor-blade victories. How to watch: Free on: and … Continued → Read More
Let's talk about the latest feud in League of Legends over the problems with franchising in esports
“I love me some Regi,” wrote Riot Co-CEO Marc Merrill in a now-infamous Reddit thread Monday, “but if he’s so concerned about the financial health of his players, maybe he should spend some more of the millions he has made from League of Legends on paying them instead of investing in other esports where he … Continued → Read More
What do you do when a game breaks midmatch?
On Sunday, TSM squared off against CLG in the 2016 North American LCS Semifinal. All signs pointed to a close match: a Grand Finals rendezvous between the two teams in the Spring Playoffs had ended in a close 3-2 victory for CLG. Game one of Sunday’s match started off promising for CLG, with midlaner Choi … Continued → Read More
Inside the battle for the soul of competitive Pokémon
Header illustration by Gareth Damian Martin If you ask YouTube content creator Verlisify, there’s a cancer eating away at the heart of competitive Pokémon. Verlisify, whose channel has over 200,000 subscribers, is the most prominent crusader against a form of tool-assisted play he claims runs rampant throughout even the highest levels of The Pokémon Company’s … Continued → Read More
A very brief history of awkward esports champagne ceremonies
It’s no secret that esports tournaments borrow broadcast conventions from more traditional sports. Many of these elements, like instant replays and snappy uniforms, were natural additions to the esports milieu; others, like the champagne ceremony, have had what might charitably be called mixed results. Consider the champagne ceremonies of traditional sports: the dignified tradition of … Continued → Read More
An ode to hard-working, salt-of-the-earth Torbjörn
Torbjörn is a dwarf. He builds things. What Blizzard did to come up with Torbjörn was look at Team Fortress 2 and say, “Which World of Warcraft archetype would the Engineer be?” Obviously the answer is dwarf, because dwarves are squat and grumpy, and they build things. You play Torbjörn because you want to play tower defense I can’t tell you what it’s like to play Torbjörn, because I have never… → Read More
Can Blizzard resuscitate StarCraft with an HD edition of Brood War?
Here’s a mystery: why has Super Smash Bros. Melee, a videogame from 2001 with zero developer support, outdated graphics, and a minuscule player base, outlived so many much younger, better-promoted esports? Games that achieve both widespread popularity and lasting tier-one-esport status are rare. Often, as with Super Smash Bros. Melee, they are flukes: games that … Continued → Read More
Dota 2 is losing a major tournament, but that's not a bad thing
On August 1st, 2016, unspecified representatives of Valve Software confessed to a crowd of players, managers, and associated staff at The International 2016 (TI6) that a grievous error had been made via the facilitation, over the previous twelve months, of TOO MUCH competitive Dota 2. If that sounds like an odd pronouncement, it kind of … Continued → Read More
EVO 2016 might be the most competitive smash tournament ever
The Trojan War was a great story, but I’ve always thought the parts with Achilles were lame. I never liked the way the nigh-invincible demigod was ankle-cheesed out of contention by a camper with a bow and arrow. Also, Hector was my favorite character, and we all know how that turned out. Even though Achilles ultimately gave him the business, Hector still defeated tens of thousands of Greek… → Read More
The perverse beauty of streaming the democratic national convention on twitch
Sometime around the moment Barack Obama won Iowa, a little cartoon light bulb lit up above the heads of some 10,000 or so campaign managers and associated staff nationwide. The light bulb was duly followed by a thought bubble containing the words “young people also vote, sometimes.” Since then, every political campaign, Super PAC, and fair & balanced cable news network has been racking its… → Read More
What would a trump presidency mean for esports?
Unless you have been living under a stack of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition boxes for the past year and a half, you’ve probably heard that a six-foot-tall, pasty, third-grade-vocabularied sack of racist bile and vitriol, ensconced in an expensive suit and a greasy toupee, has a small but non-negligible chance of becoming the next president of the United States of America.… → Read More
The Summer's Biggest Counter-Strike LAN Imploded in a Major Way
On paper, ESL One Cologne had all the makings of a successful Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) tournament. The in-game production was led by PGL, a company that Dota 2 fans liked so much they begged Valve to retain it for every event after the Manila Major. PGL succeeded at the Manila Major through a combination of innovation, nimble response to fan feedback, and an omnipresent sense of… → Read More