One of the UK’s top esports players, Jake ‘Boaster’ Howlett, has been immortalised in a new animated music video to promote the upcoming Valorant Champions 2022 tournament.
The Fnatic Valorant player is featured in cartoon form at the 2:31 mark in the ‘Fire Again’ video published by Riot Games.
The song, ‘Fire Again’, features the vocals of popular American artist Ashnikko, aka Ashton Nicole Casey, and has been produced by Grabbitz. Ashnikko appears courtesy of Parlophone Records Limited.
“The worlds of agents and pros collide in a race for the Champions trophy. Check out the official anthem and music video for Champions 2022 “Fire Again ft. Ashnikko”, reads the blurb in the YouTube description.
Fnatic qualified for Valorant Champions earlier this year. The tournament is essentially the Valorant world championship, and will feature 16 of the world’s best Valorant esports teams. Valorant Champions will take place from September 2nd to 18th 2022 in Istanbul.
There are more than 40 Valorant players in the video to ‘Fire Again’ overall.
This tweet from org Paper Rex got the community talking and sharing names on Twitter:
Other players include Shroud, Stax, Benkai, TenZ, Zeek, Magnum, Asuna, Mixwell, Victor, Trent, Xeppaa and more.
Women Valorant players also made an appearance in the video, such as Naxy, C9 meL and G2 Mimi, who won a record three VCT Game Changers women’s tournaments in a row earlier this year with G2 Gozen.
The community responded very positively to the video, with 55,000 likes on Twitter and almost 2m views on YouTube at the publication of this article.
It mirrors Riot’s marketing strategy for League of Legends Worlds tournaments, where it produces a song prior to each one.
For the Worlds 2021 song, Riot sneaked a Mad Lions meme into the ‘Burn It All Down’ music video.
Thanks to Lliandra for her intel and help with this article
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
