Lionscreed UK Fortnite player George ‘Bloomy’ Bloomfield (pictured above) had his PC unplugged mid-tournament at DreamHack Summer 2023 in a surreal moment of madness.
Why did this happen, what else should you know about the 24-year-old Fortnite player – and how did other UK talent perform in the tournament? Dom Sacco spoke to Bloomy to find out.
Bloomy was playing with his duo partner and fellow UK Lionscreed player, Rabid, in the $250,000 DreamHack Summer 2023 Zero Builds Fortnite Open.
In heat three, they got off to an almost perfect start, when their PCs were shut down.
Someone had pulled the plug on them, on purpose.
The perpetrator? A civil engineer called Fredric Morenius.
Fredric’s actions also caught the attention of the gaming community for other reasons.
Jake Lucky reported on the man’s anti-gaming views, with Fredric saying: “[Gaming] culture is not sustainable. It is escapism and an escape from responsibility and opportunity. It is neither Putin nor the weather that will kill us, but ourselves.”
Fredric said in other tweets that he’s played ‘a huge amount of games’ when he was younger.
“Fortunately, I moved on after that, when I realised how much more important and rich [things there are] to do, and need to be done,” he added.
Fredric’s argument was that: “I just pulled the plug on a guy who thought it was a good idea to take our table’s outlet so our computers would have no power, instead of using his own table.
“He was not at all happy when the box went black in the middle of an important game of Fortnite.”
“Let this be a lesson,” Fredric added. “Mess around without thinking and [having] respect for others, [and you’ll] recieve consequences Also: you seem old enough to stop playing and act as an adult man.
“You unplugged the black four way extension for our tables so that my daughter and I did not have any power, and you have a problem with us restoring it.”
In other tweets he added: “I didn’t look or care who had taken our power. F*** around and meet consequences. I would never unplug peoples stuff at another table in the first place. Only people with no manners to something like that.”
‘Absolute doughnut’ potentially costs UK Fortnite player Bloomy thousands of pounds in lost earnings
Bloomy of course disagrees with Fredric’s version of events. He told Esports News UK: “So you have four heats to qualify for the finals, and it’s massively high stakes. It’s a $250,000 tournament, and more importantly, the top ten places qualify for the $2m Gamers8 LAN in Saudi Arabia, all expenses paid. I went last year and it’s amazing, it’s life-changing money and the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
“So the way DreamHack set out their desks, they have extension ports in the middle of the desks. There’s multiple extensions all along, and you plug in your extension lead into their extension. You have one slot out of this extension lead, and everyone plugs into these slots. Obviously there isn’t an extension lead long enough to cover the whole length of the hall without there being cables everywhere, so they have these connectors – a single plug. These stay plugged in.
“He unplugged the connector for all the extension leads, so mine and my teammate’s PCs completely went off. We were in the middle of a really good game, we had loads of kills off spawn, we were in a great position with great loot – it was the best start to a game we had all tournament and out of all qualifiers including DreamHack Dallas. And we would’ve qualified from heat three, but we didn’t because he unplugged our computers.
“We ended up qualifying for the finals in heat four [after he switched off my PC], but I was so annoyed going into the next game, we died off spawn twice, I had to close my eyes and do breathing exercises to calm down a bit! But we ended up not qualifying for Gamers8. So his actions cost us thousands of dollars.”
Bloomy, Lionscreed
“He’s two seats away from me, and I said to him, ‘what are you doing? You just unplugged our computers’. And he said, ‘no, no, you’re plugged into our port’. And I said no, that’s the connector for these extension leads provided by DreamHack.
“He brought his own extension lead and was trying to plug it straight into the long connector, in front of his PC, which he shouldn’t have done – he should’ve plugged it into the extension lead which was by my computer. I couldn’t be more clear to him about it, I told him he might have ruined our chances of qualifying. But he was just so stubborn and wouldn’t listen to me. He thought I stole his slot. And this was in front of his young daughter, who had a PC, and he had a laptop.
“He just didn’t care. He knew we were playing, and he admitted [he pulled the plug] to teach me a lesson, because he thought I was in the wrong. If he’d have just asked me [before unplugging our PCs], I could’ve explained to him it was DreamHack that set the plugs up like that. Or if he’d done it by accident and apologised, I would’ve been annoyed in the moment but fine with it afterwards. Luckily the guy opposite me was really nice and said I could use his socket.”
Did Bloomy report the situation to DreamHack?
“The Coalition of Parents in Esports are currently in contact with DreamHack and are talking to the reps there,” Bloomy added.
“He’s one of those strongly opinionated people that is rude online to people. I think it’s so unfair [for him to compare] gaming to Putin and say that gamers are killing themselves [by playing games].”
What is Bloomy’s background in esports and Fortnite?
Not wanting this article to be too negative, let’s focus now on Bloomy as a player and his time in esports, before looking at what else happened at DreamHack as a recap.
Bloomy said: “I’m probably the oldest Fortnite pro in Europe at 24 years old (he tells us Liquipedia incorrectly states his age as 28).
“I’ve been signed to Lionscreed for about 18 months or so now. I travel to every tournament possible, I’ve played video games my whole life, I started playing CS 1.6 when I was six years old.
“I’ve always been competitive, and started competing and earning a bit of money in Call of Duty when I was about 15 years old. Then I switched to PC, played H1Z1, the first battle royale, when it came out. Then I transitioned to Fortnite and got good at it. There was a low access point to earn money at the start, like the World Cup qualifiers. And I’ve been pursuing it full-time.”
What about Bloomy’s views on the current state of competitive Fortnite?
“As long as the money is still in Fortnite, it’ll carry on being a thing,” he replied. “Epic Games has shown time and time again they don’t really compare about competitive compared to other games. They do updates, but whenever there’s an update there’s a problem, like a bug or issue. I sympathise with them, because there’s no other game that ships out as much content as they do, but they sort of go back on the previous words they’ve said.
“They said they’d focus on the players, at the start, but the money in competing is only worth it now if you’re at the top.”
UK orgs almost win $250,000 DreamHack Summer 2023 Fortnite zero build tournament
DreamHack Open Featuring Fortnite, a Zero Build Duos competition that debuted at DreamHack San Diego, brought its third installation to Sweden, following a successful run at DreamHack Dallas.
Available to all BYOC ticket holders, the three-day competition at DreamHack Summer 2023 provided an opportunity for attendees of all skill levels to try their talents for $250,000 in prize money, including Bloomy.
After four heats of competition on June 16th to 18th, the finals crowned the top 10 duos that also qualified for Gamers8 Featuring Fortnite, a $2m event taking place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in July.
Guild Esports’ Danish Fortnite player Anas and Tundra Esports’ UK Fortnite player Pinq ended up finishing second at DreamHack Summer 2023.
They took home $25,000 and qualified for the Gamers8 2023 tournament.
The tournament was won by Galaxy Racer duo Malibuca (from Russia) and Th0masHD (from Denmark). They received the $45,000 top prize and also qualified for Gamers8.
Elsewhere, UK player Veno finished ninth with Serbian player Queasy, while UK player zMax finished 14th with Portuguese player Hyrax.
As mentioned, Lionscreed UK players Bloomy and Rabid finished 22nd, taking home $3,000.
What else happened at DreamHack Summer 2023?
Aside from Bloomy’s shenanigans, plenty of other esports tournaments took place.
ESL StarCraft II Masters wraps up, Serral from team Basilisk wins
Following an action-packed weekend, team Basilik’s Serral and Psistorm Gaming’s GuMihotook to the stage for the ESL StarCraft II Masters Finals.
Serral, a former IEM Katowice champion and regular top placing player at previous DH SC2 Masters, was crowned the winner, taking home the lion’s share of the grand prize of $75,000 and 8,300 ESL Pro Tour (EPT) Points.
Svenska Elitserien: 00 Prospects Crowned Champions in Grand Finals
Swedish “Elitserien”, the most significant domestic league in CSGO, drew to a close today at DreamHack Summer.
After a weekend of tough battles, 00 Prospects and Young Ninjas went head to head for the crown, with 00 Prospects named Swedish Champions for the second season in a row.
FGC sees new champions
DreamHack, in collaboration with Phoenix Blue, brought fighting games back at DreamHack Summer. The festival played host to tournaments for Street Fighter 6, Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Tekken 7 across the weekend, with players competing for a chance to win a share of the 30,000 SEK prize pool.
Cosplay Championship winners
A whole host of characters took to the stage for DreamHack Summer’s Cosplay Championship in hopes of taking home a share of the 25,000 SEK prize pool. Judged by professional cosplayers Yumidun, Enayla and Trine.k.n, winners included:
- Kids Winner: CosSiz Flos (as Skull Kid from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask)
- Novice Winner: Shapeshift.cos (as Pyro Abyssmage from Genshin Impact)
- Artisan Winner: Bikus_Cos (as Gore Magala Armor from Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak)
- Expert Winner: 8Z Cosplay (as Twitch from League of Legends)
There’s more in our DreamHack Summer 2023 preview 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.
