A Love Story: FIFA, an iPod and Audiobooks

My first love is a very long story, and I’m still writing it. Today, read the story of my third love.

This story started in the Mehran University point in Hyderabad. I was talking to my dear friend Mateen bhai, telling him that I play games, and properly, at a professional level (we didn’t know what professional meant yet, we were kids).

Mateen bhai said: Do you play FIFA?

I replied: No yaar, I really want to, but there’s no one to play with. Playing against the computer is no fun.

Bhai said: I’m here, yaar.

I said: Great, come to Raheel bhai’s gaming zone, we’ll have fun.

Now FIFA, a football computer game, I had played in 2002. This was 2006, and the 2006 version was the one being played at that time.

I had made a commitment to bhai, so I took permission from Raheel bhai, installed FIFA on one computer and started practising. Mateen bhai came after quite a few days because he was busy with other things.

Then we played FIFA and had a lot of fun. Other friends at the gaming zone saw us playing and said things like, what is this strange game, what are its rules, and so on.

At that time I mostly played Counter-Strike, which is a team game with 5 players in each team. Our team’s name was Simplicity, and during matches we used the initials Simp (which is really funny when I think about it today 😂). Team games have a lot of fighting, and I was really fed up with it (actually I was a useless player, it was a shooting and strategy game and I was very weak at it). I kept playing FIFA, both at home and at the gaming zone. Raheel bhai, Zeeshan bhai, Fahad and many other friends slowly started getting into the game.

I started playing the game online at an international level. There was a platform called GameOn, where most of the gamers were Iranian. The connection was very bad, but we didn’t care. In the same way, for both the game and business, we started organising tournaments. Raheel bhai was happy, and we were happy too.

Then I found a platform called ESL, where I got the chance to play with European players, and I found out what a professional gamer really is. I made friends: Saad Naseem from Islamabad, Waleed from Karachi, Umar bhai, Babar the Great, Farrukh the Magician, Nadeem bhai from Abbottabad, and a group called Fifa Online Pakistan was formed.

So where is my love, my passion, in all this?

Because of this game, I went on my first fully funded trip to Lahore in 2008 to play a tournament, and went to Lahore again in 2009. I went to Karachi twice.

But thanks to this game, I found a love that is still with me today. As the prize for winning a tournament in 2008, I got an iPod mini, which was a media player. You can think of it as an MP3 player.

When I got it, I had nothing to listen to on it. I had no interest at all in songs. I listened to 99 Problems just to look cool.

At that time I really wanted to learn English. Who knows where, or who, gave me this tip: listen to English audiobooks, and if you don’t understand, then at the start keep the PDF of the same book on the screen in front of you, and keep listening and reading together.

From that day to today, the listening is still going on. If I can’t read a book, I definitely listen to it. This is a love and passion whose story is going on along with the story of my life. Maybe by now the count has gone into the thousands.

Apologies to all the friends whose names I missed. And if I’ve broken the leg of the language anywhere, please do correct me.