The Life and Times of Elfishguy, Australia's voice of esports

Written by Lachlan "Flamboyant" Hamilton

Jordan “Elfishguy” Mays has been the voice of Oceanic Counter-Strike (and dare we say APAC esports as a whole) for almost a decade.

He has played a part in every iconic moment and event that Australia has had, from multiple ESL ANZ Championships to the illustrious and beloved IEM Sydney stage.

While working in other esports, he also contributes massively to Asian CS2 with his podcast Geographically Challenged, which has made Elfishguy a notable figure globally alongside co-hosts Mitchell “pilski” Pilipowski and Sudhen “Bleh” Wahengbam. Elfishguy has been quite open about the ability of content to enhance the life of a caster.

His podcast and interviews have been mainstays for OCE with his YouTube channel becoming a time capsule for the region's history. DFRAG was able to sit down with the voice of Australian Counter-Strike and pick his brain over how the esport has evolved and what it takes to become the voice of an esport.

Elfishguy has an origin story like no other, mainly because he's older and a visionary, seeing the potential of esports before many others. But in the beginning, it was all fun and games.

“I started around 2012, when I was in uni. I was just doing it for fun,” he said to DFRAG, adding that he’d scour the depths of CyberGamer for open games to broadcast, likening it to the way casters pick up CS2 matches today via third-parties like FACEIT and ChallengerMode today.

 “I just watched open games and was casting them on my personal Twitch channel which was very bad quality. I remember specifically I had a 0.6 Mbps upload speed, so I could stream at like 480p if I was lucky,” he laughed.

Just doing it for fun turned into something more, however, as nightly LoL open casting turned into an invite to Team Down TV—an organization run by Steve “Cyanide” Sams and Ben “Sandman” Green.

Thanks to his time on Team Down TV, Elfishguy landed the dream position with ESL. The job at ESL provided Elfishguy with the ability to start planting himself into the world of esports. In many ways, the ESL job that he got was one of the biggest steps in his career—but not without a little help from our beloved Daniel “Mavrick” Lang to get the Counter-Strike arc started.

“I had already been casting CS for a while, and I was like ‘look, I don't think League of Legends is working out for me.”
Jordan "Elfishguy" Mays

“I owe a lot to Mavrick,” Elfishguy says. “Whenever he comes knocking, I'm like, ‘Yeah, I'll help you out.’ I try to do it at mates' rates for him because he bought me my first copy of CS—he wanted me to cast an ACL qualifier and ACL went on to become ESL.”

Elfishguy continued: “There was an ACL event in Sydney or Melbourne or something. He was going to produce a qualifier from his place and he needed people to cast it. That ended up being me and Sandman because we lived in Brisbane. I said, ‘Well, I'll do it if you buy me the game.’ I needed to learn the game, so he bought me the game.”

At the time, Elfishguy felt the opportunities in LoL were expiring. On multiple occasions, he applied for a position with Riot Games and was “part of the conversation” for the gig, but it fell through. This opened up a pathway into Counter-Strike—and Elfishguy took it with both hands. 

“I didn't get picked for [LoL]. Inevitably, another year or two down the track, they were specifically hiring casters for Riot and I applied for that. I didn’t get that role either. “I just focused a bit more on CS, and then the ESL offer came to do World of Tanks, and with that came CS as well.

From there, the rest was history. Elfishguy became one of Australia’s premier voices of esports—and not just for CS either, with the ESL gig also seeing him take on titles like World of Tanks.

There's more to casting successfully than just casting

But over a decade at the top isn’t easy, and as Elfishguy goes on to say, passion is only going to get you so far when others match that enthusiasm.

“I think everyone that tries to [commentate] is passionate about it,” he said. “I wouldn't say that I have any more drive necessarily to be a commentator than any of my colleagues that I work with. I think some things have made it work for me that other people don't have.”

Getting in early was a big benefit for Elfishguy, as well as landing the ESL gig when he did. “I was lucky, I guess, in terms of getting a full-time job at ESL, because I don't think if I didn't get that full-time job at ESL I would have still been doing it as a hobby.

"That position kind of fast-tracked me in terms of getting better as a caster. But [these] opportunities to work on proper shows also added some legitimacy to my name.”

“If I didn't get that full-time job at ESL I would have still been doing it as a hobby.” 
Jordan "Elfishguy" Mays

“There were some opportunities that I had earlier that others didn't get like me at ESL [between 2016-2019]. There was a group of sorts of, say, five to 10 people who were pretty solidly safe as a caster.” 

It’s not enough to sit and cast—something Elfishguy has learned over the years. There’s more to the job than lending your voice: your brand. 

”Something I've worked on is my brand a little bit more. Back in the day, you didn't have to think about that. You just cast. There were only so few casters, there was more stuff to cast than casters. Now, there are more casters than stuff to cast. So, you do have to kind of be putting yourself out there.”

Twitch isn’t the only platform for casters to build upon. Alongside pilski and Bleh—plus the occasional special guest—Elfishguy founded Geographically Challenged. The podcast acts as a way for APAC CS fans to be kept up with the action, whilst also aiding in building Elfishguy’s brand outside of social media.

“I'm trying to post stuff that people would follow to see if that makes sense,” Elfishguy said. “I just posted whatever I wanted 10 years ago. Now, I'm thinking about it more from that business side and trying to brand myself and stay in the public eye. I feel like I'm fairly unique in that.”

It’s something Elfishguy would like to see more of in Oceania, comparing what he does to the likes of Jacob “Pimp” Winneche, Mohan “launders” Govindasamy, and the Talking Counter crew.

“I think you have to put yourself in front of eyeballs, and that's what I'm focusing on, that I think is keeping me relevant in 2024 and going into 2025."
Jordan "Elfishguy" Mays

“I don't see many other people, especially domestically, trying to build a brand of their own. Some people can get away with that because they're already at the top and they're pretty solidly locked in. I think, at least in my position, and certainly as someone who's coming up domestically, that's where we want to look towards.”

Onwards, then; with a personal brand established and a 2024 that saw him branch out into Crossfire and Apex Legends, the world is seemingly at Elfishguy’s feet. Yet, there remains a big checkmark: casting a Counter-Strike major. “I think there's always somewhere further to go,” he said.

“I guess the ultimate goal for anyone who's involved in Counter-Strike is always to do a major. I've not done a major and I think I'm still quite a long way off from doing that. “[But] I think there have been a lot of opportunities for me in 2024 that I didn't have in 2023.

The true step-up, in Elfishguy’s eyes, is consistency. “I've worked on the biggest shows, but I don't do it consistently. I think the next step is being able to consistently say I will get six to eight S-tier shows a year.

“In an ideal world, I would like to be making meaningful income from content. It will always be primarily weighted towards casting. But if I could sort of put some money in from the content side of things as well that was of actual significance, that would be a really big win for me.”

OCE CS is on life support, but it won't take much to spark it again

Counter-Strike is one of Oceania’s top esports in terms of success and a developed ecosystem. Elfishguy believes ESL is the major factor in the esport’s growth down under. But following the withdrawal of major ESL assets and the ending of the ESL ANZ Champs product, the future of CS in OCE hangs in the balance. 

“I don’t think Counter-Strike in ANZ would be even remotely what it is without ESL, especially after ANZ Champs got neutered in the way that it did and it became ESL Challenger League. Nobody has stepped up to the plate to fill that void,” Elfishguy said.

“That was the perfect opportunity for LPL or any other TO that may have wanted to make a play — but nobody did. In the past, even though there were some exterior TOs that were floating around in CS at the time, none of them could have really done it the way that ESL did it.

“I'm a little bit concerned about the domestic health of CS in the next two, three years in ANZ.”
Jordan "Elfishguy" Mays

“I do think that ESL has been hard-carrying CS in the region for a long time and eventually their business plan has moved away from national, regional-based competition in a lot of cases and no one else has really found a way to kind of step up and take that mantle. I'm a little bit concerned about the domestic health of CS in the next two to three years in ANZ.” 

Where OCE has dropped slightly, Asia CS is back and better than ever—something Elfishguy definitely didn’t see coming four years ago. From the success of The MongolZ to constant competition among the top Chinese squads and FlyQuest’s resurgence, the top tier of Asian CS is well-placed entering 2025.

“I think if you were to ask me in 2020, is Asia CS ever going to come back, I would have said no. Yet, here we are in 2024—Asia's best year ever.”

 “To draw the parallel between OCE and Asia, I think you can never say never, do you know what I mean? It's definitely not looking great for OCE right now, but there is still some support. ESL is still kind of involved in some shape or form. I think really all it takes is one other party to kind of step up and have like a somewhat regular league.”

“Nothing's quite going to compare to ANZ Champs from a purely broadcast perspective, but there's no reason that it can't work from the player's side of things. Just because it's not broadcast at the same quality doesn't mean that the quality of the tournament needs to necessarily be any worse.”

Elfishguy doesn’t think it’ll take much for an outside TO to get a decent event going, as the community remains hungry for any tournament happening—especially offline. “There's enough people that are still interested in playing that will play it. That's all you really need to do—keep the scene on life support until the ecosystem kind of turns around.”

“CS is a generational game that will last forever. There's always going to be CS of some sort. And as long as we kind of keep it chugging along, I think at some point the interest will pick back up.”

You’ll be able to catch Elfishguy back on the mic this week at eXTREMESLAND 2024 in Shanghai, China. Otherwise, be sure to tune in to Geographically Challenged and keep up with everything Elfish via his Discord server or on X/Twitter.