Since "retiring" from competitions last year, Fong has been devoting himself full-time to Gamers.com, an ambitious portal for gaming fans. With a recent influx of $11.5 million in venture capital, as well as a partnership with AltaVista, Fong is positioning his company to be the gateway for the coming tidal wave of next generation, Internet-ready console players.

To service them, he's built a staff of 150 full-time gamers, hand-picked for their expertise in everything from first-person action shooters to traditional standards like bridge. Each day in their Richmond, Calif., office, the staff aggregates content from across the Net, so that someone coming to the site can get hip to the latest news, patches and gossip in the expanding gaming universe.

"It's one-stop shopping for game players," Fong says. And a potential one-stop gold mine for Fong, especially considering that next generation console makers like Microsoft and Sony are expected to spend over a half-billion dollars to promote their new products.

Fong's journey from digital jock to entrepreneur is a perfect case study of the deep new worlds that have popped up during the rise of Generation Pong. Ten years ago, the thought of a professional gamer would have been absurd. Now, gamers have not only become cultural icons, but industry players. If Fong has his way, he says, "computer and video gaming will become one of the largest sports in the world."

What made you decide to do a portal for gamers?

We saw a need in the industry for something like this. There are literally thousands of Web sites dedicated to games on the Net, but no single, comprehensive source. Take all the online zines. Almost half of them are professionally done. That means they're all competing for exclusive stories. And if one of them gets an exclusive on a game, none of the others will tell their users about it. This results in creating a fragmented community. If you want to be on top of the news every day, there's nowhere to go; you have to surf through a variety of sites.

My brothers and I decided to start Gamers.com back in 1996. We had a huge passion for gaming and believed that it would be a "big deal" down the road. So one night, we logged onto the Internet, registered "gamers.com" for 75 bucks, and off we went. The first two years of our business were essentially a makeshift business school for us -- we made every possible mistake entrepreneurs could make, but it was great because we learned how to be profitable without needing outside funding. It wasn't until two and a half years later that we felt ready to take the next step of raising capital.

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