Three new live shows from ROG highlight our latest hardware and the hottest games

New hardware, new games, new technologies—there’s a ton to cover in the world of the Republic of Gamers right now. To help you keep up, we’re launching three new live shows on Twitch, and we’ve recruited a special talent to bring it all together.

After a lengthy search, we found our host in Jake Kulinski, better known to the community as SolidJake. Before joining the ROG team, Jake made a name for himself as an esports organizer and commentator. He’s now sharing his enthusiasm for gaming and hardware on several new shows, which you’ll find at the ROG Twitch page:

• ROG Pulse—10:00 PM ET, every Thursday. A behind-the-scenes look at our newest and most innovative technologies, this show features insider knowledge from our team and live teardowns of exciting new ROG hardware.
• ROG Live—4:00 PM ET, every Friday. Tune in to watch and chat as Jake dives into the latest games and old favorites, all using the hottest new ROG components and gaming systems.
• ROG Sidequest—Coming soon. Here, you’ll find Jake kicking back and chatting about the wider world of gaming with a diverse range of guests, including community members, fellow employees, and developers.
   

A host driven by his passion for gaming

We recently sat down with Jake to learn more about his path through the gaming world and how it’s become part of his DNA. Like many of us, Jake lived and breathed games as a child. Along with his two brothers, Jake spent a lot of time competing, passing around controllers, and talking trash.

His most formative moment came later. “I fell in love with competitive Smash Brothers in high school,” Jake said. It wasn’t just the frantic gameplay and classic Nintendo characters that caught his attention. “[When] a friend introduced me to a forum devoted to the broader world of competitive Smash,” Jake told me, things got serious. He sensed that gaming could be more than a hobby. It could be his career. “I started running my own tournaments,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I organized a tournament running down the entire East Coast. There were about 300 people competing. Several flew in from California, others were driving ten hours or more.”

It turned out that Jake made a name for himself at just the right time. Far beyond the competitive Smash scene, esports started to take off. Starcraft II became a global phenomenon that drew star talent from Korea, Europe, and around the world to compete for dazzling prize pools in front of boisterous audiences.

“When Major League Gaming wanted to get in the Smash Brothers scene, I was the first hire,” Jake recalled. “I was making broadcast assets and player profiles. But then there was The Esports Report on mlg.tv. It covered all esports, and I was asked to come on camera and talk.”

Jake admits that on-camera work is harder than it looks. “You have to think about posture, facial expressions, body language,” he said. “Sitting in a chair with hot, bright lights in your face is not easy.” Jake wasn’t deterred by the challenges of this work, though. In fact, he decided to go all in on it.

Jake attended Blizzcon in the year that Blizzard announced Heroes of the Storm, its long-lived multiplayer online battle arena. After playing the alpha version at the convention, Jake sprang into action. “I called up some buddies, said we’re going to podcast, make commentary content,” he said. It took a leap of faith to move on from MLG, but as Jake recounted, “I believed in myself, believed I could be a commentator.” He took his chances. Under the handle SolidJake, he became one of the HotS community’s most visible personalities, breaking down the play-by-play action during many of the game’s most important tournaments.

Jake is now connecting with an even broader audience through the Republic of Gamers, and he’s had a special connection with ROG hardware for many years. When he faced the prospect of producing and sharing gaming content over a five-week stretch on the road, it was an ROG laptop that provided the processing power and convenient features he needed to stay productive no matter where his work took him. While he’s already gotten his hands on some of our latest and greatest hardware, you may still find that trusty old laptop supporting the stream behind the scenes if you keep an eye out.

We hope you’ll be as excited as we are to watch Jake stream the latest games, host compelling and informative conversations about ROG hardware, and kick back and chat with passionate fans of the most storied gaming franchises, new and old. Head over to twitch.tv/ASUSROG, subscribe, and make sure you catch the trio of new shows that Jake is contributing to the gaming community.