Uber discusses his career, how ‘audacious’ it is to cast multiple esports

Mitch “Uber” Leslie quickly became a fan-favorite when he entered the Overwatch League in its inaugural season as a caster.

With years of casting experience behind him, he was an obvious pick to join the OWL. He has a plethora of experience in other games such as League of Legends, Halo and Battlefield 4, just to name a few.

Not only does Uber have a successful casting career, but he’s also a father, streamer and podcaster.

Uber took the time to speak to Nerd Street Gamers about how he came to where he is now, and tips for other casters who might want to follow in his footsteps.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Nerd Street: What first sparked the idea that you wanted to be an esports commentator, and did you ever expect to make a career out of it?

Uber: Initially, it was really just a hobby.

Scrimming 40 hours a week in a Call of Duty 4 team, and I was like 19, I think, but that was around the time where I was starting to have to go to university.

I didn't have the time to study aerospace engineering and then also scrim 40 hours a week. So, I stopped playing sort of competitively, but I wanted to be involved still, and there was a random website called Net Game Radio that was being run by a Defence Force retiree in Australia, and he was just getting people to come and radio broadcast some competitive [esports].

So video games Australia had its own website, Cyber Gamer, which was like a ladder system. It was like forums. It was sort of an all-in-one sort of community hub basically. And so I decided that I would just start commentating on the radio the Call of Duty 4 games so I could still be involved in some way 'cause I still wanted very much to be in that scene, that community ...

So that allowed me to do broadcasts three to four nights a week. Just radio broadcasts of Call of Duty 4 matches at like the invite level, which is the top 12 teams in the country, and so I did that and it was just a hobby. It was just a way to stay involved, but it sort of materialized as time went on.

Nerd Street: At the time, you had no formal training, right?

Uber: Yeah, at that time I didn’t have any formal training, no. I took some inspiration from some traditional sports broadcasters from Australia, like Australian rules football which is a game that is only played in Australia and in some parts of India.

My dad was a professional Australian football player. He was a lead sportsman, and I used to watch all his games and I was very interested. I was actually very interested in the history of the game … and my Kindergarten used to be at the [Adelaide] Oval, the stadium itself. So I’d look over the balcony and I could see my dad playing.

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I took my inspiration from my love of Australian rules football and some of their commentators. Eventually I started looking at other esports commentators, but in the beginning I didn't even know they existed. I just thought we were the only ones doing this.

It wasn't until I started paying attention to the European Call of Duty 4 scene, and to some degree the American one. Then I realized that there were other people doing this, but I wasn't taking it seriously enough at that time to really try and study what they were doing and apply it to myself.

Nerd Street: Are there any skills you picked up along the way that you were surprised you needed to have in order to further your career?

Uber: Yeah, absolutely. When I got the opportunity to move to Germany and work at ESL full time as an esports commentator it was a very steep learning curve.

Well, I'd learned very quickly that my fluency in casting was poor. My phrasing needed a lot of work, and I really needed to work on the contrast between my highs and lows in terms of pace, volume and tone. So there are a lot of things that I actually needed to work on. I had a very strong Australian dialect as well at that time, which is pretty normal, but the problem was that most of my early work at ESL was to Eastern European people because I worked on a game called World of Tanks.

So a lot of our viewer base were wanting to listen to the English language cast, but they were from Poland or Ukraine, or parts of Central Europe as well. And my accent was a little too strong, especially for Polish people. So I had to work on that a lot.

At ESL, every Thursday after lunch, we'd walk into a room. It would be like me, [Lauren “Pansy” Scott], [Alex "Machine" Richardson], [Leigh "Deman" Smith], [Shaun "Apollo" Clark] at the time was a caster, and then we sit around table and we just basically tear each other's casting to shreds, go around and get feedback.

Image credit: Overwatch League

Nerd Street: Your phrasing definitely improved because you’ve been getting a lot of praise on social media lately for your recent cast of the San Francisco Shock versus the Houston Outlaws. You said at the end of the game, “We thought they’d be kissing the ring, but they’ve forced the kings to bend the knee,” after the Outlaws won. Is that something you practice or does it just come with experience?

Uber: I came up with that line on the Houston Outlaws attack of that round, and I was thinking about it because I had a feeling that the game was going to be quite exciting, and they’d already got the third point. I was thinking back to how I framed San Francisco’s victory back in 2019, talking about the golden crown and all this other stuff. So there are threads of theme throughout some of my commentary.

For example, when Joon-yeong "Profit" Park was so dangerous in the finals I said the “lone sniper returned,” which is the way I referenced him in 2018. For me, there’s a storyboard of the roles, or the mythical characters that we’ve seen or ascribe to.

That one was not purely off the cuff -- I think I had 15 seconds while [Matt “MrX” Morello] was breaking down a fight. Thankfully, I didn’t get punished for not listening to what he was saying, because I can’t do both at the same time. It came together really well because I had a very visceral, very genuine reaction when [Myung-heum “JJANGGU” Cho] went for a flank shatter just beforehand. That was my reaction when I just sort of yelled, “oh, my God” it was very much unfiltered, so I had to very quickly, you know, get back in control. Otherwise my subconscious 12-year-old esports fanatic was just going to ruin the quality of my cast.

Nerd Street: You’ve casted a lot of esports, and sometimes you cast different games very closely together. How does your preparation change for each game?

Uber: Sometimes it just happens at night before. Honestly, sometimes I have no choice but to, you know, go to cram school. Especially because this week like there's no way I was watching VALORANT over the weekend.

Like you know, [Josh “Sideshow” Wilkinson] is a good example of someone who's able to split his time across two games, but he spends the lion share of his day watching VODs as soon as the Overwatch League is done.

I don't have that option because when I'm done with work, I walk in and there is a very tired partner of mine who's been looking after Griffin all day, and that's when I jump in and try and help out, so I don’t have the chance to watch many VODs.

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For the Twitch Rivals powerlifting thing, I came out of the [OWL] broadcast -- it was 2 p.m. -- I had an hour-and-a-half to get some food, and then I had a rehearsal for that. I ran through that one for about four hours, and once that was done, I had to research all the competitors and develop a list of facts and other qualifications like the kind of streamer they are. I had to get what their personal best lifts were, and then I did some research on how conventional powerlifting commentary was even done, and that wasn't easy to find, so I wanted a reference point. In the end I found very little, so it was half golf commentary, half shoutcasting in the end.

In terms of the Overwatch stuff, like I have a fairly strong foundational sort of knowledge about casting that game. So what I really have to focus on doing is developing cohesive storylines before the game and delivering them, and then understanding how they may change based on how the series goes.

Nerd Street: How difficult is it to have to be prepared for two different esports at once?

Uber: I'll be honest, it's audacious. I look at a day and I go, “all right, let's see how much I can fit into this and f--- me dead if I don’t,” so that's obviously, you know, it's a challenge.

Sometimes I just don't fit everything in, like I went into a VALORANTING podcast this week, we talked about four of the sort of semifinalists and Challengers 1. I've watched two of [the matches]. I'll be honest, I'm leaning on the actual analysts on the [VALORANT broadcasts], [Alex “Vansilli” Nguyen] and Yinsu [Collins] respectively to do a lot more of that. That's the fortunate thing 'cause I'm a host on VALORANTING, so ideally my best work is done when I am allowing either one of those two to display their expertise. That helps a lot.

Nerd Street: How do you manage your time with everything you’ve got going on, and especially with a kid?

Uber: I think I don't really have much idle time anymore. That's really just the decision that I made because I wanted to essentially keep doing as much as possible of what I was doing before I had a kid. I think I maybe had an unwarranted fear that my career could be affected or my ability to continue to sort of improve in my career may be hampered by the extra responsibility of having a kid.

I'm still able to sort of, you know, maintain sort of my standard of work I think and keep producing content during the week. But it just means that there's no idle time. So like a lot of things, World of Warcraft, for example, is out the window, like that's just not happening.

I think the only times I can really game [currently is when] I'm doing a gaming stream which is a couple nights a week, so I've just had to manage my time pretty effectively also. So I get a lot of help from Ashley who's still on maternity leave right now, who spends a lot of the day with [my son], and I do all the chores -- so cooking, cleaning, laundry, you know.

So yeah, there's no secret to it. I really just try, and I'm quite audaciously trying to fit everything I can in each day.

Nerd Street: If there was one skill an aspiring commentator should hone the most, what would it be?

Uber: A strong sense of introspection. The prevailing attitude I've often seen is that there is a tendency, and sometimes it's justified, but in general there is a tendency to blame the things that affect us or prevent us from advancing on a larger system or a larger institution keeping us down.

They project their inability to advance on some sort of unfairness or inherent bias in the system, whereas me as an observer, I can actually sort of say, well, no, I can see that this commentator is not really ready for this level of event or, for example, I don't think the quality of their work is up there now. Maybe if that caster is more introspective, they can realize where their weaknesses are and actually shore them up and develop.

It's really hard to get good feedback as a caster from the community. ... There are a lot of casters that do this, they condition the community to always back them up. The community loves an underdog, right? The community loves Tier 2 casters as well for that reason, right? …

But I see this happen with Tier 2 casters everywhere, and sometimes they're not ready for that Tier 1. But the community pushes so hard, they clamor so loudly, and if this caster is not able to block out the people supporting them and actually look at themselves objectively, they will not be ready ...

Long story short, being able to look at yourself critically is important 'cause getting good feedback even from your peers can be really hard.

Lead image credit: Overwatch League