meffew: “The EPIC videos are still special to me, and they’re special to a lot of other people”

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Matthew “meffew” Godsell, a former Scottish player, is a well-known name at EPIC.LAN as the “video guy”.  UKCSGO sat down with meffew to talk about his journey into content creation, how he balances his time with making videos, and the fun that keeps him coming back to these events.

The Scot shares his thoughts on the current state of the UKCS scene and what it’s like to make videos that people look forward to after every event. He showcases what EPIC.LAN is all about and the reasons why many decide to come down to Kettering to go through the three day marathon.

So firstly, could you start by introducing yourself? 

My name is Matthew Godsell, my in-game name is meffew. I’m commonly referred to as the video guy. I’ve started to go fond of it to be honest, but yeah, that’s what people know me as. 

 You got off to a good start here at EPIC, how confident are you feeling about the LAN this year? 

Well, the thing is, when leading up to this event, four of us haven’t really played that much, so me, Earl, Seth and Harper we didn’t play team CS for quite a while, and we’ve been on and off playing in general, just because we’ve got full time jobs. Yoom have flown over from Holland. He’s playing advanced  so he’s the only not washed player in our mix [laughs].

But the first two games, we were playing against people that we definitely should’ve beat anyway, and they were stomps 13-2, 13-0. It was still a bit of a confidence booster, just because we had quite a lot of fun in those games. Sort out our positions, sort out a lot of the kind of micro things. But, yeah… We lost to Dreams To Legends just there. There was a couple like silly mistakes that we made. They still played well. yz0 dropped 30 on us so whatever.

I think we are feeling really confident because we’re having fun. It’ such a good group of guys like it’s actually the core from the ex-Katana team in like 2022 except we got Harper, so yeah, we all get along really well in and out of the server which definitely helps, so we’re just hereto have fun and win games.

You’ve been focusing on content creation, making these EPIC highlights, is it just your normal content or are you trying to promote EPIC LAN?

Um, I don’t know, somebody told me actually “tell EPICLAN, I won’t release a video unless they give me like fifty crowns or something [laugh].” But I would never do that. It’s just fun. I made the very first video in 2020 when I went to my first LAN. I didn’t think it was going to be a series, but after that, I just started making more and people where like “oh, where’s videos, where’s video.” It just kind of grew into a thing now, I don’t really know how.

Is it just like a hobby?

Yeah, exactly. I don’t really make videos, just some things from time to time, I don’t do serious stuff as I’m not trying to genuinely push for a YouTube career and I’m just dumping clips off my hard drive, so I can look back in 20 years and be like, oh, yeah, that was a good play. I mean, there’ll be a video. I got the songs picked out already, it’s just crazy. I constantly get so many DMs from people like “oh, like I’ve got this clip, this clip, this clip.”

I’ll genuinely have hundreds of clips that people submit there. And this is the biggest LAN for CS as well, so I’m just going to have like millions and millions of DMs, and people will be like “please, please can you put this in the video?” So, I don’t know if I’m prepared for that yet, I’m not mentally prepared. 

EPIC43 is the biggest one yet, are you planning anything special? 

[Taps his nose and laughs] That’s all I’ll say. Uh, yeah, I don’t know. I’ll wait and see. NO. It is obviously the biggest one yet. Um, we’ll see how we get on because you know, if we did really well, then I’ll be forced to, you know? Maybe we’ll make the stage and win it [laughs]. But yeah nothing too special. 

What are your short-term and long-term goals when it comes to content? 

The only long-term goal is that I’ll probably keep making these videos for quite a while. As far as it goes for like other content? Not really. I’ve got a full time job now. I’ve just got other commitments and things, but the epic videos are still special to me, and they’re special to a lot of other people. So that’s why I really keep continuing them.

To answer your question, not really any like set goals. It’s more just to keep carrying the torch, especially for people that may not be familiar with EPIC and then you look at these videos, and think “oh, it’s good fun, I’ll come.” It already happened to some people.

You’ve been coming to EPIC for a long time now, even making notable results. What do you like to get out of it? 

I don’t know, I mean, at the very least, we don’t want to get grouped. I wouldn’t expect us to get grouped here because Yoom came all the way from Holland and it would be a bit of a shite one [laughs] if we get grouped here. Even with the new group rules, the new top 16 only playoffs. But no, I think we definitely can [make it out of groups].

We’re a team, even if we’re all like washed, there’s still a lot of potential. The main goal is to have fun and to win games along the way. If we can get HLTV, that would be great, because we’ve managed in the past few events that we’ve played, we’ve managed to get some of our friends on HLTV, like own profiles. We got one for Freddie, a Swedish guy who used to play with. EPIC37, we got EXLI, who was one of our older teammates, we got him a name on HLTV. and this name we got Stanoski, who used to coach us back in the day and yeah, we got him a HLTV profile [laughs].  

What do you think of the current UK CS scene?  

It’s pretty healthy, I say, I think it’s a lot less cliquey and people speak to each other more often. There’s no longer these kind of groups. It used to be, especially in the upper half of the scene, it was quite cliquey, but everybody is really more open now. The only thing I would say is that it doesn’t seem like there’s an upcoming team or player just now, for a while it was Coalesce or ex-Coalesce, like Kararr, moz, Prime, wfn and BehinDx. I thought they were doing really well for a while, and I thought they would. If they stuck together, they might have been able to do well, but BehinDx went back to Denmark and they’re just kind of floating about just now.

So it’s in a good place, but I think it’s if it stays this way for a couple of months you say it is stagnating because we don’t have amazing results from the like of Verdant, which I think they’ve also admitted that themselves. It’s not in a bad place. It’s not an amazing place. It’s a decent place, not a bad place. 

That’s everything from me, anything you’d like to add? 

Shoutout to Harper, especially. He’s doing a masters right now. He has three exams next week and he still came to LAN, even though he has bills and revisions so shout out to him. Shout out to yoom for flying over as well. His dad’s also really sound and he’s here. His dad’s not playing. It’s just the first time he’s been in the UK, so that’s why his dad came with him. Shoutout to Earl, also coming to play, you know he’s got a job and doing loads of hard work, and same as Seth. Honestly I mean, I just I cannot glaze my teammates enough. They’re just so much fun to play with.