A 34-year-old cotton and corn farmer from Serres, northern Greece, just became the world champion of Age of Mythology, a...

A 34-year-old cotton and corn farmer from Serres, northern Greece, just became the world champion of Age of Mythology, and his story is one of the more unusual in competitive gaming. Themis "TheMista" Bonidis, from the village of Simonas in Serres, won the global Age of Mythology tournament held in Athens. He started playing Age of Empires 2 in 1999 as a primary school kid, rushing to his grandparents' house after school to get screen time on his aunt's computer. When Age of Mythology launched in 2002, his family didn't own a PC, so he played at one of the first internet cafes in his village, which had exactly two computers. By age 12 or 13 he was competing seriously. Local tournaments in Thessaloniki and Athens, followed by Balkan and European competitions, eventually brought in around 200 to 250 euros a month, which was enough to change his family's attitude about all those hours in front of a screen. Gaming has never been his primary income, though. He took over the family farm full-time in 2016 after his father's health problems, and farming sets the schedule for everything else. Once the agricultural season begins, the computer goes off entirely. During peak months from June onward, his days can run from 4am to 10pm, sometimes stretching to 17 hours of work. One of the more striking moments in his career came in 2022, when rain kept him off the fields for five or six days mid-season. He hadn't played competitively since March. He entered a weekly qualifier anyway, finished second, and in one match came back from 0-3 down to win 4-3 at around 5am. He later said it only happened because it rained. He also bought a modern tractor with prize money, combining a tournament runner-up payout with savings from previous competitions and investing the total back into the farm. Starting a new growing season costs him roughly 100,000 euros in upfront capital each year, money he describes as throwing everything into the ground and waiting to get it back, with weather and natural disasters always as a risk. He has raised concerns about how Greek agricultural support programs are structured, saying that at 34, as an active producer, he still failed to score enough...