Patrick Benassi (IGN: Balarius), Molecular & Cellular Biology, 2015
During his senior year at UIUC, Patrick played in the 2015 Heroes of the Dorm competition, where he led UIUC’s team to the live finals. After experiencing a massive esports event firsthand as a player, Patrick saw the incredible power esports has with creating and establishing communities. As the first President, Patrick contacted and connected the various gaming related clubs to join forces to lay the foundation for Illini Esports. In fall of 2015, Patrick Benassi and Jake Astin officially co-founded UIUC’s first student organized gaming and esports organization, Illini Esports.
After graduating, Patrick joined Blizzard Entertainment as their Collegiate Competition & Operations Manager, where he led and oversaw all Collegiate Competitive programs before taking on the Global Overwatch Open Division program. Since then, Patrick has worked with various publishers to create their collegiate programs from the ground up, and worked with partners such as ESPN, Coca-Cola, and ASUS to help establish college gaming programming across North America.
Today he works as a game producer at Raven Software where his team handles new features and content for Call of Duty®: Warzone