The early years of KioShiMa, France’s legendary Counter Strike player

With over 12 years of professional play, Fabien “kioShiMa” Fiey is one of France’s most experienced Counter Strike: Global Offensive players. He’s placed 1st in multiple premier tournaments, is a major winner, a highly regarded rifler and one of the most flexible players we’ve ever seen in the CSGO scene. Most professional Counter Strike players retire or go on hiatus when they are not performing well or are simply done with the game, but kioShiMa’s case is quite different from the rest.

KioShiMa and the French CSGO community have one thing in common, they’ve always been surrounded by drama. This goes all the way back to 2014 when Titan’s Hovik “KQLY” Tovmassian and Gordon “Sf” Giry got VAC banned a week before Dreamhack Winter 2014, getting them and their teams kicked from the event. This meant that LDLC, kioShiMa’s team at that time, would be the only French representative at the tournament. LDLC ended up winning the tournament after they took down Sweden’s Ninjas in Pyjamas in a 2-1 manner and kioShiMa had one of the best performances in the entire tournament.

Almost a year after this event, kioShiMa went on to participate in the DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015, now under the EnVyUs organization. They came into the event as invitees because of their recent performance at ESL Cologne ’15 where they placed 2nd after being 2-0’d by Fnatic in the grand finals. DHO Cluj-Napoca gave EnVyUs the perfect opportunity for revenge against Fnatic, they were going to face each other in the very first round of the playoffs and EnVyUs took advantage of this, ultimately taking down Fnatic 2-1. The French squad continued their journey and defeated both G2 Esports and Natus Vincere in a very convincing manner.

A few months later, kioShiMa got kicked out of the team despite their recent major win and the reason was mostly due to team issues, “Our cohesion became really bad, the communication between players became even worse, we basically lost our soul.“, said kioShiMa on EnVyUs official statement after his release. KioShiMa got traded to FaZe Clan, where he would find his share of success even if his first few months with the team were not the best. In April 2017 the team would get invited to the StarLadder i-League StarSeries Season 3, where they would nearly get knocked out of the competition early on but then managed to win 3 series in a row, bringing home the title after defeating G2 Esports, HellRaisers, and Astralis.

After his run with FaZe Clan, he would go on to re-join Team Envy but didn’t find many victories while playing on that team, this was looking like the beginning of the end for him. But kioShiMa never really gave up, he tried to go international and joined Cloud9, where he would find a lot of love from fans over in North America, and even if they didn’t win any big tournaments, he was still praised by the community. The French player still competed for many years after his C9 run, but it’s almost like the magic disappeared, Spanish Team Heretics was the last team we saw kioShiMa play for, and we haven’t heard much from him after that, maybe one day he will make a comeback but at this point it’s uncertain.