What once began as a gaming clan has grown into one of Arizona’s only gaming organizations with a mission to accelerate Arizona’s presence in the esports industry.

Nevalleynews.org spoke with its founder Damian Mitchell about the organization’s origins.

“I started it back in 2012, May 18 to be exact. It started out during the Call of Duty days when they had the whole um kind of clan system and that’s when the Arizona Gaming Clan came out” Mitchell said.

Mitchell dropped “clan” from the name in order to appear more professional and avoid any misinterpretation that came with that word and adopted the organization title as it grew.

Arizona Gaming now serves as a way to connect casual gamers with each other and build a community where you could find like-minded people to play with and connect online.

“On the casual side people can range from they just want to get on in the middle of the night and have a set list of people to play with, they want to know what people are playing, they want to know if they go to a different game there’s going to be people there waiting for them” Mitchell said about the casual side of the organization.

Mitchell is also involved locally with the competitive scene whether it be promoting events on their Facebook page or attending tournaments with a team at a local lan center.

“I promote as far as all those events that are happening on one area. I help out bring news to certain things and it’s all in one area to the public; Like our Facebook page is mainly for the public, a lot of things on there, if something happens in the organization whether it be an event or a new video, we usually post it there” Michell said.

“There’s a lot of events that happen in Arizona we have our own teams that go to them. I usually like to look for quality people in the organization that are not I guess “toxic” who are really there for expanding the scene coming out making really the organization look good.” Mitchell said about their attendance at events.

In its six years as an organization, Arizona Gaming continues to compete in various video games across platforms, but there is no stopping there for Mitchell.

“We’re always expanding we have some avenues as far as not just games anymore, now we have people who are interested in doing tabletop gaming um card games, Magic the Gathering stuff like that so its ever-expanding,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell believes that 2019 will see the biggest growth he’s seen in years for his organization.

Arizona Gaming currently has 236 members across PC, Xbox and PlayStation 4 and social media presence on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.