Published: Sun, Jul. 27, 2008 12:00AM

Modified Tue, Aug. 19, 2008 09:31AM

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The company has more than 125 players signed to management deals. Top players can earn more than $80,000 a year, plus outside sponsorship money, says an MLG spokeswoman. The average pay is in the $20,000 to $30,000 range.

Blake has done well in local tournaments, including one held at a Chick-fil-A that earned him 52 combo meals. By his account, he has lost only once since "Guitar Hero III" was released late last year. Some of that time was spent playing online, against players from all over the world.

This is how he knows he's good. It wasn't that long ago that kids who excelled at some activity, say basketball, would only have to go to the next neighborhood to have their dreams crushed by some older, more accomplished player.

Today, on Xbox 360, players use the system's online component to compare scores with players all over the world. Blake, who goes by the online name "Dreminem," figures that he has top-10 scores on 20 or so of songs on "Guitar Hero III."

He guesses that he's probably one of the top 15 or 20 players in the country.

Blake so far has won about $1,000 in prizes in the months since he began competing in "Guitar Hero." His biggest challenge will come in mid-August, when father and son travel to California for the U.S. regionals of the World Cyber Games. Blake qualified to appear there after performing well online.

If Blakes wins the regional, it's on to the national championship. The best "Guitar Hero III" players there will earn the right to represent the U.S. at the world tournament in Germany.

Blake is happy with his success. Mom and Dad are happy with his grades. Since he's gone to the tutoring arrangement, she hasn't once had to tell him to do his homework, because he does it on his own. They got plenty of grief from family and friends about their decision at first, but they've also watched Blake, who is shy and disliked school, become a happier person.

Set up to play

Inside his upstairs bedroom, Blake's environment is set up specifically to make him a better gamer. There is a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360. He also has a stack of plastic guitars, but no real ones. Blake doesn't play an actual guitar, a skill that doesn't really transfer to playing the virtual kind, anyway.

The frame for his bed is on the back porch, with the box springs and mattress on the bedroom floor. That puts his bed at a more comfortable level for sitting to play "Guitar Hero III" for extended periods. At the moment, he plays just a few hours a day, but that number will increase as the California competition nears.

Blake seems happy with his home school arrangement, as you would expect from a teenager who is allowed to stay up into the wee hours to play video games. Sometimes, when Mike heads to the gym before 5 a.m., his son is still playing video games. Blake calls it working "the late shift."

He didn't enjoy school, he says, and especially didn't like the rules associated with attending the Christian academy. Shaggy hair is more his style.

He's good at video games. "I wasn't really good at anything else that I liked."

His "Guitar Hero" skills certainly have impressed the local gaming community.

"He's amazing," says Mike Gibson, the good-natured owner of two local Play N Trade Video Games stores. "I can't have tournaments for that anymore. I might as well just give him the prize."

Blake dreams of making a living playing games, and scoring a contract with Major League Gaming.

But Terry Lindle, aka Terry15, knows how tough it can be to make it. Lindle, 23, lives in Illinois and has been a competitive gamer for about eight years. He won the national championship for "Halo 2" in 2005 and traveled to England earlier this year to compete in a world championship for the game "F.E.A.R."

Lindle came in sixth and won $4,500. He estimates that he has earned about $25,000 in his years of gaming.

"When you want to go somewhere with this gaming stuff, you've got to be in the top 1 percent," he says.

Lindle is impressed that Blake qualified for the tournament in California. But in gaming, coming in third or fourth doesn't mean much.

"You've got to win these major tournaments, otherwise you don't get noticed by advertisers and sponsors."

Lindle believes there's a future to competitive gaming, one in which more people can make more money. He points to Major League Gaming's recent deal with ESPN, which includes live-streaming tournaments on ESPN360.com.

Right now, Blake is concentrating on "Guitar Hero," working to get the "Dreminem" name out there. "Guitar Hero" isn't a big money game on the tournament circuit, as most of the cash goes to the people who play "Halo 3."

Blake is biding his time to the next big thing, so he can get ahead of the curve.

"The next big game that comes out, I'm just going to focus on that one," he says.

And why not? The guy is self-employed. He sets his own hours.