The ALGS Championship’s underdog winner, Oblivion, just made esports history

When I first sat down with Bowen “Monsoon” Fuller, we were both out of breath. Moments earlier, he and his teammates on team Oblivion had just pulled off the unthinkable: winning the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) Year 5 Championship in Sapporo, Japan. On the fourth and final day of the competition, Fuller and his team had miraculously beat out Philip “ImperialHal” Dosen’s Team Falcons, who were highly favored to win and had maintained their number-one spot throughout the first three days of the event, but lost to Oblivion in a shocking ninth and final match on the last day.

I realized I wanted to interview Fuller when, after Oblivion clinched the win, he reacted by putting on a Japanese maid costume.

“You’re about to see a man lift a trophy in a maid outfit,” one announcer pointed out, chuckling. “If you do not know the story of that man, Monsoon, let me tell you, it’s a tearjerker, but it’s one of hard work, it’s one of perseverance, and now is one with a conclusion that he couldn’t have dreamed of at one point, from homeless to international major champion.”

By the time I talked to him just a few moments later, Fuller had swapped out the maid outfit for the coveted ALGS Championship jacket provided to each member of the winning team. Grinning from ear to ear, his excitement was contagious.

“Insane, just crazy,” he replied when I asked him to describe how he’s feeling. “Perfect. Absolutely bonkers.”

Oblivion’s win marked the first-ever ALGS win by a female-coached team, and Fuller says coach RubyKaster was pivotal to the team’s success.

“Ruby put in a lot of great work and believed in us from the start,” Fuller said. “We’ve been free agents for the past five months, so being able to devote as much time as we all did into it really contributed [to the win.]”

By “free agents,” Fuller means his squad’s status as an “orgless” team: one that isn’t backed by a major esports organization. Oblivion is also the first team to win the ALGS Championship after making the cut during the Last-Chance Qualifiers, which take place only two months before the championship and see 40 teams who haven’t yet qualified go head-to-head for a spot at the biggest competition in Apex Legends esports. Fuller says that as an unsigned team, the championship win means “everything” to Oblivion.

“It’s total validation in ourselves as a team, as individual players, making it work when obviously, nobody — or not a lot of people — really believed [in us] in the ways that we did. This is just everything to me, it just fulfilled my dreams.”

Fuller is an experienced player, and has competed in Apex Legends tournaments since the game first launched in 2019, but his life hasn’t been easy. He’s struggled with homelessness, at one point setting up his PC in restaurants like Taco Bell to take advantage of the free wi-fi.

“I was homeless growing up and never finished school,” he tells me when I ask if he has any advice for the droves of FPS players who want to go pro. “The only thing that I kept from all of my belongings when my family and I were going through that was my little computer. So ultimately, follow your heart and do what you love — which is so cliche, but it’s true. It’s one thing to know it, but it’s another thing to understand it, and you understand it when you do cool shit like this.”

Oblivion had an especially rocky year in 2025. The team signed with esports organization KOI in April, before teammates Miguel “Blinkzr” Quiles and Brandon “FunFPS” Groombridge left the organization in September and reformed Oblivion with Fuller, leaving the trio of ALGS champs just a few months to practice together as a team before Last-Chance Qualifiers in November — and no organization to back them.

“I took a little bit of a break and came back, and this was my first event back,” Fuller said.

While Oblivion’s win came as a shock to most attendees, Fuller knew as soon as he woke up that morning that his team would win.

“I looked Fun in his eyes, and I was like, “You know we’re winning this shit, 100%,” Fuller said of a conversation he’d had with teammate Brandon Groombridge that morning. “So [I had] full faith. And if you don’t, then you’re probably not going to win, to be honest.”

Fuller told me he’s played plenty of FPS games in his life, but Apex‘s complexity is what keeps him coming back.

Image: EA/Respawn

“There are so many dynamics in the game, and there are so many things you have to think about, so many variables that go into success or failure,” he explained. “It just keeps you really on your toes, it keeps your brain going. When you hit those peaks, it’s hard to find those peaks again, but Apex does it for me.”

The recently crowned champ definitely hit one of those peaks with this ALGS win, which sent the crowd of nearly 15,000 attendees into a deafening frenzy that could be heard from outside the Sapporo Dome where the event was being held. With regard to his future plans, Fuller told me a celebration was first on the list.

“I’ll be celebrating with a lot of alcohol, most likely,” he said, running his fingers through his hair and still trying to catch his breath. “I’m going to get fucked up. I was going to get fucked up regardless, but I might have a couple extra drinks now, maybe die, I don’t know.”

After all the bottles have popped, team Oblivion is still looking for a new organization. With the ALGS Year 5 Championship trophy in their possession, that task just got a whole lot easier.

But winning the trophy as an unsigned squad does come with a major advantage: Unlike teams backed by esports organizations, the members of team Oblivion will be able keep every cent of their $600,000 prize to themselves, rather than splitting the winnings with the organization they represent. That means more money in Fuller’s pocket, and anyone who witnessed Oblivion’s performance at the ALGS Championship will agree those winnings were well-earned and well-deserved.

That means the hardware comes home, too. According to Fuller, the massive ALGS Championship trophy is as heavy as it looks — “probably 35, 40 pounds” — and he has the perfect spot for it: a shelf above the fireplace in the “beautiful little apartment” he now shares with his fiancée, after seven years of grinding away at competitive Apex Legends.

“I didn’t want to step away from Apex until I won something.”