Today we talk with Dennis "Thresh" Fong, the world's most legendary Quake player to learn more about his latest online gaming-related endeavor - Ultimate Arena . A simple explanation of Ultimate Arena is that it is a website using a proprietary tournament technology that allows single and team players to wager real cold hard cash. Dennis, who is a co-founder of Ultimate Arena, and the Chief Gaming Officer for UA, gives us the dirty little details on what it's all about:

GameShark: The first obvious question for our readers not familiar with your accomplishments over the years is who is Dennis "Thresh" Fong and what have you accomplished over the last six years that has made you a household name amongst the first-person action game loving community?

Thresh: I'm probably most well known for being the world champion in Doom 2, Quake, and Quake 2, and the guy who won a Ferrari (John Carmack's) playing Quake. :) I was also the first "professional" gamer, as I was sponsored by a company called Spacetec in 1996, and then consequently was sponsored by Microsoft, Earthlink, Diamond Multimedia, and a few other companies beginning in '98. I'm also the founder of gamers.com and firingsquad.com.

GameShark: Tell us a bit about Ultimate Arena. What's it all about, who's idea was it and what's your role in this endeavor?

Thresh: Ultimate Arena really is a dream that has finally come true for me. I used to receive hundreds of emails a day from people who wanted to "kick my ass" in Quake and Quake 2. There was no way I could answer all of those emails, let alone take on those challenges. I'm sure many of the top gamers today, e.g. Fatality & Team 3D, go through this on a daily basis. I always wanted to say "If you think you can beat me, why don't you put your money where your mouth is?" I mean, that would have been a great to weed out the people that were serious, and also make a little extra money on the side. :) It's taken a few years to turn that idea into a reality.

I am one of the co-founders of Ultimate Arena, and am the Chief Gaming Officer. I'm involved in many aspects of the company, e.g. product development, marketing, and most importantly (IMO), figuring out ways to work with and support organizations that are doing great things in the gaming community, e.g. United Admins w/ their anti-cheat efforts.

GameShark: What games does you currently support and how many games do you hope to have support for the year's end?

Thresh: We currently support Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, and America's Army. We are expecting to have at least 6 of the Top 10 games supported on our site by year's end.

GameShark: There are some concerns about the legality of wagering on yourself in online competitions - how much research took place before the site launched and how legal is it in the United States?

Thresh: We too were concerned about the legalities of skill based gaming before we started this business. We spent a lot of time researching the concept, and also hired two law firms to research the idea. What we found surprised us -- there were already many companies doing skill-based gaming! (e.g. MSN, Yahoo, Vivendi, EA.com, etc.) They were just doing it for parlor-type games, such as Hangman and Solitaire. We are the first to do it for online multiplayer games.