Mert Yazıcıoğlu
Cenk 'Sifiralti' Gökkaya
Overview
New high school grad and avid gamer Cenk is recruited to an intense esports team that trains for a tournament with a life-changing prize.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
4 min readThe Lonely Glow of the Screen
I’ve sat through enough bad comedies to know the signs: the forced laughter, the predictable beats, the sense that the filmmakers are checking boxes rather than telling a story. Good Game: The Beginning has all of them. But what makes it linger—uncomfortably, like a bruise—isn’t its failures as a comedy. It’s the way it accidentally stumbles into something real: the loneliness of being young, online, and convinced that the next level will fix everything.
The film follows Cenk (Mert Yazıcıoğlu), a recent high school graduate who spends his days in his room, gaming. His parents nag him about his future; his friends have moved on. Then, out of nowhere, he’s recruited into an esports team training for a tournament with a life-changing prize.
The setup is pure wish fulfillment, the kind of fantasy that keeps teenagers glued to Twitch streams. But the execution is so clumsy it’s almost fascinating.
Director Umut Aral seems torn between two impulses: making a broad comedy about gamers and crafting a character study of a kid who’s lost. The result is a film that can’t decide if it’s The Hangover or Eighth Grade. The comedy scenes—team pranks, exaggerated rivalries, a training montage set to upbeat Turkish pop—feel like they were written by someone who’s only heard about gamers secondhand.
The humor lands with all the subtlety of a lag spike, and the jokes about "noobs" and "tryhards" are so dated they might as well come with a dial-up sound effect.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey licensed League of Legends and sold a first.
Vadistanbul, 31 October 2018. The gala for Iyi Oyun, later retitled Good Game: The Beginning on English posters, sold a youth movie about five kids chasing the Turkish League of Legends final. Producer Doruk Acar told NTV they had taken a license and made "the world's first esports film." He compared it to Rocky. Not a documentary, a feature with a sport underneath. latestnetflix.com's view is that Kerem Bursin, co-producer through Braveborn and on screen as Ada's brother Ruzgar, called being part of a worldwide first a point of pride."It was a new world for me.",
The roster mixed a YouTuber, a first-timer, and The Protector's director.
Mert Yazicioglu, 21 and coming off Karagul, plays Cenk "Sifiralti" Gokkaya, a booster who plays other people's ranked games in an internet cafe to help his mother. At the gala he called it his first film and said esports had been treated as a real sport for 15 years. Later he told NTV he started League of Legends for the shoot. "I had never played a game like that." Afra Saracoglu is Ada. She said she wanted in as soon as she read the script. Orkun Isitmak, already a YouTube name, is Batu "Phenom" Celik. Bahar Sahin is Naz "Mikasa." Yigit Kirazci coaches as Ozer. The team on the poster is Bes Benzemez. Hakan Bas, a founder of SuperMassive, the club that had just won the Turkish league, produced with Alper Caglar and Acar. Writer Emre Sirel came from Boru and actually played. Director Umut Aral was also steering Netflix's first Turkish original, The Protector, around the same season. Hurriyet had announced a 28 September 2018 date, more than 3 million LoL players in Turkey, and Ulker Arena tickets for the real national final selling out in two hours. The film slipped to 2 November. TMDB lists 1 hour 44 minutes and the original title Iyi Oyun.,,,,
The boast traveled farther than the score.
Aral told Diken he had made the film for the whole world, the first to put esports at the center and take it seriously, unlike the documentaries Free to Play and Rise of the Esports Hero. A Turkish YouTube review called it a feature-length commercial with a YouTuber in the mid lane. IMDb settled around 4.6 from thousands of votes. Netflix still picked it up in 2020, two years after the gala, Turkish audio, English subs. Cenk still works the cafe. The prize is still life-changing. The first-claim is still the line the producers wanted printed.,,,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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