A member of our site since April 2017, Gulf was enthusiastic in his commenting as well as guide-writing, creating his first and longest-maintained guide, "Kuzenbo, King of the Kappas!" less than a month after joining. That guide eventually won in our Season 8 Guide Contest. He was also of great help in providing a solid combo of a keen eye and strong game knowledge as a judge in some of our other contests over the years.
While he was always keeping an eye on builds and comments on the main site and contributing with his thoughts here and there, you could find him participating more often on our Discord server, where he was known as our resident Pepe emoji spammer and is still #3 on our leaderboard.
Outside of SMITEFire, Gulf was an avid gamer of many genres, with some favorite games (from my recollection) including but not limited to Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Divinity: Original Sin 2, the Civilization series, Mass Effect, the Borderlands series, and Warframe. On Steam, SMITE was his 2nd most played game.
He is survived by his wife, Laura. She said that the best way we can honor his memory is one of two ways:
- Direct donation to his favorite charity, St. Jude's Children's Hospital.
- Gift games to friends in his honor. Laura said "I think the best way to honor him would be to keep a game fund. He was always finding games he enjoyed and if anyone would say they'd have to wait for the price to come down, he loved to just gift it to them. He'd tell me about it later and then he'd smile and say 'Now they have to play it with me.' He'd always have cash in his Steam wallet. Buying games for people was always a spur of the moment thing. I guess it's really a 'pay it forward' gesture."
With his winnings from the Season 8 guide contest, he used the proceeds from that to gift games to friends. He was always very generous with these types of gifts, as well as with his time spent helping others and just sharing his free time with friends.
If his family will read this, I want them to know that I'm sorry for their loss and that he will be missed dearly by all of us.