In the first era of Rocket League competition, when community weeklies were turning into studio shows and a brand new world championship, Adam “Espeon” Barth stood out as one of North America’s great mechanical talents. An American player born in 1996, he helped carry Onslaught and then Genesis through the earliest Rocket League Championship Series seasons, reaching the Season 1 World Championship in Los Angeles and returning to the world stage in Season 2 at Amsterdam.
At his peak, an official RLCS recap described Genesis as making “full use of Espeon’s aerial dominance” and noted that many viewers saw him as an “American analogue to Kuxir,” a comparison that placed him beside Europe’s most feared striker of the time. Across two world championships, a string of regional top finishes, and dozens of online brackets, Espeon helped define what high level North American Rocket League looked like before the esport settled into franchise structures and long running organizations.
Early Life, Aim Training, And A Name From Pokémon
Before Rocket League, Barth spent his competitive energy in another precision game. Under the username “pooptartsonas” he played the rhythm game osu! at a very high level, peaking second in the United States and 65th in the world. That background in tracking and timing would carry over into the flight paths and redirects that made his Rocket League play so striking.
His in-game name came from lighter origins. When he and a friend were playing StarCraft II, they decided to pick matching names from Pokémon. His friend took Umbreon, and Barth took Espeon. By the time Rocket League arrived in 2015, that nickname came with him.
The Rocket League Esports Wiki notes that a friend first recommended Rocket League to him. About a month into playing he realized how quickly he was improving and began looking at the game as something he could pursue competitively rather than casually. Within a year he was part of the small group of North American players who would turn the game’s first experimental league season into a professional path.
Hello?, Double Tap, And The Road Into Onslaught
Espeon’s first teams sit in the prehistory of the RLCS era. In late 2015 he played for squads known as Hello? and Double Tap, lineups that mostly lived inside early paid leagues such as the Professional Rocket League (PPL) circuit and online tournaments.
With Double Tap he reached the PPL Season 1 playoffs, finishing second in that early North American league. Those brackets mattered less for prize money than for matchmaking. They introduced him to players such as Fl0w, Huskih, and Klassux who would recur across his early career. In March 2016, he moved into Retrospect alongside Fl0w and Huskih, then into Onslaught Esports with Huskih and Klassux just as Psyonix and Twitch announced the first Rocket League Championship Series.
Onslaught won PPL Season 2 North America and climbed through early qualifiers into the RLCS Season 1 North American Group Stage 1. In that first group stage they finished fifth. The result was not enough to reach LAN, but it put Espeon’s name in front of a broader Rocket League audience and proved that his teams could compete with the best lineups in the region.
Joining Genesis And The First RLCS World Championship
The decisive step in Espeon’s legacy was his move to Genesis in June 2016. That lineup paired him with two players who were already familiar to the early Rocket League community, Pluto and Quinn Lobdell. Together they would become one of North America’s most consistent top four squads during the latter half of Season 1 and through Season 2.
Genesis immediately stepped into the thick of Psyonix’s first league. In RLCS Season 1 North American Group Stage 2 they finished third, a position strong enough to advance to the Online Final 2 and then into the eight team Season 1 World Championship in Los Angeles.
At that inaugural world championship, Genesis took fifth to sixth place and earned $2,750 from the $55,000 prize pool. The bracket path ran them into European opposition in the lower bracket, where Mock-it EU eventually eliminated them. It was the first time many North American fans saw Espeon on a live stage instead of through online streams.
Outside RLCS, the trio ground through Rocket Royale weeks, PPL Season 3, GamerSaloon Champions, and other mid-2016 tournaments. Liquipedia’s results pages show Genesis winning back to back Rocket Royale weeks in late August, reaching the playoffs of multiple paid leagues, and consistently finishing in the money. Those events gave Espeon room to refine the aerial focus that would define his second world championship run.
“American Kuxir”: Aerial Star Of RLCS Season 2
When RLCS returned for Season 2, Genesis came back largely intact, with Espeon now firmly installed as their primary attacker. During the league play weeks of Season 2 North America, Psyonix’s own news coverage highlighted the team’s distinctive style. A recap of the opening week wrote that Genesis made “full use of Espeon’s aerial dominance,” a performance that led some to describe him as an American counterpart to European superstar Kuxir.
Stat lines from that season reinforce the impression. Genesis finished third in the Season 2 North American group stage and then placed third in the RLCS Season 2 North American playoffs, a run that earned the team $4,000 and qualification for the Amsterdam world championship. In the official Psyonix recap of the regional championships, Espeon, Pluto, and Klassux sit directly below NRG Esports and Orbit in the final standings.
In Amsterdam, Genesis could not replicate their regional form. Liquipedia and the Rocket League Esports Wiki record them finishing seventh to eighth at the Season 2 Finals. Their prize for that placing, roughly $1,666 per player, still made up a significant share of Espeon’s lifetime earnings, which Esports Earnings lists at $8,467.47 from 28 tournaments.
Even with an early exit, that second world championship marked the high point of his visibility. Between the RLCS broadcasts and community coverage, Espeon became one of the faces of North American Rocket League, recognized for fluent aerial reads and for a willingness to challenge balls early and high on the backboard.
Take 3, League Play, And A Shifting RLCS Landscape
After Season 2, Genesis dissolved and Espeon moved to Take 3. The new lineup paired him with Vince and Zanejackey and aimed to stay inside the reshaped RLCS Season 3 system just as the league began to stabilize into recurring organizations.
Take 3 fought through the Season 3 North American open qualifier, then survived into league play. In the Season 3 NA RLCS league table they finished seventh, a result that left them short of the Season 3 World Championship but maintained their presence in the upper bracket of regional competition.
Liquipedia’s results list from early 2017 shows Take 3 winning weekly tournaments such as PRL Rivals Cup events and a Gfinity Rocket League cup, earning smaller but steady prize pools. They also took part in the Midseason Mayhem showcase for Season 3, where they fell to Genesis in a loose exhibition format that reunited Espeon with his former teammates.
For Espeon personally, Season 3 represented both continuity and change. He remained a starting attacker in RLCS league play, but the ecosystem around him was growing more crowded. Organizations such as NRG and G2 were stabilizing their rosters, upcoming teams were sharpening their rotations, and the skill floor across the scene was rising. Holding onto a world championship spot became more difficult with every season.
Hollywood Hammers, Rival Series, And The Spacestation Experiment
In mid 2017 Espeon moved from Take 3 to Hollywood Hammers, one of the teams fighting to claim space in the newly introduced Rocket League Rival Series and to convert into a full RLCS promotion. Esports Charts highlights the RLRS Season 4 North America campaign as one of the most watched tournaments of his career, a sign that even outside the main RLCS broadcast his matches still drew viewers.
The results from 2017 and 2018 show Hollywood Hammers and later teams hovering around the edge of promotion but never quite pushing back into the top league. He and his teammates reached mid level placements at RLCS Summer Series events and a mix of weekly and monthly tournaments while the RLCS era moved on toward franchised organizations and longer contracts.
One last high profile organizational step came in early 2018, when Spacestation Gaming entered Rocket League with a roster built around Over Zer0, Espeon, Lemonpuppy, and Laz. Liquipedia’s Spacestation Gaming page records that first lineup forming on February 14, 2018.
Under the Spacestation tag, Espeon returned to the RLCS qualification path in the RLCS Season 5 North America Rival Series play in. The Liquipedia results page for Espeon logs a seventh to eighth place finish in that bracket, with Spacestation falling to Splyce three games to one and missing the cut for the new season.
Spacestation Gaming pivoted quickly. In March 2018 the organization acquired the existing Radiance roster, and the original Espeon led lineup left the team. For Barth, that brief stint in a modern organization represented both an endpoint to his RLCS era and a bridge into a new role in the scene.
Hoops, In-Game Tournaments, And The Shift Toward Streaming
Even as his appearances in premier league play slowed, Espeon stayed tied to Rocket League in other ways. A 2018 Red Bull feature on competitive Hoops highlighted him as one of the players exploring that alternative mode at a high level and explicitly described him as a “pro Rocket League player formerly of Team Genesis.”
Later that year, another Red Bull article on the game’s new in-client tournament system quoted him as a Spacestation Gaming pro discussing how the feature made competitive brackets more accessible to players who took the game seriously but were not yet at RLCS level. His perspective connected early pros to the new generation of ranked and tournament competitors climbing through the game’s built in systems.
The Rocket League Dojo talk show also invited him on for an episode titled “Online vs Live Competitive Play,” a segment that, according to the Rocket League Esports Wiki, centered on the mental and mechanical differences between online competition and LAN events. While full transcripts are not easily accessible, the episode’s focus underlines his position as both competitor and teacher by late 2016.
In the years after Spacestation, Liquipedia’s results list shows Espeon playing in smaller events across 2018 to 2020 with teams such as Goodies’ Goodies, Sweatpants in Public, and various placeholder lineups. These appearances sit more in the realm of bubble competition and content creation than in the center of the RLCS world stage. By the time Liquipedia updated his main biography to describe him as an “American former Rocket League player,” his legacy as a top level professional was already firmly tied to the first three RLCS seasons.
Legacy And Impact
Measured purely by trophy case, Adam “Espeon” Barth’s career looks modest next to later world champions. Esports Earnings records roughly $8,400 in prize money across 28 events, with his largest single paydays coming from third place in RLCS Season 2 North America, seventh to eighth at the Season 2 World Championship, seventh in the Season 3 North American league, and a fifth to sixth place finish at the RLCS Season 1 World Championship.
That framing misses the texture of his impact. In the mid 2016 landscape he was one of the most visible examples of aggressive aerial play in North America, a player whose reads and ceiling touches forced defenses to respect the entire vertical space of the field. Psyonix’s own language, comparing his style to Kuxir’s, gives a snapshot of how fans and analysts saw him at the time.
His career is also a capsule of early Rocket League’s volatility. Within roughly two years he moved from community teams like Double Tap and Retrospect to Onslaught, then to Genesis and two world championships, then into Take 3, Hollywood Hammers, and finally a short Spacestation Gaming experiment as the scene restructured around new organizations.
From an Esports Legacy Profile perspective, Espeon occupies a particular tier of importance. He does not have the longevity or world championship medals of later legends, but he sits squarely inside the core cast of players who built the North American side of Rocket League’s first RLCS era. His story traces the path from pre-RLCS leagues through two world championship runs and into the Rival Series, connecting community roots to the modern professional structure.
For historians of the game, his matches with Genesis across Seasons 1 and 2, his league play with Take 3 in Season 3, and his later interviews and features offer primary material for understanding how top level Rocket League looked and felt before the esport’s consolidation. In that sense, Adam “Espeon” Barth remains one of the key names in any serious history of Rocket League’s early competitive years, an aerial specialist who helped show what was possible when players took to the air and never quite came back down.