Twenty-three-year-old cyber athlete Aran «Sonic» Grösbeck has officially announced his retirement from professional CS: GO. Thus, one of South Africa's most successful players ends a career that spanned eight years. During this time he has played for organizations such as Bravado, Cloud9 and ExtraSalt.
Sonic started to gain notoriety in 2014-2015, having made a name for himself at local events in South Africa. He started his career with a team called Energy, but soon the young and talented player caught the eye of Bravado, who by then had already started to make their mark on the international stage. However, despite achieving success at home events, the team failed to progress to a higher level. Therefore, the 2018 Bravado lineup made the decision to move to North America. Sonic continued to deliver outstanding results. His team's most notable achievement during this period was reaching the grand finals of DreamHack Open Winder 2018 after being eliminated from a group in which they were competing against OpTic and G2.
In 2019, Sonic moved to Cloud9, but his results began to decline after the online era. Afterwards, as that organization was dissolved, he soon found himself in Extra Salt, which during 2020 was showing good gains locally. However, over time, her results began to decline and in 2021, the player announced that she wanted to take a break for a while. Now, after a six-month hiatus, he has announced that his decision is final: he has no plans to return to cybersports and will instead pursue other business ventures.