GOLDSBORO — They moved like a single organism. Traversing the maps, they executed their plans with precision, bringing soldier after soldier to the ground.

They talked quietly about their status, strategy and the location of their enemies.

Although their enemies communicated as well — it wasn’t so quiet or reserved.

“We waited six hours and we’re going to be out in the first round.”

“I keep getting double-teamed.”

“We are completely getting raped.”

Every once in a while, a team would take one of them down.

One guy here.

“He’s got to have two or three shots left.”

One guy there.

“There he is, I see ’em”

“I got two of them.”

But it seemed that with every kill, another enemy would be right behind the survivor, and death was certain.

“Who keeps shooting me?”

“Where did he come from?”

“Dude, they’re everywhere.”

It became clear — as team after team fell — that these guys weren’t messing around.

“Behind you, behind you!”

They were cold.

“Where’s he at?”

They were calculating.

“Where, where?”

They were killers.

“What!?”

Game over.

And just like that, 17 teams were dispersed in the Halo 2 team tournament at the Goldsboro Gaming Expo Saturday, leaving two victors to battle it out in the championship match. But to the team from N.C. State, who dominated the scene for the previous three hours, this game wouldn’t be so easy.

The expo, held at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, played host to almost 15 tournaments throughout the day.

Lead organizer and full-time WCC faculty Michael Everett, a 2003 graduate of N.C. State, said expo planners took time to gather input from prospective attendees to formulate the tournaments.

“From the beginning we’ve tried to say, ‘All right guys, what do you want?'” Everett said. “We tried to make sure that whatever people wanted was there.”

From Madden 2006 on the XBox 360 to Tekken 5 on the Playstation 2, hundreds signed up to enter the competitions for trophies, certificates and prizes.

But among all the competitions, Halo 2 tournament manager Chris Thomas said that from what he had heard, the Halo 2 tournament was the “best and craziest” room at the expo.

“This has turned into the best club in town,” Thomas said.

Rodney Bass, Jay Hann, Mike Pettitt and Mike Yoder thought so too.

Although Bass and Hann had entered the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament earlier in the day, this was the game the team had driven an hour to play.

“It’s a game that everybody’s familiar with,” Hann, a junior in agricultural business management, said. “I can’t think of any game like that now.”

According to Hann, the team wasn’t even sure they would get to enter in the tournament, because when they arrived at 3 p.m., tournament leaders told them the lists had been full since 1 p.m. when the event began.

“We were pretty pissed about it because online it said you only had to register 15 minutes before the tournament started,” Hann said. “I understood because they obviously underestimated the amount of people.”

But after about an hour of waiting, persuading and insisting, tournament leaders put the team from Raleigh on the list.

“I told the guy, ‘If you let us play, we will win,'” Hann said.

And they kept Hann’s promise.

The foursome beat out another team in a 100-kill championship match that filled the tournament room with spectators, and kept the crowd on their toes for about 30 minutes.

Although the team was down by as much as four and only up by as much as nine, they eventually ended the match 100 to 94.

“It was the best game we played up until now,” Yoder, a junior in computer engineering, said.

Pettitt, a senior in criminology, said the biggest frustration during the competition was the lag — the split-second delay between the user’s action and the game character’s action caused by the data connection.

Although the expo is fairly new and certainly isn’t home to the biggest competition in the nation, Hann said he still takes a lot of pride in this weekend’s win.

“We have a pretty solid team for at least Eastern North Carolina,” Hann said.

But to some of the other expo attendees, many of whom were only in their mid-teens, the team represented a goal to aspire to. Many approached the four hoping to get their screen names, hoping to play them later, hoping that one day, they might beat them.

Several even asked if they were N.C. State’s Halo team.

But they assured their fans that they were just a group of friends, albeit with an interesting history.

Although Bass and Hann knew each other from high school, they met Yoder and Pettitt online — oddly enough, playing Halo.

They even began their friendship calling each other only by their screen names.

“I still to this day call him Assassin,” Bass, a junior in civil engineering, said.

Looking back, Yoder said it’s a weird twist of fate that they all ended up together.

“What are the odds?” Yoder said. “We all lived in Bowen [Hall]. We all play Halo. We’re all nasty.”