It’s been no secret that I was brought up as an arcade rat. I, like many others, spent many hours in darkened rooms dropping quarter after quarter into these huge refrigerator sized cabinets. These games would allows us to travel to other worlds when we would not be able to do so at home for years. While now arcades are few and far between, there is one I have been spending time at on a regular basis: Arcade UFO in Austin.
Arcade UFO is the firxt Japanese style arcade in the state of Texas. Instead of the large machines of the past, the systems used now are head to head. In most cases you don’t know who you’re opponent is unless you look over the top of the thing. You get the anonymity of playing online without the lag. You can still be called a ‘communist nazi jew’, though.
While the owners of UFO do have a wide range of games, their main focus is fighting games like Super Street Fighter 4 and BlazBlue. Many well known players have spent some time there, and I have spent quite some time getting my ass kicked by them. In spite of that I still have a lot of fun and I’ve made some great friends there. UFO is like a second home to me.
Earlier in the year some of the better players were discussing plans to make their way to the largest US fighting game tournament that was to be held this summer: Evolution.
The location of the tournament: Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada.
So I had four reasons to join them:
1: I could cheer on my fellow Arcade UFO players
2: I could hang with the Spankwagon crew
3: I hadn’t been any further west than Austin
4: I hadn’t had a proper fucking vacation in five years.
Ding! Booked the hotel reservations and the plane tickets.
Originally I was just planning on going to lend my support to the UFO peeps that were playing. But on the last day of registration I decided to enter into the Super Street Fighter 4 tournament. Maybe if I practiced I could make a halfway decent showing.
Or I could make a complete embarassment of myself and be out in two rounds.
You can probably make an educated guess which one was more likely.
I arrived in town on Thursday, the day before the tournament started. One thing I quickly figured out was that a lot of people who were coming to the tournament were pretty friendly. At one point I was talking with a group of players from Denver while waiting in line for room registration. Not long thereafter I was hanging out with Marn, one of the top US players in a number of games, and Skisonic, also a top player and someone who would be doing running commentary during quite a few of the matches. Though I wasn’t known by most of them at all, a lot of them were very willing to chat and whatnot. It was pretty cool for them to accept strangers like that.
One other thing that was obvious about the whole thing was that it was primarily driven by the fighting game community. While there were corporate sponsors like Capcom and MadCatz, most of it was handled by volunteers. On Thursday a group of people took time to run an early registration table, as they did on Friday, the busiest day for people to get their badges. Many functions were run by players themselves, from organizing the brackets for pools play, acting as judges, and also helping with the live internet stream. They had a passion for what they were doing, and it showed.
Passion was also displayed by those who were watching the bouts as well. While people did have their favorite players, there was some serious appreciation and hype for high level play all around. During the Super Street Fighter 4 finals the hype was stronger than I had seen at some sporting events. So much so that I had trouble hearing after everything was said and done at the end of the event. But it was awesome to experience regardless.
While the idea of a tournament for fighting games is nerdy, the whole experience didn’t really come off as such. I didn’t have to deal with anyone that really creeped me out (though the number of guys watching the Women’s SSF4 Invitational came close), and people actually bothered to attain some level of personal hygiene. It came off more like a lot of people getting together for a MMA tournament, except that no one got injured. Pride and egos of the losers were the only things to get bruised.
For those who have an appreciation for fighting games I can say this: you owe it to yourself to go to Evolution at least once.
As for what happened outside of Evo? That will be covered in the next article.
Continued in Part Two: That’s What You Get For Waking Up In Vegas
