'We're not about those golf claps': Why the Street Fighter e-sports community likes to keep it loud
Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros. and other tournaments held at video gaming convention in Toronto
If the roars from the crowd were any indication, this was the upset of the past weekend.
Chris Alphonso, a 19-year-old from Scarborough, Ont., is taking Julio Fuentes from California to the limit.
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It's the middle of the Street Fighter V video game tournament, part of the Good Game Convention in Toronto. Alphonso, who goes by the online nickname Bus, is a local favourite and one of the best Canadian players in the pool of more than 200 competitors vying for a trophy.
The tournament's called Toryuken, a spin on "Shoryuken," the signature leaping punch of the Street Fighter main character Ryu. It's the second biggest Canadian Street Fighter tournament, behind Canada Cup held every October.
Fuentes, however, is the fourth-ranked Street Fighter V player in the world, according to publisher Capcom's current rankings. He's one of a handful of players here from the U.S. in the rarified tier of competitors skilled enough to play for a living rather than as a hobby.
Alphonso is unknown to most spectators outside Canada. But he surprises Fuentes with a 2-1 win, knocking the favourite into the losers' bracket.
A highlight from <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Toryuken?src=hash">#Toryuken</a>: the crowd goes wild as Scaborough's <a href="https://twitter.com/whereusitting">@whereusitting</a> upsets <a href="https://twitter.com/juliofuentes408">@juliofuentes408</a> in SF5 pools <a href="https://t.co/0EDx5ngonr">pic.twitter.com/0EDx5ngonr</a>
—@Jon_OreThe crowd erupts. Several spectators' eyes are wide open, hands on their mouths. They jump out of their seats and begin to chant, "Bang Bus! Bang Bus!" It's a riff on Alphonso's nickname, but also the name of a pornographic website.
It's a display of the passion and excitement and also the rowdiness the fighting game community is known for. But that same rowdiness — and the off-colour flourishes and so on — have also been the cause of some growing pains as the scene expands.
'We like to showboat'
"I like to compare the fighting game community to the WWE," says Justin Wong, the 16-year pro sponsored by Twitch-owned e-sports label Evil Geniuses (EG).
"We like to showboat, we like to 'pop off,' we like to cheer, we like to jump around. It's just thrilling. We're not about those golf claps. We're about keeping it hype."
The theatrics haven't distracted Wong from being the top-ranked Street Fighter player in North America. He went on to win first place in the Street Fighter V tournament on Sunday, defeating Fuentes, who clawed his way out of the losers' bracket after his loss to Alphonso.
It isn't just chants and the occasional vulgarity that the fighting game community — or FGC — are typically known for. The most memorable moments sometimes take on the theatrics of an actual WWE show.
Take the CEO 2015 tournament, in which entrants played while sitting on chairs inside a wrestling ring.
Wong's EG teammate Kenneth (KBrad) Bradley walked down an entrance ramp to the theme song of Stone Cold Steve Austin, showered himself with a pair of beer cans and gave a volunteer Austin's signature wrestling move, the Stunner — all before playing his match.
"I just thought: 'What would be the craziest thing I could do, to maximize this ring?' I told myself that I wanted to do something to entertain the people and to entertain myself, too," Bradley said of the moment.
Mind games
The beauty of Street Fighter and other fighting games is apparent almost immediately. While team-based strategy games like League of Legends enjoy larger audiences around the world, anyone can figure what's going on in a fighting game. Two fighters square off and the first to knock out his or her opponent is the winner.
"It's so simple to understand. It's just fun to see two people beat themselves up in a video game," says Eduardo (PR Balrog) Perez, another Evil Geniuses member and perennial tournament winner.
Kevin (Dieminion) Landon, a top North American player who practises his techniques anywhere from three to 10 hours a day, likens it to a game of chess that demands lightning-fast reflexes with a joystick.
"There are mind games between you and your opponent. Even though you might not see it when they're playing, there's definitely a mental connection between the two players," he said.
Cleaning up for prime time
The initial simplicity with complex, high-level play has helped contribute to the FGC's growth.
Companies like PC manufacturer Razer, streaming service Twitch and Red Bull have sponsored players and organized increasingly lavish tournaments with broadcast-quality production values, knowing they can reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers during a single live stream.
It's a far cry from the tables-in-basements look of a decade prior.
Some of the harder edges of the community have been necessarily filed down in the process. A player known by his handle Crackfiend changed it to Hypefiend earlier this year.
Following the Electronic Sports League's example, Capcom banned the YouPorn-backed Team YP from displaying its logo for the remainder of the Capcom Pro Tour. And Twitch recently announced efforts to clean up its live chat, an unrelenting stream of sexist, racist and generally uncouth comments.
Smash the competition
That doesn't mean the FGC is totally going corporate.
A few feet away from the Street Fighter events is the most grassroots e-sport of them all: hundreds of entrants are playing games in the Super Smash Bros. series. Most are playing Melee, the version that came out in 2001 for Nintendo's defunct GameCube console.
It's such an old-school game that organizers, volunteers and players have lugged hundreds of older computer models — and 70 tube television sets — to play the game because the GameCube's video output doesn't work well on modern screens.
"The community works together and mobilizes together because we understand that if we don't, we're not going to get handouts in order to progress and keep our game alive," says Joe Cribari, the 23-year-old Toronto native who organizes the Smash portion of the convention called Get On My Level.
While he admits that he could do much more with money from a major sponsor, Cribari seems resigned to the fact that if he wants to run his events the way he wants to, he'll have to do it mostly on his own and with the help of the community instead.
For everything going against it, though, the Smash crowd seems healthier than ever, with a partisan Canadian crowd blowing the corrugated steel roof off for Quebecer Elliot (Ally) Carroza-Oyarce.
Just next door, Toronto FC fans were cheering and chanting at BMO Field, a community with bigger screens and brighter lights, but perhaps more in common with the FGC than one might think.
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