good shit… in just to sponge up knowledge.
does anyone know much about the Japan scene? like… were Ohnuki, Daigo, etc playing since HF, or were they newer school?
also where does BAS fit into all that? i think in B4 he was the only Akuma who knew Sodom couldn’t duck Akuma’s jab (and hence beat Chikyuu).
Shameless plug alert:
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8302192&publicUserId=5606215
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8302121&publicUserId=5606215
I usually update this every year around EvoWorld time. I think I’ll talk 'bout DPC, Melty Blood, Smash bros and SFIV announcement when I do update this summer.
NOTE: I dunno jack about the Japanese scene so yeah, don’t expect much coverage on events outside of the states.
I like how someone from the top finally admits this much. It’s funny how the American mindset is different from some of the Japanese. For example, I used to hang out with a few of the top japanese names in Virtua Fighter, and one of them said he used to have dreams about VF where he would come up with techniques, then go to the arcade before school to play, then play after school.
Then you have a LOT of the known names in American competitive fighting games who try to act MUCH cooler than they actually are, and downplay how much time they put into playing fighters. I’ve not seen a lot of discussion on this subject (I started a thread about it a long time ago, it didn’t go anywhere).
I just think that in America it’s more idealized to be gifted at something than to put hard work in, to the point where top players try to pretend they never play games except for winning tournaments. I could believe this is true for some of the old timers that have the knowlege base/skills where they only need the occasional brushup, but no one ever got good only playing in tournaments…
This is such nonsense. Watson never placed top 5 when he came to norcal in st. Alex wolfe and osaki perfected tomo the night before the st tourney. tomos fat manager said “i cant allow alex to play tomo anymore” The other BS is that LA players always had to come to norcal simply because we never lost to them. There was no point in going there. As far as renorob he was like 10 years old, how does he know this? Jeff please dont try to rewrite history. As a matter fact i never lost to you in any tournament. :amazed: Now there will always be a shit talking rivalry between north and south but there are no facts except tomo winning 2 tourneys.
I got curious and typed in Tomo Ohira on youtube.
Found these two gems:
[media=youtube]6OEXzKk5gkQ&feature=related"[/media]
[media=youtube]c0sh_ARERII&feature=related"[/media] <No one can beat this man’s mullet. Also, was the DP supposed to be executed in the wrong direction in that version?
Lol this thread is like a fraekin year old. Jeff always tryin to pop out of nowhere to talk about the times as if LA was the only peeps around. The truth of the matter is, Both top players from north and south went back and fourth with a mixture in top 8. SF2 and CE majors were run by capcom. Tomo LOST WW and won CE up in nor cali (nor cali took all other places.
With Hyper Fighting…La and Nor cali did NOT play each other during the whole entire phase of this game. We each had a major, Tomo won down south and Osaki took 1st in nor cali.
When Super came, nobody really gave a flying fuck about that game so who cares. We did have 1 major and Tomo won via Watson throwing the game to him and Nor cali got 3rd.
ST = COMPLETE NOR CALI DOMINANCE! So cali lost Tomo, he got so rocked by watson like 200 games straight and gave up SF. Watson was new champion and got raped by nor calis honda players =D
So to put it blunt…Tomo and Osaki were the only real champions that were FAR beyond everyones level up until ST. Once ST hit, everyone was at god status and Tomo and Osaki just couldnt take losing so much so they quit SF all together. Meanwhile myself, Choi, Nelson, Watson, Schaffer, Thao and Valle pretty much went on to leading So Cal and Nor Cali.
Alot of people quit during Alpha1 (that was all Watts and CHoi)
A2 = Valle (Myself and SChafer being the only fools to beat Valle in a tourney =P) but honestly, that was Valles shining moment, nobody could really touch him
A3 = ALL ME BABY =) til nationals…then Valle took nationals but didnt really take any other tourney after. Choi did not come up in A3 til the very end. Once CC’s and crouch cancles were discovered the game just dissappeared with a small group still playing trying to claim they owned it.
SF3 = Valle, choi and Eddie
SF2i = valle and Eddie
SF3 = Hsien and now Pyro/Wong (dont really know my history on SF3)
CVS1 - I have to say this is Nor calis game. We came up with Nak rush down. Nuff said. It started with me, choi nelson rockin everyone and then Rickys first transition to SF from Marvel and he quickly became unstoppable with Nak. Nelson ended up claiming that game and winning B5 (or b4 one of those)
Cvs2 = Japan , please someone rise up and stop them. Honestly though, Norcali AGAIN, completely dominated this game for a majority of its life and are still pretty much on top. It started with Me wrecking everyones face pre-RC. Once RC came out it switched to Choi and Ricky owning. Now we have a lot of great players, but i think a majority of the top ones are still from nor cali (Choi, Buk, Ricky, Kim)
So let the TRUTH BE HEARD!!
Cole
lol, this thread is hilarious!
Fuck all the dumb shit. Schaefer can talk from the fake pulpit all he wants.
Here’s the thing like that cat from Seattle was saying. Top players play a LOT. To contradict, there are natural players who don’t practice like that.
Schaefer will never play again because he hasn’t the capacity. Too many games jumble his head and he can’t practice for the better part of his day anymore so he isn’t that good. He was just very very very trained.
To that I say, so what? A lot of players never realize their potential because they have other endeavors. The players that can still play in their adult lives are the best. The rest are just obsessives for the time that they play.
Great will always be great.
If any of the old school guys are really good, put up the matches for a side evo event. Nelson vs.Schaefer, Cole vs. Thao etc. Bragging rights can last 2 years and then do it again.
It’s funny but non-sensical to rewrite history. There’s no need to speculate on history when who is better can STILL be proven beyond mere words.
damn, so watts put it to tomo like that?
what was it about ST that made tomo\osaki beatable? did the rest of the competition eventually catch up to them?
They should add Exhibition Hyper Fighting to EVO events, and have Norcal face Socal.
Would Tomo reemerge? Would Osaki reaapear? Either way, watching Wolfe vs Watts, or Nelson vs Schaeffer would be awesome.
So Tomoz got punked into submission? Damn, that is vicious.
Though this would be great to see for us youngin’s, this isn’t like in a western when the cowboy digs out his six gun for one last gunfight. This is a video game, which many people have moved on from with the advancement of adulthood. Who knows? Many of these guys might have even lost their chops by now.
they may have moved on but you know they still think about the good ol’ days when they ruled the arcade.
coles the homie, but i cant agree with his wc bias in the thread. still tho <3
nelson didnt win b5, did you forget he lost to chikyuu, as did ricky, in epic fail for the usa that year. 
as for early cvs1…dont you remember when you and nelson came over here for nec1 and you both lost to me? ricky held it down for norcal, as did choi though later on in the year, thats for sure no denying that, but i had a winning record over dangerous crew in that game 
Old Skool Lore - Originally By Jcasetnl
Old Skool lore…
The old man stirred in the corner at hearing the young man’s question to the other fellows at his table.
“What’s that? Speak up, boy, these ears aint what they used to
be!” He croaked. “What’s that you say about the old school
days?”
The young man turned and stood up as an old, wizened man emerged from the shadows amid a cloud of smoke but steeled his nerves and said, “I want to know about the old skool days, what it was like.”
“Ah, well we didn’t use that new-fangled spelling
of “school”, for one”, as he took up a chair. “The old school days, eh? Sit down, boy, sit down, and I’ll tell you a tale… but you keep my cup full, you here?.”
With a glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks in his hand he
took a deep breath, staring intently at the young
man and nodded. Then he turned his eye off into the distance, into some past he held sacred.
“Yeah, I’ll tell you a tale, boy… Not one told often, or as often as it should. Because in these days there ain’t nothin’ like it, and prob’ly won’t be again. Pay attention now.”
Let’s turn the clock back to the year 1987 and a
little town called Oakland, California, and a 7-
11 not far from the intersection of Fruitvale and
McArthur and a boy about 11 years old.
Let me tell you of a time when a quarter was still a lot of money to us kids. Let’s talk about a game called “Street Fighter”.
There were fighting games before Street Fighter: Yie Air Kung Fu, Karate Champ, Punch Out… but Street Fighter was different. The
fighters were huge and detailed and brutal and sinister looking. Each was signficant and unique, and your ability to defeat each one was a measure of your skill.
When you got punched in the face the sound that came from the speakers sounded painful, not some 4-bit, scatchy, crackly
noise but a full and powerful SMACK. As primative as it was, it was closer than anything that came before to tapping into the animal instinct of two fighters locked in a mortal strugle.
I won’t dwell on those early years, though, because the original Street Fighter didn’t have too much of a following. I was a videogame junky by then, or what we used to call a “ware fiend” - a slang that comes from the old BBS days of downloading cracked games for the C64.
That 7-11 installed some pretty useless games over the years but every day after school a group of hardcore players were there no matter what, to dominate and master whatever they threw at us. Hell, I even kicked ass at Arabian and that game is a piece of shit.
See, it wasn’t just the game that mattered. It was the “scene” - the people and the friends you met and made, and the competition. Some kids got respect for playing on the basketball team. But we weren’t like them. We got respect by getting our initials on the high score table.
Yes, the competition. Even playing Ghost and Goblins there was an element of competition because when a good player walked up who could beat the game, the other kids took their quarters off the machine knowing they’d have to wait an hour before the next game. They stood around and watched you kick ass, though. And that was one of the main ways you earned respect back then.
Occasionally 7-11 installed a gem of a game, and Street Fighter was one of them. In the spring of 1987 I ran Track and after running my race up at Merritt College I’d leave the Meet early, catch the bus and spend the rest of the Saturday playing Street Fighter. It was just Street Fighter and 7-11 nachos. That’s all I really cared about.
In those old days the arcade industry was in a slump and had been since about 1984. It’s important to recognize this to really understand just how big the impact of Street Fighter 2 was going to be. There were few arcades and most of them were dark, seedy places that kids were either too afraid to walk into or weren’t allowed to walk into by any parent that cared a damn about their kid’s security. All the action to be had was at the local 7-11 or on this new home console system called “the Nintendo”. Girls never, EVER played videogames.
Street Fighter was eventually replaced by some other crap game and time passed. My parents love to gamble and Reno, Nevada was a second home to me. I knew every arcade in town. But on one trip I saw a game at Circus Circus - a knockoff of Double Dragon called “Final Fight”. This was a game that had instant appeal to everyone, especially button mashers. This is where the car from the bonus round in Street Fighter 2 came from. As wowed by the incredible CPS1 graphics as I was, this was just a hint of what was to come.
A few of those 7-11 grammar school friends remained friends when I started high school and just like before we were loyal game addicts. But now a couple of the guys had licenses and cars, so we headed for “far off” places like Bayfair, which up until then were just fanciful “palaces” we got to visit when mom wanted to go shopping. My friend, Phil, was an avid bowler and Bayfair Lanes had a handful of games. That was our hangout for about a year.
Then one day Phil told me that Street Fighter 2 was coming out. Phil was considered “the best” at the original Street Fighter and all those memories came flooding back. A place called Manor Bowl, not far away, supposedly had one. So we went.
I don’t know what it was, but the first time I saw Street Fighter 2 I didn’t want to play it. Phil played and started beating on these little kids with Ryu. He commented that doing fireball and uppercut were easier than in Street Fighter 1. He said that when doing jumping roundhouse you had to hit the button late (in the original you have to hit Roundhouse just as you start to jump or it doesn’t come out). After a couple of games Phil was doing the oldest of the old skool traps - the fireball-uppercut pattern.
The next day at school I was talking with my friend Ian during P.E. and telling him about Street Fighter 2. He had seen screen shots in the magazines but hadn’t played yet. “Dude, the fireball doesn’t take off shit, neither does the uppercut,” I told him. You see, in the original Street Fighter, the special moves were tough to do but did MASSIVE damage. Two fireballs plus a roundhouse killed your opponent. One well-timed spin kick could actually kill your opponent. In Street Fighter 1, being even ABLE to do the special moves was proof you had skill.
We decided that Street Fighter 2 was just eye-candy and not equivalent to the old skool original. This was a game for the “masses”, we thought. How right and wrong we were…
Finally I got around to playing it at our old homestead, 7-11. My very first round of Street Fighter, ever, was against Blanka and I got destroyed. Blanka was considered tough in the very early days. Zangief was considered practically invincible. I hated Street Fighter 2 after that. I mean, fucking Blanka? He was like some “monster”. All the characters from the original were human. The whole idea of this Blanka character seemed silly.
Then 2 Star Liquors, three blocks from my house, got a Street Fighter 2. I grudgingly tried it again and got my ass kicked again by Chun Li. I tried it again with the same results. WTF?? No matter what I did she stuffed it! Throw a fireball and she just jumped over it and no matter what I did she’d hit me. Fucking WHORE!
Fuck this. I put another quarter in. This bitch is toast. By the end of the first round I heard something I’d never heard before:
"YOU LOSE…
… PERFECT."
I couldn’t believe it. Me, a guy who had killed Mother Brain, a guy who had saved the Princess, a guy who had beaten SATAN and a guy who had faced Adon and Sagat in the original Street Fighter and was declared “King of the Hill”… got his ass handed to him by a GIRL. I didn’t even want to play the second round. I HATED this game.
In the old school days there were always little kids milling around begging for quarters because they had no money, for all I know they still are. One of these kids asked for 2nd Round. Disgusted with this piece-of-shit game I said, “Fine, go ahead.”
Chun Li jumped, he moved under her and did ducking fierce. Chun Li did a spin kick and he did the same.
But for a couple hits he won the Round easily. Then he turned to me and said, “See? She’s easy!”
A fucking eight-year old.
I was hooked. Pride, maybe, but I was hooked.
The first few weeks that Street Fighter 2 was out it was just another game for us to beat. Nobody ever challenged. You have to understand that before Street Fighter 2, video games were almost always about showing off your prowess against the MACHINE, not another person. Games were about patterns: learn the pattern and if you had even decent execution you could beat the game. The guys who could deviate from the pattern and still win were the heros. The guys who could rack up the most points were the ones that got respect. Like in Ghost and Goblins, the guys who blew through the game with the torch as their favorite weopon were considered Gods since the torch sucked so bad compared to the sword. If your name was on the high score table, you were the King. We took those scant three initials seriously back in the day because they were the evidence of our skill. And God so help the 7-11 employee that unwittingly unplugged the machine at some point and whiped the high score table. He was the target of unending scorn…
I don’t remember when it happened but about three or four weeks after SF2 came out I got off the bus and headed for 2 Star Liquors for my daily dose of ware play. 2 Star had installed a second machine and there were about 20 kids there, whereas before there were maybe two or three. 20 kids, crammed into a space that was maybe ten feet by fifteen feet. Think about that for a second.
When was the last time you saw 20 kids crammed around ANY game?
More tommorow…
The next day the young man returned but the old man was nowhere to be found. He turned to leave but just as he reached the door heard the old man’s voice:
“So… back for more, eh?” he rasped?
“Well, I… well yes.”
“Fine, fine. Set me up with a drink, boy, and we’ll continue.”
The old man lit a cigarette and stared into his glass for a moment, sipped, took a deep breath.
“Now where was I… oh right… twenty kids crowded round a video game?”
And they were all crowded around a kid named Pele (prounounced like the soccer player), playing on the second stick. A few kids challenged on the first side and he quickly dispatched them. Finally, everyone backed off to let him play the computer. He got to Balrog and was trounced, but no one had ever seen “the final four” before and he instantly became a legend. Watching him play I learned in a few minutes what would have taken me months to learn on my own. He knew exactly what to do against each opponent.
I’ve been hooked on games before, but I’d never been re-hooked. Still, I got my first glimpse of what was possible with this game, or what we old-skoolers like to call “the next level”.
I’d never seen him before but he made me step up my game. And from that day forward at 2 Star Liquors playing the computer was just half the game and competing against LIVE players was the other half. Even though no one had beaten the game at that point, no one gave a flying fuck about the high score table. It didn’t mean shit because if some schmuck could challenge you and toss you off the machine your stupid initials on a high score table didn’t mean jack. And people were playing so much no one ever saw the high score table anyway.
In short, it was the start of a whole new era of videogames.
Two Star Liqours on Fruitvale Ave wasn’t the exception, but the RULE. Street Fighter 2 had taken hold in a massive way. From then on, if you went into any convenience store, arcade, 7-11, or shithole bar there was a crowd gathered around the game. If you wanted a game “against the computer” you had to EARN IT by beating the crap out of every player that stepped up. No longer did you stare helplessly at another guy playing the game hoping he’d mess up so you could play next. Now, all you had to do was beat him.
But as revolutionary as Street Fighter 2 seemed to be with what little we knew, it was merely the beginning.
The old man sat back from his drink, eyes watered over from the alcohol. “Well that’s enough for this night, boy.”
And the young man said, “There’s… more?”
“More!?” the old man said, in angry contempt. “That’s just the start, the beginning! Of course there’s more… much more. But I’m an old, old man now. Long in the tooth, boy, and I need my rest. You come back tommorow and I’ll tell you another tale.”
“But! Tell me just a bit more.”
The old man sighed. “Okay, just a bit more then.”
So with a swig of his drink he continued.
Everyday after school we had one thing on our mind. Two classes before school let out my mind was already thinking about it and my hands were doing fireball or uppercut motions on my notebook and sweating with the anticipation. The moment the bell rang I was down to Phil’s car in a flash and as often as not he’d be there before me if his last class was in a building closer to the parking lot.
We quickly established ourselves as good players at the local places. 7-11 was no longer the hangout of choice for us because it cost 50 cents to play, whereas 2 Star only cost a quarter. All the history, literally, the 3 years I spent at 7-11, were cast aside. And 2 Star fostered the game, not like those jerk 7-11 counter jockies who would sometimes unplug the games because there were too many kids crammed in there.
The Fireball - Uppercut trap was beatable but only by good players. It required fakes, mind games and consistent execution if you wanted to use it and win. Even against the computer you at least needed good positioning. And for those of us that made that pattern our business we got respect. Other players feared playing us. Never before was “fear” part of videogames. As I watched a good player beat opponent after opponent, watched my quarter slowly march to the right, the adrenaline started to rise and my pulse would start to quicken. I can beat this guy. I can BEAT this guy.
One day I walked in and there was a murmur in the crowd about this thing called a “triple-uppercut”. Of course, the uppercut only hit twice so I tried to imagine how it could possibly hit three times. Maybe if you were under the player? It didn’t make sense. But true to form Pele stepped up against me and after getting me dazed he positioned himself right next to me.
Now when you dazed a guy the thing we always did was throw him. It did good damage and well… we couldn’t think of anything better to do. But Pele did jab into uppercut. He basically mashed the jab button and whirled the stick in a tight circle. Three hits. And I got dazed again! It was the first time I’d ever seen a double-dizzy, but much more importantly, it was the first combo.
I was re-hooked again.
On and on we played. Phil was two years older than me and graduated that year. Eventually we lost touch and he stopped playing anyway, to concentrate on his studies at Cal Poly.
At some point the potential of Guile was realized but I still clung to Ryu. No one ever thought Guile could compete. Sure, he had that insane reach with his normal moves but you had to charge his specials, so he was insanely predictable. But as the strategy evolved and progressed, those three seconds to charge his moves basically disapeared. And his sonic boom had no delay. His flash kick had insane reach as well. Put it all together and Guile was a corner-trapping God.
I was good, but I wasn’t that good. As much as I tried I was never as inventive or creative as many of my opponents. I was a “pattern” player. But that was enough to be the best player at the local liquor store.
By this time it was also known that if you got close to your opponent after a knockdown and did ducking short (which they were forced to block), you could throw them before they recovered from block delay. It was reversible, but extremely difficult to reverse. So players dubbed it a cheater’s tactic and it became known as “cheap”. Even the computer fell for it, and players with absolutely no skill could now beat the game. “Honorable” or “skilled” players never used this tactic. How many arguments, debates, shoving matches and outright fist-fights did I see over this one aspect of the game? I can’t even recall, but there were a lot.
I got back in touch with a friend named Tony. In the six or so months since I last spoke with him he had been playing and had all sorts of stories to tell about legendary players and massive arcades where the best of the best went. Tony had a car and had been all over - Oaktree, the Underground, Bayfair, and Regency just to name a few.
I played Tony a few games and he absolutely thrashed me with Ryu and Guile. He was a great trash talker too. When he played it looked like some intricate dance. He seemed to read my mind and know what I would do way before I did it. He could triple with ease, and landed fierce-forward-fireball combos on me one after another. Over eight months of street fighter experience and I was still being soundly trashed whereas before it had taken me anywhere from two days to a month to master any game before that.
Then he switched to Guile. At the time he was by no means an expert Guile player but being exposed to the far more advanced strategies of the arcades I didn’t have a prayer. Over and over he absolutely destroyed me. I had no answer to anything he threw at me. Finally he said, “Dude, if you ever want to succeed at this ware, you need to take that fool Ryu and dispose of him. He can’t compete. You have a plan, but Guile has PLANS, fool. You want to defeat Guile, you have to defeat all his PLANS.”
I told him he was the best player I’d ever seen and that he could dominate anyone in the place.
And he said, “Yeah, but there’s this Asian fool at the Underground that whoops my ass on a daily basis. That fool has ludicrous skills. He’s on the next level. I beat him a couple times at first, but then he factored my gameplan, divided by Pi, multiplied by the common denominator and filed me away in the database. He whoops me every time now.”
“Who’s that?”
“Thomas.”
The next day the young man returned again and found the old man at the back of the bar with a cue stick in his hand, engrossed in a game of pool against some of the regulars and leaning against a Golden Tee game in the corner waiting for his shot.
“You see, boy? You see this piece of shit behind me? The only thing sadder than this waste of a perfectly good cabinet and trackball is that people actually put quarters into it. But it wasn’t always like that. We used to have good games, games worth playing and mastering. Now they make 'em so any drunk-off-his-ass college kid can feel like a hero by smacking a track ball. Ah, but where was I?”
Tony advised I switch to Guile and that’s what I did. It quickly became clear to me why Guile was so dominant. Within a week I was a far more powerful player than I ever was with Ryu, and even when the gap between the two was closed with Champion, Hyper and Super, I never played Ryu again with the kind of conviction I did with Guile.
By this time I was actually afraid to step into a real arcade. Between the ass kickings Tony handed me regularly and the stories he told I was afraid to face reality - that I was nothing. Sure, I could now easily defeat any of the asian kids in the neighborhood, even Pele was no longer any match for me, but I still felt I needed more practice. But that was the thing about Tony. Like it or not, he dragged me kicking and screaming.
The first lesson in humility I got was at Regency Game Palace in Concord, CA. The whole drive out there (about 40 minutes for us) Tony hyped it up and I squirmed in the passenger’s seat.
Tony: “Dude, are you prepared?”
Me: “I’m ready for some Throw Down.”
Tony: “Nah, dude, I mean are you PREPARED?”
Me: “ha ha, sure dude. It’s all good.”
Part 2
Tony: “Nah, dude, nothing can prepare you. I hope you’re in shape, dude, I hope you ate a full meal and got a good night’s sleep. You’re gonna be making a lot of trips to the token machine. I don’t want you to pass out from exaustion.”
Regency gave an unprecedented 11 tokens for a dollar. There was a cluster of four World Warrior machines in the center of the arcade with about 40 people playing. And they weren’t kids. They weren’t the 10-year olds I was used to at the liquor store or 7-11. In fact, no one looked younger than I was and several looked well into their 20’s. We pushed our way forward into the crowd.
I watched what I didn’t think was possible by that point. Some guy was playing Ryu against Guile. And winning. The guy playing Guile was good, in fact, at the time he was one of the best Guile players I’d seen. Better than Tony. But this Ryu player was extroardinary. He had incredible timing and put pressure on the other guy in a way I’d never seen Ryu played before. In some cases he traded hits to stay out of the corner or keep the pressure on. He didn’t seem to play by any set of rules, he had no pattern I could discern. Even though Guile was the better character he still pulled off the win.
Me: “Damn, did you see that? That fool is–”
Tony: “…on the next level. Hell yeah, he is. His name is Jay.”
Jay was probably the most dominant player at Regency. I counted the tokens till I was up - there were at least 10. But Jay gave his game to Tony and after Tony beat another Ryu player he gave me second round.
I froze up. The guy wasn’t even that good but I’d never seen people play like this. It’s like when some little kid with absolutely no skill just bangs on the buttons and seems to beat you. I was expecting a mano-a-mano test of who could work the fireball-uppercut pattern better than the other but this guy just waited for openings and tore me apart.
My thinking was just so wrong about this game. I was so used to throwing a fireball and waiting for my opponent to react so that I could answer with something. This guy examined my pattern and went from there.
Tony: "You got schooled. Step aside."
Me: “I… uh… damn…”
Tony finished the guy off. The next round I was ready. Something clicked and I was no longer a pattern player. They say competition breeds excellence and they’re right. Watching those few rounds in that dimly lit arcade with at least 10 people staring over my shoulder I immediately changed my style and focused as I never had before. It wasn’t enough, not yet anyway.
Tony: “You suck dude. That fool read you like a Dr. Seuss book.”
We played until the arcade closed at midnight. I managed to win a few games over the course of the evening but even the crappy players were a challenge for a me. We made for Dennys up the street and that became our Friday night tradition. Warez till midnight, then off to Dennys.
In the old skool days, news travelled via word-of-mouth. The internet technically existed but neither I nor the vast majority of players had any idea what it was. If you heard about a player it was in the arcades, chatting it up with other respected players. You even learned of an arcade’s very existence this way.
If you talked trash you had to have some nuts to do it because whatever you said was to a player’s face. And this was in the Bay Area. In Oakland, you better be careful who you talk trash to. Spend a day there and you’ll see what I mean.
And when it came to legendary players, well, they just didn’t get the props they rightfully deserved. We didn’t have easily accessible ranking tables that could tell you with a few mouse clicks and URLs who the best players in the country were. Even the tournaments were poorly advertised, ussually just a flyer taped to the side of the game that got ripped off within a day of it being put up. How did we know who won the tournament the day before? Either we were in it or we asked someone else who was.
We played on through the summer and I got better with Guile. We went everywhere we could find and when we weren’t in the arcades we filled the gaps at the convenience store.
Finally, I had a run-in with the famous Thomas Osaki.
A few times we went to the Underground at UCB. In the World Warrior days we actually avoided the place because truth be told, there weren’t too many good players there and a lot of the players were “cheap”. On top of that the games were usually in lousy condition. But Telegraph Ave had always been a hangout for us, all the way back to the early La Val’s days and $2 Sunday at Silverball.
There was a good crowd that day and Tony pointed out Thomas to me.
Me: "You think he can beat Jay?"
Tony: "I don’t know, dude. My guess is he probably could. I haven’t played Thomas in awhile, though. He doesn’t seem to come here much any more.
My guess is Thomas was probably going to SVGL at this point, but I don’t know for sure.
At any rate, Thomas was methodically beating player after player. There were so many guys gathered around the machine that I could only catch a little of what he was doing. It was such a hassle to get a glimpse I finally resigned to playing on another machine.
Tony: "Oh my God, did you see that?"
Me (in the middle of a game): "See what?"
Tony: "He just did Fierce-Standing-Fierce to flash kick."
Me: “Wha…?”
Okay, this sounds sort of pathetic by today’s standards, but in old-skool combo theory this was a very big deal.
Since this was World Warrior I had to pick Ryu. I knew I couldn’t win. Against any good Guile player my Ryu just didn’t stack up. But supposedly this guy was an expert Guile player.
Thomas beat me soundly in a no-nonsense sort of way. No flash, just all business. No slack in his game. No faking a sonic boom with jab. No mistakes. He never once looked at me, not when I stepped up, not when I put my quarter in, not after he beat me. I was just another duck in the shooting gallery I guess.
If I could relive those few hours knowing what I know now I would have put another quarter up and played him as much as I could. But after that one game I played the rest of the day on the other machine. Like I said before, we didn’t know who the best of the best was. We went to the arcades and just played whoever was there. We knew who the local good players were but we didn’t have any idea just how good they really were. I mean, we were comparing this guy to Jay, and I can say with certainty that Thomas would have owned Jay in a heartbeat.
But that’s how it was in those days. The world was a smaller place before the internet. The level of competition that existed in the Bay Area was extremely high, but we didn’t see it that way. We figured what was going on in the Bay Area was happening everywhere, that guys like Thomas were just a 10 minute drive away at the next arcade. And sure, the Fighting scene was a hundred times bigger throughout the world in those days, but the Bay Area was one of the true hotspots. Go anywhere from Sausalito to San Jose and there was competition. Even after I won ten straight at the arcade the night before, I’d walk into a 7-11 during my break at work for a quick game and some random guy would give me a wake up call. Almost a year of playing Street Fighter fanatically and I was still just another player. That’s how good players were back then.
How many times have you been given a wake up call playing Golden-fucking-Tee?
That was the one and only time I played Thomas. We never saw him again at the Underground. Sorry if my experience is a bit of a let-down, but that’s how it happened. We never considered the possibility that one day this fabulous era of competition would end. We didn’t really know what we had until years later when we realized it was gone…
More time passed and fall turned to winter, which in the Bay Area means absolutely nothing. And like the unchanging weather I was an unwavering Street Fighter addict as always.
By this time, however, Guile and Dhalsim were considered practically unbeatable in the hands of skilled players and that combined with the game being out for over year caused the competition to start tapering off. I didn’t care too much though - I was happily doing invisible throw, handcuffs, statue and all the other glitches we had discovered.
But one day it all came back with a vengeance. I rode with my friend Adrian in his 65 mustang out to the Red Robin at Bayfair.
In the pre-web days you got game information from the magazines like Gamepro and EGM. I used to laugh when there was any mention of things like the handcuffs or the game reset glitches. The magazines were afraid to print how they were done but they were well known to all of us. One even warned that these glitches could “damage the game” and one version of World Warrior featured a neutered version of Guile to prevent people from doing them.
I still remember when EGM played an April Fools joke wherein they explained that Sheng Long really did exist. This was always a big mystery to us. Who the hell is this Sheng Long guy anyway? Most speculated that it was the Dragon Punch, but we all wanted to believe he was some hidden character. Every once in awhile some kid would make a wild claim that his friend’s friend’s sister’s boyfriend had gotten to Sheng Long. You know how those stories go. We never took them seriously.
Supposedly to get to him you had to beat every single fighter perfect. They even had screenshots of him on Bison’s stage with a flaming uppercut. I made this my mission for a few days until I wised up. I was so pissed off at EGM for all the quarters I’d wasted trying to accomplish this that I never bought another issue.
But we rarely bought the magazines anyway. Another old ritual of ours’ was going to Barnes and Noble in Jack London Square. We gathered up a stack of game magazines and then marched up to the cafe, ordered a cup of coffee and then spent a couple hours reading while the sun went down on the Bay. When we were done, we put them back on the rack and left.
There was one I did buy, though, and I still have it. It was called “Video Games and Computer Entertainment” and it had the first screenshots of Champion Edition we’d seen.
As Adrian and I pulled into Bayfair’s parking lot I was skeptical. Adrian had “heard” that Champion Edition was there, but Adrian wasn’t nearly as hardcore as I was, and the friend he heard it from was some scrub from Alameda.
Anyway, as we walked in, there were at least 30 kids jammed into the little game area they had and there it was, Champion Edition. In fact, there were so many kids jammed into that room that finally the staff put a divider and a “door man” in front of the entrance to the game area. About an hour after we arrived they announced that only patrons of the restaurant could stay - everyone else had to leave.
Being kicked out of 7-11s or super markets for crowd control reasons was a common thing back in those days. On one occasion at a 7-11 the guy told me “last game” and I said “fine”. Then he went into a back room and cut the power right in the middle of my game. Disgusted I got in line behind about six or seven people to get my quarter back and after finally getting to the front he told me “no refunds.” Then he smiled like a jackass and turned away on some Clerk-esque power trip. I don’t reccommend you do what I did next. I reached into a box of candy bars at the counter, grabbed the biggest handful I could and waved it at him. “This ought to cover it, asshole,” and I walked out.
So I was used to being kicked out wherever I went. It was one of the prices we paid to play back then. But I got two games in, one with Ken and one with Guile. I couldn’t resist playing Ken the moment I saw that huge sweeping uppercut of his. It seemed impossible to daze your opponent but the combos and the overall flow of the game just seemed better than ever.
A week later Tony and I were out at Regency around noon time and he was playing Ken against a lousy Bison player. This is one of the all-time funniest Street Fighter moments I can remember.
Everyone picked up on Bison’s zig-zagging psycho crusher tactic that did stupid amounts of damage before you recovered from block delay and this guy was relying on it to win the match. So Tony, who knew a thing or two about playing against “cheap” players just gave him what he had coming. After his defeat the guy whipped out his soap box and started crying foul about how he was cheated.
Tony pointedly underlined the “Champion Edition” logo on the marquee of the machine with his finger and said, “You see what this says? It says CHAMPION EDITION, dude. You see that game over there?” He pointed to the lonely World Warrior machine in the corner now suffering from total neglect. “That’s where you need to go… back to Remedial Edition… to learn the basics.”
Champion Edition was a worthy successor to World Warrior and the Street Fighter competition scene was back in full swing. But unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.
Now some people say the end of the “golden age” of Street Fighter happened when Alpha came out. In a way, they’re right. But in a lot of ways it happened during Champion Edition. It happened because of the “kits”.
You may have heard of Street Fighter: Rainbow Edition, or Street Fighter: Black Belt Edition. Those were hacked rom sets of Champion Edition. There were literally dozens of them. They started out tame - the first one I ever saw allowed you to do moves in the air and projectiles could go super slow (so slow you could walk past them after you threw them) or super fast.
They were a lot of fun at first. You could throw a fireball, cross-up your opponent and combo him so that he was hit in the back by it during the combo. The computer AI would react in all sorts of wierd ways to these set ups. But we quickly realized a problem with them: competition was a joke. Take Zangeif for example. All you had to do was keep jumping and spinning and you could go off the screen. You could literally go up several screens this way. And then all you had to do was line yourself up vertically with your opponent and do a SPD. Sure, it was funny watching a guy get a SPD from seven screens up but after that, Zangief just had to spin up a few screens out of reach and wait for time to run out.
There was another problem. Every week a new kit came out. Sometimes we got two or three in a week. And each one was more ridiculous than the last. Some sped up as you played, others had zig-zagging or curving fireballs. Others allowed multiple projectiles on the screen or zero delay charge moves (imagine sending 10 super slow sonic booms at your opponent). Others allowed you to switch characters mid-round. Throw ten sonic booms, switch to Ken and do a super fast spin kick across the screen, switch to Zangief and do a super high jump into SPD while your opponent is tied up in block delay. On wakeup your opponent was in a sea of sonic booms and totally powerless. In short, they were all fun for awhile but serious competition became impossible.
When the kits hit, Street Fighter began to dissapear from the 7-11s and the super markets. Now it was the more hardcore players that remained. The damage was done though. Capcom’s answer was Hyper Fighting.
Once again I was up in Reno and my ussually cheap parents decided to splurge. We stayed at what was then called the Bally’s and they had Hyper Fighting. I played it and honestly didn’t really care for it because it played a lot like some of the early kits. You could do some moves in the air, it was sped up, etc. In fact, it seemed boring compared to the kits. No more crazy combos, no more total ownage of the computer, and no more insane setups using five different characters.
It did bring back the competition though. It only took a couple trips out to Regency to figure that out.
This is when arcades started to change pretty radically. Street Fighter 2: WW had brought the industry back from the dead and other fighting series (MK, SS, AoF) had kept the ball rolling but as the genre’s popularity began to center around the more hardcore gamers the profits began to dry up overall.
Regency was the classic example of this. First off, they changed the name. It became “Playland”.
“Regency Game Palace” - home of hardcore players.
“Playland” - home of… stuffed animals?
Sad but true. They installed a bevy of ticket games and one of those big, plastic playgrounds. It was no longer dimly lit and mysterious, with the competitive atmosphere of a pool hall from “The Color of Money”. Now it was screaming flourescent lights and day-glo Barneys plastered all over the walls.
By this time we checked into one of the oldest of the old skool homesteads: Gametown USA. This was an arcade of about 15 games and half a dozen pinball machines on College Ave. It was a shithole with virtually zero competition. However, I’d finally worked my way up to something approaching Tony’s level and the competition was all about us. At the same time we made some good friends there. We still hit the other arcades looking for competition but somewhere along the line we realized the train had started to slow down. And as for me, I had other things to think about.
The old man finished his drink with a seeming finality and the boy figured the story was over. But the old man gestured for the waitress.
“One more and let me close out.”
Back in the day, I always paged Tony with my code - 7311. This time he called me back a couple minutes later on his cell phone and explained that he was running late due to some domestic trouble.
Me: “So what happened, dude?”
Tony: “How do I explain it, dude? She was just tripping, you know? It’s like… It’s like you know when you’re just playing some fool and it’s all good, but out of nowhere he goes for the tap-tap-throw?”
Me: "No doubt, dude. Did you break-out the technique?
Tony: “Well… I had every right to cross
her up with deep roundhouse, ducking short, standing jab to
uppercut, you know? But if I do that, and don’t give her a round, she’ll take her tokens and go home.”
Me: “I hear you, dude. But after she went for the tick throw, it’s all fair game, in my opinion. So what did you do?”
Tony: “Basically, I just took it back to Remedial. I gave her a little
fierce-forward-fireball, a little fierce-strong-flashkick, know what I’m saying? So, she knows I’m in control of the game flow but that I was merciful and gave her Second despite her transgressions.”
Me: “I hear that, dude. Good shit. But I mean, in the overall scheme of the World Warrior Tournament, what’s in store? You think she’ll ever compete on the next level? I mean, when two fools step up they can just sit there and throw each other all over the screen but what’s the point. Why play at all, know what I’m saying?”
Tony: “I hear you but I don’t know, dude, at this point she doesn’t possess the knowledge that a fist of fire can destroy. You know it’s like when you’re just having an off day and you lose to the computer and the timer is running down and you’re out of tokens. Sometimes you go back to the token machine, sometimes you just hop up in the Ride and roll out to Dennys.”
Me: “Yeah, dude, and sometimes you hop in the Ride and travel the world to face a wider variety of opponents.”
Tony: “Exactly.”
Me: “I hear you.”
Tony: “Let’s go play Turbo.”
Me: “Good shit.”
When words failed us, we put things in “Street Fighter” terms and we knew exactly what the other guy was trying to say.
I forcibly restricted myself from playing Street Fighter because of College. I started College that Fall at a school that is not known for its academic posterity, but it is known for its hair. Yes, I’m speaking of the one, the only, Chabot College, a.k.a. “Hesperian High”. No other school came close to Chabot’s female student body in boasting the biggest, highest, most obnoxiously unnatractive hair-styles ever to scrape the pleather from the roof of a Honda Civic hatchback as that bastion of education in Hayward, California. But at $13 a unit, who was I to complain? Especially since I was paying my own way.
As soon as I realized most of my classes employed some sort of a Curve, spelling my name correctly pretty much assured I would get a passing grade. Thus, after getting over the “shock” of college, I spent most of my time in the rec room.
The Chabot rec room was a little ten-game affair next to the cafeteria. It reminded me of the old 7-11 and Two Star days because it was always crowded and hot. There were always guys that couldn’t speak english. I used to listen closely and try to figure out if it was manadarin, cantonese, thai or vietnemese. I could swear like a sailor in all of those languages. Spend as much time in Bay Area arcades as I did growing up and you just picked this sort of thing up.
There was always the lonely fat kid with headphones who never looked anyone in the face, just stared around sheepishly, played a couple games and left. There was always the really foul-smelling “fresh off the boat” kid missing a bunch of teeth and wearing acid wash jeans from the flea market. There were the anime geeks - nice guys, but other than school they just didn’t seem to do anything well. They were mediocre at best on the sticks. They were such nice guys, though, I always felt bad smacking them down.
Samurai Showdown was the big game at the time - the first fighting game that used weapons and wasn’t horrendously awful. It was one of the several fighting games that we played casually, as a diversion from Street Fighter. Tony played the World Heroes series.
Part 3
Me: “Dude, what the fuck?! That fool threw a boat at me.”
Tony: “Yeah, that fool has nautical powers, dude. You’d best be on gaurd.”
Me: “This game fucking sucks.”
That was the beginning and end of my interest in World Heroes.
Super Street Fighter got a lot of hype in the magazines and sounded impressive on paper - new graphics engine, new artwork, Q Sound, four new characters and a supposedly revamped combo system. One magazine stated “No longer will you be Dhalsim the combo-less wonder up against Captain-Combo Ken…”
We were waiting for it. Each day we’d drive out to one or two arcades to see if they had it. We even made trips to places like Escapade in Emeryville and “The Castle” near the Oakland Coliseum - places with lousy competition, broken sticks, or both - places we typically ignored - just on the off-chance that it would be there.
For the first time in our gaming lives we were fully able to pursue our passion. We both had cars and we both had jobs. We also got to know the guy behind the counter at Gametown so we had a say as to what games were installed. We told him to page us with ‘911’ the moment Super arrived.
It was like a childhood dream realized. No more digging through the couch looking for quarters. No more being kicked out of 7-11s - in fact the guys at Gametown often let us play after-hours for free. No more being told when to be home by our parents. Like all parents, of course, they didn’t exactly like our fascination with video games, but luckily they had the intelligence to realize there were far worse things we could have been doing.
Oddly enough, after all that driving around for about a month or so, the little Chabot rec room was the first place I found with a Super Street Fighter.
The first thing I noticed was the announcer’s voice. The old voice was serious, grave, and a just a bit menacing. He could have hosted matchups in Thunderdome. The designers of games like Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct stepped that up a notch for added affect. Somehow, Capcom went the other way.
The new announcer could cut your hair and give you a manicure. I didn’t know what Capcom was thinking, or continued to think later on with other Street Fighter incarnations, as this non-threatening, non-forboding, effeminate, he-girl voice played into my disbelieving ears.
The next thing I noticed was that Super was a lot slower than Hyper Fighting. That seemed a little odd, but it wasn’t the huge turn-off to me as it was to most because I was more of a thinking player. I never had the best reflexes. But above all else, that was the most common complaint about it. It was just too damn slow for most people. It wasn’t as slow as World Warrior. It was somewhere around Champion Edition speed.
I noticed a curious phenomenon in the Chabot game room, which also had a Hyper Fighting machine. Although the popularity of Hyper Fighting had died down, when Super came out it actually had a small resurgence of interest. After a game of Super, a lot of players would shake their heads in disgust and walk over to Hyper Fighting for a few games. And when they did they played seriously. Beat a guy on Super and nobody cared. Play them again on Hyper Fighting and they immediately stepped up their game.
I beat Super the first time I played it. The computer was easy compared to Hyper Fighting or even Champion. At the end of the day I drove home and paged Tony with the news. I should have figured it, but he demanded we go right back out there.
When I had played Super earlier in the day the wait wasn’t long. But this was no surprise because as lousy as Chabot was, a lot of kids took their educations seriously. And moreover, all the high school and grammar school kids were stuck in school during the day. But as we drove back out to Chabot I thought back on the old World Warrior and Champion Edition days when the arcades were still jammed. Sure, the crowds for Hyper Fighting had been a bit lackluster but that’s because it was just Champion Edition with some added bells and whistles, I figured. This was a whole new Street Fighter. I imagined seeing some of the old faces and the old competition.
It was about 7 o’clock, I remember, and the rec room closed at 9 so I was worried we wouldn’t get any games in. I wanted this first night of Super to be perfect because we’d been waiting in anticipation for so long. I didn’t want a bunch of no-skill wannabes to be in the game room wasting precious playing time, but on the other hand I didn’t want the place to be packed or we might not even get to play at all. I was hoping maybe six or seven really good players would be there.
There wasn’t a single person.
Tony: “Damn, dude, that’s a sign of the times.”
Not one single person was in the game room. The silence was prophetic.
Yes, the scene was starting to wind down but we kept going anyway. We made some good friends at Gametown and played almost daily. Between the five of us there was usually at least one other person to play and it made our trips out to the arcades that much more fun, going as a group. We’d play for who had to walk next door to Wendys or the Burrito shop and buy food. Like always, warez till midnight, then off to Dennys, then back to Tony’s to play the consoles till four or five in the morning. This was around the time of the 3DO and a great time for console gaming in general.
As unloved as Super was, it was during this time that I played at my peak. I dissected Guile like never before. His normal moves were given less and less priority with each succesive version. His sonic boom delay seemed to get worse and worse and his flash kick became easier to counter. That meant positioning, timing and the mental game had to be that much better. I played with all six buttons, maximizing each one. Rather than hit the buttons with one finger, I played with my three middle fingers which allowed me to hit the buttons just a few hundredths of a second faster than the other guy. With every move I figured there had to be a use for it, if only as a way to enhance the mental game.
At the end of the night of gaming I’d talk Tony’s ear off about some new realization I’d made about Guile.
Tony: “Yeah, dude, you’re taking Guile to the next level but Street Fighter is kind of on the down slope now, you know?”
I honestly don’t know why I stepped up my game like this given the scene was deteriorating. When I think back on it now I sometimes wonder. Why push so hard when there was no one to play? It was like I was trying to pump some life back into an era of gaming that I knew was heading towards an end. But that wasn’t the whole of it.
All the signs of change were there: going from high school to college, moving out of my parents house, working at a job not just for spending money but to actually live on. I was 19, almost 20. I had a girlfriend, a car and bills to pay. I’d been playing games since the 5th grade, since I was nine years old, since 1985. 10 years earlier my best friend had shown me Spy Hunter at the Round Table down the street and from that day forward each game I played, and mastered, became a sort of marking of the passage of time.
It wasn’t just the Street Fighter scene that was coming to an end. It was, in a nutshell, the end of my childhood. I was growing up. Part of me still wanted to stay a kid.
In 1994, Super Turbo was released, hot on the heals of Super. We liked it and we played it, but it was tough to find good competition. It was tough to find any competition for that matter. Even out at the good arcades it was a treat when one of the old-skoolers would take a break from Slam Masters and play Super Turbo a few games.
I think this was also around the time of the Street Fighter live-action movie. We gathered up all the homies and crossed our fingers because when video games get turned into movies the results are often dissastrous. Our summation: it could have been worse. Sadly, it was the last acting gig for the esteemed Raul Julia. That’s akin to saying Babe Ruth’s last game of baseball was in his backyard with a wiffle ball bat.
On one of our forays to Barnes and Noble a few months before the release of the movie we were sitting in the cafe leaching the latest crop of game magazines when we noticed Ming-Na Wen was sitting at the next table.
Me: “Dude, check this out. Isn’t that the chick from The Joy Luck Club?”
Tony: “What page is that?”
Me: “Not in the ware-zine, you retard, at your three o’clock!”
Tony: “Suck the corn outta my shit, dude. Oh… hmm… let me go get a napkin so I can scope the full 360 rotational view.”
Tony: “Holy shit, dude, I think that’s her. You know, I heard she’s supposed to play Chun Li.”
Me: “Damn, really? Hmm. That’s kind of a shame. Anything Van Damme touches these days flys to the rental shelf with astonishing speed, dude. It could be career ending. Maybe I should ask for her autograph or something, and warn her to back out while she still can.”
Some of our conversation was overheard, though, we realized. When we looked over again, Ming-Na politely smiled and nodded at us and then left the cafe with the guy she was with, obviously not wanting the public attention.
1995 was when it all ended. I’ll probably take a lot of heat for saying that on a site that still preaches the gospel of Street Fighter but for myself and most of the old skoolers, that was the end of the golden age. That was the end, period. We hung on for awhle after that, but 1995 was more or less when it stopped.
From late 1994 to early 1996 several things happened. Darkstalkers came out and I immediately hated it. The cartoonish artwork had absolutely no appeal to me. The special moves were flamboyant and ridiculous and all sense of precision seemed to be absent from it. I couldn’t imagine breaking the game down with such fanatical meticulousness as I had done previously with Super and Super Turbo. But as Capcom churned out a new fighting game every couple of months, it became clear that they never expected us to.
Then the Street Fighter Movie game was released. I played it once.
Tony: “What’d you think? It’s crap, huh?”
In response I shoved the game away from the wall, unplugged it, and shoved it back into place.
One after another the old skool players gave the new stuff a try, quickly realized what was up, and left. And they more or less never came back to the arcades.
Then the anti-christ was born, except it was called Alpha. I played Alpha exactly one time while it was in the arcades. That’s how much I, and a lot of others, hated it. The gameplay was clunky and simplistic. The graphics were cartoonish and silly. The music was childish. It didn’t have the feel or flow of Super Turbo. Guile was replaced with Charlie.
Me: “What the fuck is Charlie saying when he throws a sonic boom? “Chronic-Jew”? This game fucking sucks.”
Tony: “I think he’s saying “wonic-foo”. I don’t know, dude. I think I like the voices from Street Fighter 1 better than this shit.”
Me: “And tell me this. Why is it when you hit a fool, his brains go blasting out of the back of his head?”
Tony: “I don’t know, dude. I think Capcom has lost their fucking heads for real this time.”
Tony played Alpha a bit but I just couldn’t stand it.
Tony: “It has some new shit, but NO ONE is playing seriously, you know? People just sort of play it, but there’s no one like Thomas or Jay breaking it down and taking it to the next level.”
One day, I think around April or May of '96, we drove out to Playland. There really wasn’t any competition any more by that time. People didn’t even play Alpha much and Capcom just kept churning out more clones. Half the time we’d get out there and one of the sticks on Super Turbo would be broken. We’d end up playing Bust-a-move or really old shit like Smash TV and Heavy Barrel. It started to seem kind of pointless.
But we’d been driving out there for the last four years, so what the hell else were we gonna do?
On this particular day it turned out we were going to turn right around and head back home. Playland had closed up for good.
So we spent most of our time at Gametown. One day I got a call from Tony and he said to get down to Gametown right away. I hopped in my car and got there about ten minutes later, just long enough for us to play one last game of Street Fighter as the rest of the games were being carted out. I don’t even remember who won. All the friends were there and we watched them cart away Street Fighter. It had the solemnity of a funeral procession as we followed it out.
Gametown was for Tony what 7-11 and Round Table had been to me, a fixture of his youth. That’s where he had played games ever since he was tall enough to reach the sticks.
Me: “Damn, dude, we’re getting old.”
Tony: “Ha… you fool. I hear you, though.”
And then it was over.
That’s basically how I remember it. I realize that this tale of the old skool days is a somewhat sweet, sappy and perhaps somewhat-dramatic accounting, but I can’t help occasionally feeling nostalgic for those days. Anyone who wasn’t there, anyone who wasn’t as fanatical about all of it as we were, anyone who didn’t get a first hand taste of the energy and excitement… just won’t quite understand.
At best they’ll smile and nod their heads politely. Like I said, we didn’t play basketball or football. We weren’t like those other guys. We carved out our own little niche in the world and if other people didn’t get it, we didn’t care.
But the thing was, we made those old skool days what they were. It wasn’t our parents telling us what to do. It wasn’t some jerkoff coach kicking us in the ass to realize a dream we didn’t share and didn’t want. We didn’t do it for girls or money or because there was some big payoff down the road waiting for us. We just did it because it was so damn fun. It was something really special that we made great, and it was all ours.
The old man got up to leave, sighed and shook his head.
“Yup, ain’t nothin’ like it these days, and probably won’t be ever again.”
–end
Shouts out to all the dead homies
Old Skool Lore - Originally By Jcasetnl
Sweet read and great thread. You really translated experiences so vividly.
Yeah, it’s a depressing fact that what you and your friends experienced is over. But I bet you’d do it all over again.
Great article man. Thanks for writing it.
Great job. That was a magical time. I was a lot younger at that time, (grade school), so only started playing at SF CE, and only when a birthday party or my parents would take me to an arcade. By the time I was in High school, SF was long dead (the arcade scene that is)…still from what I experienced…the legions of SF players surrounding a machine, the tension, the excitement and amazement at seeing something never before done, trying to be king of the hill…very special.
The Japanese were smart not to let arcades die, we’re missing out on a lot.
Wow. That was a fantastic read Shadow.
Wow, awesome read. So emotional :’(
I wonder how it all was in Japan, is Alpha was hated in there too?