No vids of US SF's 'Golden Era' & best_ever player!?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Its fantastic to have you here, I had already spoken to Jeff and he knew who you were right away. Its amazing too that you not only have the oldest known recording of HF footage (and if it is 94 the skills should be really near peak level), but also connected to the CPS1 era Japanese scene too. Just terrific. I mean Japanese HF footage is something I thought I’d never get to see. I wasn’t aware anyone had contact both sides of the pacific during that era except Kuni.
So much history to fill in too, World Warrior rankings no less!! This classed as pre-history before you arrived. Really looking forward to future corespondence, so exciting.
Finaly be able to start to piece together a real picture of the Genesis of this whole scene.

There is some great reading to be done here too: http://www.shoryuken.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1427

Crayfish.

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Yeah…Jeff and I still talk all the time. Actually talked to him yesterday. I first met him in the first CE No Bison No Guile tourney at worlds finest where he got 1st and I got 2nd. It was actually a few weeks right after I got back from playing with some of those guys in japan and they showed me some pretty funny anti-dhalsim juggles that hadn’t been discovered in the states yet.

Here are two pix i’ve dug out of a photo album. I have more stashed away somewhere in the garage.

First one is a CE tourney circa 94 at Family Fun Arcade in Northridge/Granada Hills area.

http://www.laakira.com/FFACET.jpg

This one is me with two of the top players for CE and HF. Obviously im the white guy, Itoyama is standing next to me and Tachikawa is squating down.

http://www.laakira.com/TKIYM.jpg

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I’ve known that name for quite a long time, 'cause you’re in the credits of TZW’s Volume 7. :wink:

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Ah, that reminds me…I’ve got some pix of him that I can post as well. :slight_smile:

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Hey Preppy, what is the filename of tomo’s training vid on your hub?

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When you mentioned abt being taken by your friend who works at Gamest to jack & bettys, bickeys & Gamest shop, where was this in Tokyo?
I love the Family Fun pic, thats fantastic. No one had cameras when we were young then, its wonderful to see arcade pics from that time. That whole era is almost totaly unrecorded. Pastel colored surfbrand t-shirts, basketball boots, MK1!! Just fantastic. I can almost hear Guns & Roses and see T2 movie posters up everywhere.

Its just amazing how far the JP-US liinks go. It always seemed like Valle’s Team US was like Columbus landing on Japanese shores, but it goes waaay back. So Gerald, the big question: How would Tomo have done had that planned Japan trip actualy happened?
Anyone curious abt the TZW vol 7 tape check this out: http://www.gratisgames24.de/faqs/12/street_fighter_tzw_tape.txt

Its featured in one of the Sections of the excellent INH group DVD: http://www.gratisgames24.de/faqs/12/street_fighter_tzw_tape.txt

Sean Guiley re-enacted many of the same Cobo’s in these three movies:
http://perso.numericable.fr/~bkenneth/GuileCE.mpg
http://perso.numericable.fr/~bkenneth/GuileWW.mpg
http://perso.numericable.fr/~bkenneth/GuileHF.mpg

And some of the combos feature variants in NKI’s movies I think. NKI?
btw, if the was volume 7, what were releases 1 - 5?

Yeah, we’d love to see ANYthing you’ve got however small. Memories, photos, mag articles… anything.

Mullet.avi

Crayfish.

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Jack & bettys was right under Kandas yamanote line station. The arcade would sort of rumble as the trains went by. Bickeys and the Gamest shop were walking distance from each other but that was the first time I went to tokyo and I really didnt know my way around. I think it was around the Kanda, Tokyo station area though. There was another arcade in a suburb called shimo-igusa where I went with Tachikawa and Itoyama a few times.

As for the Tomo question, its impossible to answer unless he actually played over there. You can speculate all you want, but at that level its just gonna come down to who is more precise, who can employ their strategy better and who outguesses who. Tachikawa was surely on Tomos level and one time I talked to him, he told me that there were some incredible players in Osaka during the time of WW and CE so who knows, there might have been too many top notch players for Tomo to handle. I dont know. On the other hand, not only did tomo hand everyone in the US their ass in SF, he also scored a billion points on one ball at the HF biathalon tourney in san diego and none of us had ever even seen Tomo play pinball before that.

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are the jeff vs daigo vids being hosted anywhere?

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Hey it’s great to see the SF community grown like this. I still remember back in the day when we were first building it at my comic store in Pico Rivera. hehe :bgrin: For those of you who don’t know me my names Charles and I was referred to in this thread as “Tomo’s manager”. Back in the day I owned World’s Finest comics, and thats the place that had the biggest and best SF tournament for about 3 years running to about 1995. We had calls from all over the country asking when guys should come to play, who was there at what times, and man it was lotsa fun. :tup:

Firstly wanna shout to Gerald, Jeff, and Watts. Sup guys Long time no see, cept Mike who I’ve seen at poker tourneys. Jeff gimme a holler here and PM me, so maybe we can get together. I live in teh OC now, not to far from where you used to live back in the day. Tell Tomo I said sup too, as his home number changed, and I lost his cell number.

Anywho, I wanna say a couple of quick things.

#1-There was an inference that Tomo’s matches were “fixed” lol
Why would any matches of his be fixed? He was absolutely the best, and when he practiced as much as his competition, he was absolutely unbeatable. It wasnt even close. He PWNT everyone. :wgrin:
“Fixing matches”-ha ha it never happened. :tdown:
BTW, Tomo was also a very kool guy as well. Humble, and friendly with everyone. :bgrin:

#-2 Tomo was the best partly because he just had unbelievable natural talent, and unbelievable reaction time and reflexes. The thing is, many had those as well. Mike, Willie, Tony, as well as Roger, they all had those qualitites too. The thing that set Tomo apart, was his ability to think and react plus adapt to his opponents. Many of the better players back in the day used patterns to beat peeps. Tomo never used patterns cause they are predictable. He had the uncanny ability to quickly think, and adapt to any opponent, and thats why he was the best. Aterward Tomo and I had the opputrtunity to write for Gamepro for 2 years +, and I have since met many gamers, as I’m still involved in PC gaming. In all the time in gaming, no one has come close to Tomo’s overall abilities. No one… :cool:

I’ll post more, but for now I gotta go.

Jeff gimme a holler dude.
Watts I lost ur cell number too.

Chazzzy

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That was a nice, nice read. Also, welcome to srk.com, since you just registered this month, lolz. Anyways, these past few pages have been a gold mine, it’s either stories about the Golden Era, or links pertaining to it and videos, this is just too good, I completely love this thread.

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I couldn’t find it on the hub.

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Well it did at one point, but to be honest nowadays that doesnt matter. Lots of players divide the pot when they get to the final matchup. Hehe who woulda thought you’d end up here though? but then again who woulda thought i would as well lol.

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After Tomo and Roger teamed up with Tony and Willie, they always split the pots, because they played as a team. The matches were never “fixed” though, as in the smaller tourneys, they all played to get as far as they could. Spooty Whiteboy inferred that somehow I “fixed” Tomo’s matches, and that’s not true. They all played to win. Tony especially wanted to beat Tomo any time he could. lol :rofl:

Only in the Calif state tourney did one member (Willie), purposely lose to another, (Tony). That was because Willie felt Tony would have a better chance, and so it was decided that Tony should advance. TBH I always considered Willie a much better player than Tony. In the Calif. State tourney, the only players that beat our 4, were each other. We took 1st, 2nd, tie for 3rd, and 5th. Was one of the best tourneys ever put on, and lasted over the entire weekend at UTC in San Diego with about 300 peeps competing. Although it was the Calif championship, it would have been more accurately named a Western Regional since players from all over the West showed up.

Willie was an awesome player btw, and I would rank him as the 2nd best overall player behind Tomo. In most of the actial rankings, Willie was usually 2nd actually. Willie was also the original Guile that Tomo patterned his Guile after when he first took that character up early on.

TBH the reason I found this thread, was I was looking for Tomo. He was a kool friend who I lost touch with over the years, and wanted to get a hold of. I’m still heavily into gaming, so who knows, maybe after I talk to him, you guys will get to see him STREETFIGHT again. :bgrin:

Anywho, in the meantime, I’ll continue to post here, and maybe help answer some of the questions how this all got started, since I was there before the beginning. :wgrin:

Chazzzy

PS Crayfish, Graham who are you guys???

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think these are it:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/3a702d/

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hehe im the guy who got all the street fighter players into writing strategy guide stuff way back in the day and did some on my own as well. As well as the guy who climbs out of his cave every couple years to place decent at tourneys on various sf2 games. I’m prolly the tallest sf2 player , you might remember me from the bama tournament if you remember that one. I’ve been around since the dawn of sf2, i played final fight before it.

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Well myself and Tomo created The Fighter’s Edge for Gamepro and gave it creative guidance when it first started for about 1 1/2 - 2 years, as well as did some of the pullouts @ GP for Fighting Games over a 2 year period. We also helped with a Capcom SF how to softcover Through James Goddard, which was how we got the gig for Gamepro in the first place. James at Capcom introduced us to one of the writers there, a Matt Taylor, who was doing the thing for Gamepro at the time. At the end of the softcover, thats where they did an interview wiith Tomo, and he talked about gaming and stuff. Dunno if thats been scanned and posted here or not, but I’ve got that around here somewhere. At the end of the softcover project, I made a proposal of The Fighter’s Edge to Matt. Tomo’s first idea was to call it the Streetfighter’s Edge, but I thought Fighter’s Edge sounded better, so thats what we called it in our proposal letter. Anywho it got accepted, and we worked with Matt Taylor on that at Gamepro as well. Funny thing is after Matt left, we found out through our next editor John, that Matt had taken all our ideas and passed them off as his own. lol
He used to call me every week or so to ask us what Fighter’s Edge should do for the next month. lol

I just found this by googling…

http://www.highervoltage.net/mb/showthread.php?p=409480

The tier rankings and stuff that guy talked about there for MK2, was our idea, and stuff that Tomo and I did and worked on, along with the help of a few other guys at World’s Finest. Martin Vega, I think maybe Watson may have helped with that too, cant quite remember, as well as a couple others. So long ago cant quite remember. My name at Gamepro was Char-Li and Tomo’s was To-Ryu-mo. Well after Matt left, John our next editor happened to be a Swatpro editor, and since that was his baby, The Fighter’s Edge got less and less attention as he tried to make Swatpro the main thing at GP, which was natural since that was his baby.

BTW to those of you who asked about Tomo’s how to tape, that was some thing we both did for a Capcom licensee and there might be a copy of the old VHS somewhere lying around. Part of our pay was we also got a bunch of tapes too. Some crook who owned a gaming store put on a SF tournament in San Bernadino (edited- from Pomona) way back though, invited us, set up a booth to sell our tapes, then not only did not pay Tomo the 1,000$ first prize , but also stole all our fooking tapes… gahh.
Some of you OG may remember that one as everyone got stiffed… :annoy:
That tourney was on SNES btw…

Anywhoo got off on a little tangent their since that post I googled referred back to Gamepro and Matt, as well as your name there…

Shheeeeeeshhh what a small world.
Woulda never thought I’d run into the old OG SF guys again… lol

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BTW Graham, I read earlier here that your playing WOW…
Didnt anyone warn you about that man, it’s like crack dude… :rofl:
Stay away from it.

Peace,
Chazzzy

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wow slasher quan was matt taylor huh? Makes sense that he would profit from players… eh Graham?

That bitch.

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Yeah Slasher Quan was Matt Taylor. He never told you guys??? lol :lol:

The “Tomo how-to” tape btw was mostly combos and stuff. Myself and Tomo were comtracted to handle the Technical aspects of it, what combos were the best to show etc…,(one other guy helped with the actual “video filming”-can’t remember who though-maybe Max Okazaki hmmm ??). The production company wrote the script, and wanted to focus on something marketable, rather than something really strategy and tactic based. Tomo got airtime in it and was part of the actual onscreen production. They flew him out to Sunnyvale to film, and even James Goddard who was part of the original SF team at Capcom, had a small cameo appearance.

Was a lotta fun. :bgrin:

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Thanks for the welcome btw Seph… :smile: