I’ve been playing fighting games since about 92-93 (SF and MK come to mind), but I didn’t consider taking them serious in the least until about 2006. My first major was SBII in 07, and I’ve been trying to travel to tourneys as much as possible ever since.
EDIT: Arcana Heart is the reason I bothered to learn/own a stick, I suck at fighting games otherwise
Sorry, what I should have said was “I was disappointed in the console release of MSH.” Arcade was fun but I almost never had a chance to play it, so when the Saturn version came out I got pretty happy… until I tried to play it. Even with the 4meg card, that shit was sluggish as hell.
:lol: I remeber many times at Portland Tilt many dudes would go with their girlfriends and try to show off in a game to impress only for me to come algong and pwn them big time :lol:
My inspiration was my dad renting and bringing home SFII for the SNES as a kid (I was 4 or 5 I think). Ever since then the genre’s hooked me.
a friend took me to an local tourney and the hype was insane. right then i knew i wanted to be apart of that community
I used to be a hardcore Smash Bros. player (Melee), and I played that shit pretty much every day. That was like 4 years ago when I started getting really into that game. I went to some tournaments, and I did pretty good for a 13 year-old 
While I was going through the forums on Smashboards I found a thread talking about Street Fighter 2. I’d played it before with my older cousin, but it never really measured up to Melee for me. It just wasn’t flashy enough.
Than I saw a video 
Rare footage of Daigo actually angry, lol.
I went and bought 3rd strike as soon as I found a store that had it, and I’ve been playing ever since.
Brawl sucking didn’t hurt my migration to Street Fighter either 
Got into fighting games (together with my whole country) because only Mortal Kombat was imported, and we had Mortal Kombat boom, everyone played UMK3 on Sega Genesis, you could see it everywhere, it was the best, most popular game, everyone had money matches, also various merchandise was released, like sticker albums, caps, stickers etc. We played some MK2 as well, then we got into MK4 and Tekken 3. I havent had internet back then, but when I got online i readed this and that, and by pure chance I stumbled on some old archived thread where users recommended fightings to each other and I found one post which contained most of games I liked and also Samurai Shodown I never heard about. Next I got means to emulate SS games on my PC and got onto some (now oldschool and dead) SS sites and I was hooked onto the franchise, and still am. For some time (a year or two) I also played UMK3 on kaillera, but finally I got fed up with the community (yes it can be that bad) and also UMK3 felt kinda limited to me, so I started to play purely SS games online, then got onto heavenlyspirits.net and played with great players like m216xlegendx, p100q, NoG, God 2.0, Ronin, PeteR_Pa1N and many others. My favourite 2D chapter was Samurai Shodown 5 special, but I played all other as well. Now I am an expert in the Samurai Shodowns, with many gygabites of rare stuff on my hard drive, acquired ability to translate what I need from japanese sites, own SS forum, and work on updating mine Samurai Shodown site ^^
When I was younger my best friend’s friend had SF Alpha 3 and while I was over his house that’s the game we would play. Then from there the rest is history.
well it was cool reading all your short stories, thanks for sharing.:rock: