When I first got reacquainted with the fighting
game community 10 months ago it was because
of a little game called Street Fighter IV. I was
excited to play and desperately looking for
some competition. Like many others, I started
my search online at the matchmaking forums
of Shoryuken.com. Doing this enabled me to
connect with a couple of local players. Like me,
they also were looking for more competition
and driving all across the San Francisco Bay
Area to meet this competition. Our crew
consisted of 1 fledgling player (me!) and 2
tournament players with a vast lack of matchup
experience needed to win.
Today, we enjoy a flourishing fight game
community. We hold weekly Wednesday
sessions and have one of the largest
attendances of any NorCal session currently
active. Our player base has gone from 3 to an
average of 25-30 players per session. We ?ve
had as many as 50 players at one of our casual
sessions. Not tournament, just a casual
session. How did this happen? When did this
happen? What changed?
I?d like to share my experience from 10
months ago up until today and give a
recollection of how NorCal ?s North Bay went
from nothing, to one of the hypest sessions this
side of California.
Step One: Attending Other People?s Events
North Bay had a few issues when I first started
playing here. First off, no one knew if there
were any serious players here. The other issue
is that our location is secluded from the rest of
the scene. We ?re essentially way off in the
corner and for anyone to come to us, they?d
have to pay toll, cross bridges and go a long
ways to play in an unproven territory. Let ?s
face it; no one?s coming to North Bay just
because we asked. We had to attend
tournaments and sessions and prove
ourselves. The first thing we did was
practiced. A lot. Soon after, we attended
tournaments all across the Bay Area. It was a
long drive everywhere we went, but if people
saw how dedicated we were, it might make
them wonder how much of a scene we have
back home. The goal wasn ?t to win
tournaments, although we did try our
damnedest. The goal was to show consistent
improvement and dedication so people knew
that we were serious.
Step Two: Find Out if Any of Your Neighbors
Play
Now, I don?t mean that I went door to door
asking, ?Hey! Do you play Street Fighter?? Our
goal here was to find any active players nearby
with a similar situation to ours ? small group,
trying to grow, looking for more competition
locally. First place we looked, SRK. Second
thing we did was to ask other players if they
knew of anyone in or around our area that
played. Our first step in the right direction was
connecting with a group of players about 30
minutes north of us in Santa Rosa. Those guys
were even more secluded than we were, and
they also had less than a handful of players who
took the game seriously. Once we met, played
some games and got to know each other, we
coordinated our sessions for maximum
attendance. We?d attend their sessions one day
of the week, and they?d attend ours another
day and when we left the North Bay to attend
tournaments, we ?d go together. Now our group
is twice as big as it was, and our matchup
variations had greatly improved.
Step Three: Find a Regular RELIABLE
Location to Hold Sessions
Going from house to house was fine with a
small group, but in our case, we wanted our
session to grow beyond small house sessions.
The top players were everywhere in NorCal
BUT North Bay, and we needed to get our
games in with them to improve. We needed a
location that would accommodate more people
so that players from all over NorCal would feel
comfortable establishing it as a meeting place.
Luckily for us, the one thing we had on our side
was that we have a local arcade with an owner
very willing to accommodate fighting gamers ?
needs. With that, the Starbase Crew was born.
Once we got comfortable playing at Starbase,
we made sure that we were able to have
multiple setups and even went as far as
fashioning our own Sanwa cabinet from an old
airplane game that we gutted and replaced with
an Asus monitor and rewired controllers and
Sanwa parts. After establishing setups and the
location, all we needed to do was pick a day we
wanted to play. Everyone agreed on
Wednesday and Starbase ?s Wednesday Night
Casuals began.
Step Four: Get Our Name Out There in Any
Way Possible!
We started by making our own SRK thread
which got us a few new players. From there,
we simply asked any new players that came in
and had a good time to please tell their friends
and bring more people. At this point, I ?d met
many great players at tournaments who would
go on to be great friends and just kept telling
them that I ?d love to see them Wednesday.
We?d get a few random people here and there
on Wednesday, but never that full blown crowd
that we ?d wanted. I then started to relentlessly
promote our session on Twitter, Facebook,
through word of mouth and through as many
online outlets as possible. The turning point
came when one of our regulars introduced the
idea of doing an online stream. Now we ?ve got
multiple setups, a dedicated group, a live
internet stream and lots of people who knew
we had a regular session. IPW was gracious
enough to introduce us at tournaments as
members of the Starbase crew and people
were starting to know who we were.
Step Five: Give People an Incentive to Come
With all the parts in place, I wanted to throw
one large session together. I wanted everyone
to come and see how much the North Bay had
changed. It ?s now April, and Super Street
Fighter IV was coming out. I decided to plan
one big and I literally called everyone I knew in
the community and personally invited them.
Our Wednesday session happened to fall upon
the day after SSFIV ?s release. I had the session
catered and had the arcade rearranged to
accommodate more people. The food was
free, and while I didn ?t plan on buying
everyone food every session, I just wanted to
do it one time to give people the incentive to
show up, and hopefully when they see how
hype our session is that they ?d be motivated to
come back on their own.
At this point we?d never had a session with
much more than 20 people on a good day. The
day after SSFIV ?s release, we had 38 people. A
few of NorCal?s top players showed up and the
response was pretty similar across the board.
? When the hell did this happen?! I thought
North Bay died a long time ago!?
Aftermath
Ever since the session after SSFIV?s release, our
sessions have been very successful. We
average 25-30 people per week with an
occasional spike in attendance going upwards of
48-50 people with players coming from all
areas of the Bay. Our sessions require 6-8
setups and there are new faces every time.
Our stream was able to get the attention of
Mad Catz, who went on to sponsor our
tournament and allowed us to award TE ?s to the
top placers. One of our regulars was 1 match
shy of making top 8 at NCR. We ?ve been able to
come as close as cashing out at tournaments a
couple of times but narrowly losing and 1 of
our guys was 2 matches from making it out of a
pool at Evolution. We haven ?t had any major
wins yet, but for a session that started with 3
scrubs in the middle of nowhere, that ?s
something to be proud of in the short period of
10 months.
