“Part of it is straight anger and punishing people,” says Seth Killian–aka S-kill, a national champion at the video-arcade game Street Fighter II. “You’re publicly humiliating them. There are a lot of people whose lives are bereft of other socially apparent achievements. They are straight-up losers. But put in a certain context, some 14-year-old 300-pound kid is a real star–he’s the best player in four states.”
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Killian grew up in Oak Park, a town that banned video arcades, but occasionally he’d ride his bicycle across the city limits to play in Chicago, and in the early 90s he discovered Street Fighter II. Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, the game features a multicultural cast of eight characters, each with a distinct fighting style. A player chooses one of them and tries to knock out his opponent, using a joystick to move the character and six buttons to deliver different punches (jab, strong, fierce) and kicks (short, forward, roundhouse).
After three and a half years studying bioengineering, Killian changed his major to philosophy. “The prospect of spending the rest of my life sitting in a lab and maybe 30 years later doing my own research didn’t appeal to me,” he says. Now 27, he’s writing a doctoral dissertation about bioethics, but as soon as that’s finished he wants to write the inside story of the Street Fighter subculture. “The primary constituency of this market has aged considerably since its inception,” he says. “The people who grew up on this stuff and played Street Fighter enough to make it a billion-dollar franchise are now anywhere from their late teens to their mid-30s. However, the writing regarding the phenomenon hasn’t aged at all; it’s in cheap magazines that advertise things like bubble gum.”
