Marvel vs. Capcom 2 champ Justin Wong is on the ropes. Shoulder to shoulder with his opponent, the muscle-bound Bryheem Keys, he’s playing as Cable, a second-tier X-Men character, and he’s fighting for his life. Around them, packed tight as a mosh pit, sweaty gamers strain to catch a glimpse of what’s happening on the arcade machine. They’re sitting on shoulders and standing on stools, piled over each other’s backs, their faces silently cursing anyone sporting a hat or an Afro. From the crowd, Wong’s pal Sanford Kelly is encouraging his friend with vacuous but colorful advice: “Shoot that nigga! Shoot his ass!”
At Evo, no one sleeps alone. There are three, four, and even ten guys (it’s almost all guys) packed into rooms at the two-star motor lodge up the road, as well as people camped out in cars, or on the street. They’re from Long Island, Peru, and South Korea. It’s the first time some of the younger players–16, 17, 18–have ever left home. Ryan “Azhur” Hammerly endured 24 hours on the Greyhound from Denver, stuck next to the bathroom, subsisting on pop, chips, and candy. The bus was so crowded that people were sitting in the aisles. Mike “MiXuP” Mixon sold plasma for two months to make sure he had the cash for the trip from Florida. I got a lift to campus one morning with a guy who drove 1,000 miles with five others in a Ford Escort. “Just had to be here,” he said. “Had to, man!”
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On the corporate side, things aren’t much better. Golden Tee, an unremarkable golf game with no new technological features, has become one of the industry’s top performers thanks to active tournament support from its creator, Incredible Technologies. As the tournaments have raised the game’s profile, the game’s presence on the street has risen as well–at this point it’s nearly as common in bars as neon beer signs. But in an industry known for bandwagoneering and knockoffs, no one has followed Golden Tee’s lead. As some of their best customers converged on Pomona, attracting coverage from national and international gaming magazines and TV networks, none of the manufacturers whose products were being celebrated had donated money or recognized the event.
Fighting games involve neither the brainless pattern repetition of nostalgic cheese like Pac-Man, nor the reflex tests of popular games like Quake. It’s not you against a computer, or dealing anonymous death at a distance on the Internet. You stand next to your opponent, look him in the eye, and smell his fear. Winning requires tight execution and precision technique, to be sure, but what it really boils down to is what the Japanese call yomi: knowing the mind of your opponent.
They treat these games not as objects of worship so much as ongoing science projects. Either trying to squeeze an advantage from some arcane bit of information, or in it strictly for the sake of the investigation, they hypothesize about the games’ complex underpinnings, stage elaborate tests of their theories, and publish (or jealously guard) their results. They compete to have their latest work displayed on the best Web sites, rushing to make sure they aren’t preempted and fighting bitterly over credit for invented techniques.
