Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not reflect Shoryuken.com as a whole.
It’s the middle of a tournament, everyone around is getting hyped from the matches, however one person can’t really get into it–because they’re too busy checking the pool schedule. It’s a familiar enough sight in any major fighting game tournament, and many veteran competitors have probably been in the same boat. In this case however, it’s a bit different: the person is me, and I’m not checking for my own pools, but rather the pools for every single tournament, trying to make sure that everything runs on time.
I’m not just any competitor, I’m one of the tournament organizers for this event: the Manila Cup, the Philippine’s largest fighting game tournament, a Capcom Pro Tour ranking event, and something I’ve been involved with ever since its inception over two years ago.
The first Manila Cup in 2015 was something of a moderate success. Given a chance to run a Capcom Pro Tour ranking event–thanks to the efforts of Beast of the East and Koh Yungtek, more commonly known as Cameraman–we (that is, me and the Imperium Pro Team, the esports team I’m associated with who also runs multiple fighting game events) decided to do a full-on major with multiple games over two and a half days, making it one of the few ranking tournaments in Southeast Asia aside from SEA Major to do so. The tournament itself attracted a sizable crowd with a number of foreign players coming to compete (most notably Tonpy, who solidified his points slot at Capcom Cup 2015 at the event).
For the second Manila Cup, we started planning almost immediately after the first one closed its door. The biggest issue we were looking at was the venue. For the first Manila Cup, venue wasn’t an issue since the Imperium Pro Team also had its own gaming bar back then that we used for it. However, during the event itself, we found that the bar was too small for the crowd that we had attracted. In addition to this, the lease on the bar was expiring and IPT, headed by Raphael “IPT.Prime” Gancayco, had decided to not renew, since the complex it was on had decided that they would increase the price of the lease if we did so.
Now, a venue is one of the most important things to secure to run an event; any failure to do so is pretty much the biggest showstopper any organizer can face. Luckily for us, our friends at XSplit stepped in with an offer to sponsor a couple of venues. The choices we had came down to between a sports bar, or the club house of an exclusive residential subdivision. We decided to go with the latter due to a combination of lower cost, as well as the fact that it simply was a larger venue. Actually, a third option also appeared when another sponsor came one board, but we’ll save that for later.
After securing a venue, the next problem was picking the games to play. Being a Capcom Pro Tour ranking event, Street Fighter V was a no brainer. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat XL are both traditionally “American” games with strong followings in the country, so we retained those. Finally, we hosted Arc System Work’s latest BlazBlue and Guilty Gear installments, owing to the fact that we also had a sizable pool of strong “animé” players (such as ArcRevo 2015 qualifier IPT.Blickwinkel), many of whom had made their mark at SEA Major in previous years.
The big question was whether or not we would include Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. While we had included the game in Manila Cup 2015, the fact that Sony was now going to be a very big sponsor for this year’s event put a damper on that. During the course of planning however, we were working on a way to get around this. One of the local TV networks had planned to put on a monthly fighting game series that had included Smash in it. Had this pushed through, we would have held the final four for Smash at Manila Cup, on a secondary stream. Sadly this planned series never materialized and Smash at Manila Cup never came through.
For those familiar with the Philippine fighting game scene, the other big omission is Tekken. We had considered adding Tekken 7 into this years roster; however, with the game not yet out on consoles, we needed to find a way to source them. When talking to Bandai Namco we were told to talk to the local arcade chains. Sadly, these weren’t interested in supporting an event that wasn’t held at their locations. Maybe next year, when Tekken 7 is on home consoles, we can finally run the game at the event.
With the basic details of the event locked down, the next thing we needed to do was secure sponsors. For the first Manila Cup, most of our sponsors came through from Beast of the East who had secured a bunch of sponsors for most tournaments in the Southeast Asia region. For the our sophomore effort however, we were able to get more sponsors on our own.
With the success of the first one assuring them that the Manila Cup was an event worth supporting, more companies were willing to talk to us. Reputation is an important thing when it comes to talking to sponsors. Another thing that helped was the timing of the event. 2016 saw a number of large esports events take place in the Philippines, specifically ESL One Manila and Valve’s Manila Major. Manila Cup 2016 suddenly found itself caught up in a wave of esports hype.
All of this meant that we had a much easier time talking to sponsors, with some even approaching us first. One of these, local telco Globe, even offered us a new venue which we were planning to use until certain issues prevented us from using it. Other sponsors, such as ViewSonic came in due to their interest in esports and the fighting game scene (ViewSonic also sponsors other fighting game events in the region such as SEAM 2016).
Aside from the prize pool–the second largest of any tournament in the region so far–these sponsors helped us cover a lot of the requirements for the event. I already mentioned that XSplit sponsored the venue, in addition to this, they also helped us with the stream and the production set up, as well has helping bring American players into the event. In addition to this, Sony helped us acquire consoles and copies of the games for the event, while ViewSonic provided us with monitors. With this, a lot of the gear that we needed to run the event was covered. The rest was mostly covered by stuff we already had left over from the previous Manila Cup, helping us keep our expenses down.
With all of these–venue, games, sponsors, gear–in place, we were ready to run what we were hoping would be the biggest fighting game tournament the Philippines had ever seen. All that was needed was for the players–who at this point had already included a sizable international contingent of known top players–to show up and actually make it to the event; something that our venue choice almost ruined, and something that I’ll talk about more in part two of this article.
Photo c/o the Imperium Pro Team
