Category: Interviews

For many players, fighting games are a hobby. For a few, they are an obsession. Fewer still, they are have become a livelihood. Many of us have taken an idle moment or two to imagine how nice it would be to quit our day job and enjoy a career in video games, but not many of us get the chance to live that dream.

Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma has a long history with Super Smash Bros. Melee, currently ranked second on the MIOM world rankings. It is both his passion and his career, and a lifestyle that he has recently chosen over his day job as a chemical engineer. In an interview with theScore esports, he talks about what eventually made him break off from his work and why he’s enjoying the game more than ever before.

Source: theScore esports

If you can cast your minds back to the far flung time of July this year and the weekend that was Evo 2016, talent from every fighting game under the sun was concentrated in one place to earn glory on one of the biggest stages in history. Armed with a microphone and with the help of Falcon player and fan favorite commentator Vish, SSBM Tutorials got a chance to interview an assortment of top Melee players that attended Evo 2016.

Chatting to players like XTR|Eddy Mexico, Bladewise, Druggedfox and more, SSBM Tutorials was able to discuss player experiences at Evo, how they did during their respective journeys through the bracket as well as if they experimented with different character picks over the course of the event.

There can be a saturation of content that talks to just the absolute pinnacle of Melee players so these mini-interviews act as a refreshing break, as viewers can hear what players on the come up have to say about the game and big tournaments like Evo.

Source: SSBM Tutorials

Sometimes called the godfather of the Toronto FGC and tournament organizer for events like the T-Series and more recently, Fight for the 6ix as part of the Red Bull Proving Grounds series, Justin “Nagata Lock II” Baisden is quite the figure when it comes to running FGC events in Canada. Sitting down with Drekken “Drekksama” Pownz as part of his “Inside the Champ” interview series, the two talk about the path to becoming a TO, how to run a successful tournament and balancing playing for fun with putting on a successful event.

One of the points Justin touches on during the course of the interview is the real lack of organizers when compared to the abundance of people playing fighting games. While there may be loads of people playing a game in one region, it really does someone to marshal all of those players into a cohesive scene, so that people can come together as a group to run events rather than acting simply as an amorphous mass that rarely interacts with each other.

If you’re someone looking to get into tournament organizing or just want to hear how one of the best goes about running events, give the whole interview a listen.

Source: ESChamp

The FGC has always been comprised of genuine people who honestly care about the game and the people. Even when there’s drama, or rivalries, or even flat out hostility, we’re all part of the same family, all here because we love our favorite games.

I have a lot of respect for community members who take it beyond themselves, and who do their part to contribute to a bigger and better community. Today, we’re joined by a leading member of the King of Fighters community, someone who’s been actively supporting his game for years.

John “Zidiane” Silvia: Could you just introduce yourself?

James Alderson: My name is James Alderson. I’m from Northern California, born and raised in San Francisco. I’m 27 years old and my passion is Chemistry. My day job is working as a tutor for a Youth Employment program. I’ve been playing fighting games since I was a little kid. I didn’t start seriously considering fighting games until I ran into a KOF 2000 arcade machine in an LA arcade. I saw K’ and I immediately fell in love with it. Since the early 2000’s, I’ve played as many King of Fighters games as I could. I’d play at an arcade in my college with local players. I’d get crushed by people way better than me and I went looking for ways to get better. Then KOFXIII dropped in our arcades and Southtown Arcade opened. After that, the FGC world kept expanding and expanding.

Silvia: I ran into you through the KOF community survey you did. Tell me a bit about that, how it started, and what kind of reception you’ve gotten on it.

Alderson: Well, Southtown Arcade was closing down. We didn’t really have anywhere to go. I felt lost, my friends felt lost, and we were scared the game would fall off too. I thought about what other communities have done. Arcade Infinity closed in LA and many other arcades were closing too. How did they do it? So, Ivan and I, started working on making a survey. At first, it was just about preserving KOF in NorCal and using the best practices here. That idea morphed a lot once we realized how useful the information was. We wanted to share this with other people to keep their communities thriving with the game.

Silvia: What kind of reception did you get, passing out this survey?

Alderson: At first, people were really sketchy. They didn’t see the point in helping. For a month or two, there wasn’t a lot of support. Dreamcancel was a big help. With Ivan’s connections with the community, we got on the front page of the site. We posted at SRK and some of their KOF community got involved too. Some people even took it to Wednesday Night Fights and shared it live. That’s when it really started to gain traction. People started talking about it and sharing. I posted the information to a Facebook group called “KOF Tournament Players” and met a lot of great people from the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh area. One in particular, Jason, helped us make bar graphs so the data was easier to consume.

Silvia: That was for the original survey back in 2012. What about the current one?

Alderson: When KOF XIV dropped, I reposted the data from the 2012 survey to that group. I thought it would be helpful for people trying to push the game in their area. Gunsmith from Orochinagi said that with a new game, it’d be good to do another survey. That’s when we started working on a new one.

Silvia: You seem to have put in quite a bit of leg work for your community. Has that work ethic helped in any other areas of community building these last few years?

Alderson: I feel like I had direction after the survey. Armed with that knowledge, I tried to attend events farther away from home. I tried to encourage and develop talent in different areas. I’d donate money to causes and push out support for endeavors like Wikis for KOFXIII, supporting and publicizing videos/articles to educate new players, taking time to train new players, setting up and funding tournaments for new players, and getting involved with local tournament organizers.

After 2015, I took a break from the FGC and KOF XIII, but I was happily surprised when many of things I did kept people playing. A lot of new people have jumped into KOF. They are more organized and tight-knit. The community is growing and talent is blooming.

Silvia: You’ve spent a lot of time guiding other players, it looks like. What motivates you to keep going?

Alderson: I’m just doing what I can when I can do it. I feel like the franchise itself is a great one. I do get some satisfaction from seeing work I’ve done be enjoyed. What really drives me is the need. I do what I feel our community needs and I don’t stop till I’ve made an impact. In the end, I guess I try to satisfy myself in feeling I’ve made a difference somewhere.

Silvia: As far as moving forward, do you have anything left on your plate you are trying to get done, or start doing as far as community work?

Alderson: I am working, as we speak, on releasing a public version of the survey. As promised, I want people to be armed with all the information they can to grow our community. Once that’s done, I’m going to look at the data more closely. Our next course of action should be from the people who want it.

To clarify, our next course of action should be dictated by who wants it.

Silvia: Thank you for talking with me today. Did you have any parting words you wanted to say?

Alderson: Watch Super Desperation Radio. Keep supporting your community in any game you play. I will be streaming fighting games of all kinds with my good buddy Tenouraku on this channel. By teaching him KOF on stream, maybe I can help others learn too.

Following the Capcom Pro Tour Asia Finals at the G-Star Expo in Busan earlier this weekend, Kim1234 of the Jump-In podcast got the chance to catch up with Razer and Viewsonic’s Infiltration to discuss lots about Street Fighter V and the Capcom Pro Tour. Discussing his recent character usage at premier events, Infiltration says that following Evo and people starting to figure out how to defeat Nash, it made sense to figure out other characters and gain essential match up knowledge ahead of Capcom Cup in December. He feels the meta has changed wildly since an event like Evo, so premier events are the perfect places to test out his more diverse character pool ahead of the real competition at Capcom Cup.

Infiltration shed some light on his warm up routine, saying that he prefers to visualize matches and theorize possible situations, rather than playing friendlies. His reasoning is that he plays Street Fighter V so much anyway, that he isn’t suddenly going to forget a combo because he didn’t warm up so mental preparing is more important. He briefly touched on his opinion on the current qualifying system of the Capcom Pro Tour, stating that he actually prefers elements of the old system, like seeding passing down through players who have already qualified so that deserving players aren’t gatekept at stacked tournaments.

All this and a lot more is discussed during this interview, where the translation for Infiltration’s answers is provided by fellow top quality FGC content creator Gerald Lee from Core-A Gaming. Make sure to give the whole interview a listen, as Infiltration’s answers are pretty enlightening.

Source: The Jump-In Podcast