esports
Rounding out the inaugural Capcom Pro Tour, Capcom Cup pit the world's best against each other.
If you’ve lived in San Francisco for any length of time, you’ll know that there’s a point where Market Street – one of the city’s main thoroughfares – makes a sudden and dramatic shift from posh office buildings, trendy restaurants, and big-name retailers into something considerably less tourist-friendly.
Yet even though the streets are somewhat scarier, there are still several well-loved city institutions in the area known as “Central Market.” Among them is The Warfield, a nearly hundred-year-old theatre that originally hosted vaudeville acts but now plays as a venue to numerous musical acts and performers. This weekend, it hosted its first ever gaming tournament.
The Real Street Fighters
Despite the neighborhood being a bit rough, however, the Warfield was a definite step up in prestige from the previous year’s Capcom Cup, which was held at the Hilton in the southern suburb of Burlingame. There’s certainly something neat about seeing “STREET FIGHTER WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS” on a marquee usually reserved for major musical acts – though more than a few folks were puzzled by it. “Street Fighter World Championships, what the f---?” a pair of young men semi-shouted as they walked past the entrance. Another woman stopped to inquire with me as I ate my lunch outside before heading in. “Is this, like, a video game thing, or are these real street fighters?” (I must admit finding it rather bemusing that a Street Fighter tournament was considered an unusual curiosity on a day when thousands of people were drunkenly running around San Francisco in Santa garb.)
An event with competition so fierce that every single player has a genuine shot at glory – and a handsome pool of prize money.
Heading inside, the first thing I noticed were a pair of crowded lines – one for concessions and another for the official Capcom merchandise store, which was offering a slew of discounted and exclusive game goodies, including the first official bits of Street Fighter V merchandise. The line was slow going, as the Warfield didn’t afford much space for crowd control outside the theatre, but I was able to wrap up a good chunk of my nerdy holiday shopping and then hop inside to take my seat just as the player introductions were getting started. It wasn’t really comparable to the near-stadium-size stages certain eSports events have been taking place in, but there was something really appropriate about it: it felt close-knit and communal, two elements (among many) that longtime players in the fighting game community regard as some of the most important aspects of the scene.
Capcom Cup is the final leg of the Capcom Pro Tour, an effort by the publisher to create a competitive league environment for their flagship fighting game. Sixteen players are selected for the event through a combination of winning select designated “Premier Tournaments” – larger-scale fighting game events like Final Round, EVO, and Dreamhack Winter - and earning ranking points by placing well at both major and minor events worldwide, as well as in select online events. These sixteen then play in a double-elimination format at Capcom Cup, an event with competition so fierce that every single player has a genuine shot at glory – and a handsome pool of prize money.
What resulted was a varied mix of characters and fighting styles among the competitors. There were several names there that had been famous for years: Justin Wong and Daigo Umehara, the players from the most well-known fighting game video of all time. PR Balrog and Ricky Ortiz, Justin’s companions on the Evil Geniuses team who ranked highly in every tournament they entered. Momochi, Bonchan, and Fuudo, three of Japan’s strongest players and one a former EVO champion.
One Button Mistake
But there were others, as well: Xian and Luffy, the EVO 2013 and 2014 champions who took competitors by surprise with their rarely-seen character specialties. Snake Eyez, one of the best Zangief players in the world and a favored pick among spectators. NuckleDu, a skilled user of charge-based characters who broke into the rankings through winning online tournaments. Chu Chu, a relatively unknown – but hardly unskilled - player from the growing competitive fighting game scene of Brazil. Ryan Hart, a veteran player whose amazing grasp on fighting game intricacies earned him the name “Prodigal Son.” Nishikin, the shockingly talented Blanka user who won the Japanese tournament held across Taito’s arcades. Valmaster, another up-and-comer who had actually toppled Luffy in the UK’s VSFighting 4 tournament to secure a spot. And finally, there was Infiltration, a fierce Korean fighter known for making wild character selections in the heat of crucial tournament fights – and riding them to victory.
Every single fighter here had earned their place through hard work and incredible play. And yet, a sobering fact loomed over the crowd: due to the double elimination format, some of the world’s best would be knocked out of the running without a single win. Within the first third of the tournament, this came to pass: Chu Chu and Nishikin were both downed 0-2, but to the surprise and dismay of the heavily pro-American-player crowd, Justin Wong and Snake Eyez both went down without a single win as well.
His reign as a potential peoples’ champion came to a sad end.
With so much on the line, players at Capcom Cup were starting to pull out techniques and characters that they had carefully kept hidden for months so as not to give a hint to potential competitors what they might have up their sleeves. In a game like Ultra Street Fighter IV, with 44 characters to pick from, there are inevitably going to be matchups where a certain character may have an advantage, making the act of character choice (and whether to play multiple characters or specialize in one) into a metagame of its own. Fighting game tournament formats do their best to make the playing field fairer: fights typically run as two-out-of-three or three-out-of-five matches, and allow for players to elect to mutually blind-pick characters to avoid hard counterpicks. If a player loses, they are allowed the option to change their character choice, while the winner must remain with their chosen character.
It wasn’t long before the secret sub-characters came out in full force. Ryan Hart, legendary for his Sagat play, made an immediate and dramatic shift to using Ryu instead, throwing a wrench in the plans of the opponents who had been studying his Sagat play. To counter Daigo’s Evil Ryu, Xian made a single-match switch to Dhalsim – which paid off when he was able to successfully eliminate Daigo from the running. Infiltration, a man well-known for pulling out surprising character picks under pressure, used his skills yet again to knock Fuudo out of the winners’ bracket with incredible finesse.
With so many top players on deck, many of the matches came down to intense, nail-biting finishes. PR Balrog, a Northern California local and heavy crowd favorite, was knocked into Loser’s Bracket in the first round by an unfortunate “team kill” matchup against his Evil Geniuses teammate, Ricky Ortiz. He then proceeded to make massive, heart-pounding comebacks against Japanese heavy hitters Daigo Umehara and Fuudo, each after going down one set against his opponents. His reign as a potential peoples’ champion came to a sad end, however, after an absolutely tragic mistake he made while fighting rival Infiltration: he forgot to map one of his joystick buttons to the correct input.
We eSports Now
One of the things I remember most from Capcom Cup is the commentary – while most tournaments only offer commentary for viewers of internet livestreams, Capcom Cup’s liveplay by James Chen and David “UltraDavid” Graham was actually broadcast both onstream and amongst the crowd. The many times I heard “did it kill? DID IT KILL?!” exasperatedly said during that several-seconds-long Ultra Combo animations echoed the sentiments of the crowd, who were waiting with bated breath for the round-, set-, and match-ending K.O. letters to flash onscreen. Momochi’s jawdropping rematch against Ryan Hart in the losers’ bracket – an absolutely crucial fight – involved an amazing rally. Momochi, using Ken, was on the brink of defeat to Ryan’s Ryu, but managed to completely overcome Ryan’s massive health advantage using clever setups and an incredibly well-timed Ultra Combo that left the announcer pair shouting in disbelief, “OH MY GOD, IT KILLED!”
It was a crucial match, not only because it took out Ryan Hart – who, after the first few matches, I had personally pegged to win – but because it set up Momochi to go into the final losers’ match against Luffy, then onwards against EVO 2013 champion Xian, where he needed to win two sets to take home the prize. Xian, sitting with a comfortable undefeated lead, decided to try Poison out against Momochi at first, but after Momochi caught on to his techniques, Xian went back to his standby of Gen. The result was some astonishing high-level Street Fighter play, as the two went back-and-forth on leads and rounds constantly – an epic struggle from which Momochi would arise as the victor.
It was certainly a great run and a fantastic spectacle, but as producer Yoshinori Ono took the stage after another teaser for the upcoming Street Fighter V, he dropped another bombshell: thanks to the newfound support of Sony for the Street Fighter franchise, next year’s Capcom Cup was upping the stakes to a level never before seen in fighting games: a whopping $500,000 in prizes, which elicited gasps and cheers alike from the already-excited crowd in attendance.
I looked down at my phone and typed into Twitter, “Yo, we eSports now”. As soon as that had posted, I noticed everyone else on my timeline watching had said the exact same thing. That’s the fighting game community I love.
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