Origin Part 1: Beginning

Time for an origin story of sorts. Not about my entire life per se, but of my interest in fighting games and the competitive community.

I'd been gaming since getting an nes in 1986. At that time, the idea of being competitive just wasn't something my friends and I thought of while gaming. There was also the fact that there weren't really any games to be competitive in on nes. Unless you wanted to be a dick to each other in Double Dragon 2.

So of course exposure to the competitive video game was Street Fighter 2 the World Warrior at the Bristol Mall arcade many years later. I think I was 10 at the time? I'm not sure if it was a Tilt back then or not, I don't remember. I do remember the big crowd of high school kids gathered around to play the Street Fighter machines. I'd never seen the game before, I was just attracted to the attention it was getting. Although I do remember seeing it for the first time after waiting in line forever. The characters were huge! And this game has like a million buttons! I thought.

I don't remember much about my first fight ever, except for some seedy guy sitting down in the dark next to the machine. "You're gonna lose" he said. He was totally right. I think I picked Ken (the common trend of people new to the games even today) and the my opponent was Blanka. I seem to remember that because I thought it was cheap that he was a monster with "powers" after I got my ass stomped.

So I left the arcade thinking it was a neat game, but I'd never be as good as those guys because I'd never get a long period of time at the machine.

Fast forward to late 1992 or 93 and I get a call from my neighbor, Josh Williams, demanding that I go over to his house right away. He wouldn't tell me why, but assured me that it would be worth my time. I go over to his place and Street Fighter 2 is playing on his SNES.

"Let's Fight!" he demands and I jump down next to him to play. He immediately starts showing me how to do the special moves he learned from the instruction manual. This was awesome! I'm sure if I could go back and time and watch these fights I would see the longest most boring fireball battles in history.

This version of the intro theme still gets me pumped to this day:


I'm sure we sucked terribly, but it didn't matter to me. We were thrilled to have the Street Fighter 2 arcade game (as far as we knew at the time) to play any time we wanted. I would still play the game occasionally when we were out at the mall. We weren't holding huge win streaks or anything, but we were at least getting wins here and there. Mostly losses though, if I ran into someone who knew how to block well and didn't want to keep jumping on my fireballs I was dead meat, lol.

Over the next few years we kept up with the new versions of SF2. Interest in fighting came and went and came again. Mortal Kombat provided a nice distraction for a while but eventually we always went back to Street Fighter and some of my friends dropped it all together. Even myself for a time.

I'll go ahead and wrap this entry up for now. Work will come early in the morning. It was fun strolling down memory lane, more to come later.