Hype: The Secret Sauce of Competitive Fighting Games

About a week ago, EVO 2017, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, had just concluded. Yet another successful tournament to have reached its conclusion, and with it came many memorable moments that would be looked back upon for years to come.
As e-sports (i.e. professional video gaming) steadily gain their footing in mainstream media, EVO continues to grow with them, both in size and scope. The culmination of which resulted in EVO 2016’s unprecedented numbers, the highest ever seen by the community: over 200,000 concurrent viewers on both Twitch, currently the most popular game-streaming platform on the Internet, and ESPN2.
And while this number is still significantly less than that of mainstream sports such as football’s Super Bowl or baseball’s Worlds Series, it should be noted that the practice of broadcasting competitive fighting games is a relatively recent one, since 2011 and 2016 for Twitch and ESPN respectively. As such, these numbers are indeed noteworthy given fighting games’ long history and their very recent mainstream appearance.
From their humble beginning, fighting games found a strong niche with dedicated arcade fans and rose from the ashes of the arcade games industry, which was slowly dying due to many unforeseen events (most notably the video game crash of 1983) and other external market forces. Fortunately, fighting games were able to hit their stride on the home consoles. Many arcade classics, such as Street Fighter II Turbo, Mortal Kombat, The King of Fighters etc., initially started out as ports on consoles before their eventual shift to the new platform as consoles were taking over the world, one living room at a time.

With the founding of EVO in 1996, fighting games and their fans finally have a place to call home. A place for fans of all stripes to build a community around the games that they play and the people that they play with. A community that is now collectively known as the Fighting Game Community, or the FGC for short.
With its steady growth and almost meteoric rise, it does make one wonder…
How did EVO, and fighting games as a whole, garner this level of attention and interest, despite the close-knit and niche community that it originally came from?
As a relatively newcomer to the scene, I believe that the element of “hype” plays a major role in the current success of fighting games.
For the purposes of this blog, I will be using the word “hype” in the context of e-sports, the competitive gaming scene. “Hype” is commonly used as a catch-all term, both as a noun and adjective, for describing a game’s ability to arouse strong and intense emotions from within its players and spectators.
Similar to other e-sport titles, the main draw of spectating fighting games comes from seeing the amazing plays and high-level skills on display by the professional players. Games such as League of Legends and Overwatch have enormous followings worldwide, with millions of dedicated fans and hundreds of thousands of players at any time. And while fans of these games will insist that their games are incredibly “hype”, which granted is true, the problem is that these games require the spectators to already have, at least, a moderate understanding and familiarity with the games themselves in order to enjoy what is on display. This would explain why the vast majority of e-sport viewers are the players themselves.
In contrast, fighting games circumvent this problem by being simple and straightforward on a fundamental level. Almost all fighting games, with the exception of Super Smash Bros., work on the same principle:
Controlling your character and using his or her move set to lower your opponent’s health to either 0 or lower than yours before the time runs out.
However, this is not to say that fighting games aren’t complex; but rather, they don’t require a deep and high-level understanding to enjoy as a spectator. With fighting games, the enjoyment of spectating them can come from seeing the spectacles on display, even without any prior knowledge of the game.
For example, the viewer doesn’t have to necessarily understand how a pro player executes a combo to appreciate its significance and how it can turn the tide of battle. When a combo is successfully executed, we can clearly see that the one on the receiving end is now vulnerable as their health bar goes down and that the one dishing out the most damage has the upper hand.
Almost everything in a fighting game can be clearly observed in front of the screen, and everyone, including the players, has equal access to the same level of information.
In a way, fighting games are like classic board games such as chess and go. The rules of these games are clearly laid out and easy to grasp, but their complexity stem from the different positions and the numerous variations that are inherent within their systems. Similarly, despite its deceptively simple concept, the complexity of fighting games is predicated upon split-second decision-making and reacting upon an opponent’s action (aka a “read”).
Because of this accessibility, fighting games have the potential to reach a much wider audience, if given enough exposure and interest.
More importantly, this availability of information is also what makes fighting games arguably more intense than other e-sports. As the characters on the screen reach their last sliver of health, the audience can’t help but pay close attention to the health bars on top of the screen, in addition to following the action underneath. To make matters even worse for the players, the clock is constantly ticking away, preventing any chance of further delaying the round. No matter what, the players are forced to face the consequences of their actions; there is nobody who can help them, no teammate that they can rely on, only their character and their skills as players.
At any point, one tiny mistake could mean a round lost…
A potential comeback wasted…
Or even a championship taken away…
And there is no better example of this than EVO Moment 37 from Street Fighter.
To set the stage, it happened during the losers’ final of EVO 2004. The two players, Daigo “The Beast” Umahara and Justin Wong, were up neck-and-neck, but Justin was poised to win the match with his health advantage. Daigo, whose character were on his last legs, was almost certain to lose when he miraculously pulled off the perfect parry streak, followed up with a counter-combo, and proceeded to win the match in front of thousands of roaring fans. In honor of Daigo’s virtuosity, this moment was later named “The Daigo Parry,” and it would go on to inspire millions of others to pick up the game, some of whom even credited it as the reason why they became professional players.
EVO Moment 37 exemplifies the beauty of competitive fighting games, where incredible comebacks can and will happen at any moment. As long as there is even a tiny hope, the game can still be won, no matter the odds.
And the ability to promote and facilitate “hype” moments is not entirely exclusive to just Street Fighter either. Other games have done so to a comparable degree as well, such as Super Smash Bros’ “Wombo Combo” moment (warning: loud screaming and profanity for those who haven’t seen it).
This is the reason behind fighting games’ prolonged success: the “hype.” Even after some 30 years since their inception, many fighting games remain largely unchanged to this day.
As the competitive scene continues to grow, along with it, older and newer fans will come head-to-head in the biggest tournaments around the world, such as this year’s Street Fighter V EVO Grand Final. And despite the inherent age gap between the two, what unite them are the games that they play and the culture of “hype” that fuels their burning desires: their desire to learn, their desire to compete, and their desire to be the best.
