How Initial D changed my life — Final Stage
Part Three of a Three Part Series. Read Part One Here. Read Part Two Here.
Act One — Lingering
The biggest stage had been set, all the main actors had gathered, and when it mattered most, I choked. It was brutally frustrating. I had never thought I would be eliminated from the Version 3 Tournament so early and due almost entirely to mistakes that I would not have made 9 times out of 10.
But far more frustrating than the singular disappointment of showing poorly at the tournament was the flame-out afterwards. Instead of wanting to redeem myself and come back stronger, the passion I had once harboured for the game subsided and was replaced by a constant, low-frequency sense of futility playing in the background. Although I continued to visit arcades and do time attacks out of habit, my heart was no longer into the game. By the time I entered my first year of university, Initial D was already fully in my back mirror and I had moved on to other things in my life.
Yet the two and a half year odyssey had already influenced me in a permanent way — to an extent which I did not fully understand or appreciate at the time. It had a lingering sort of effect, hovering around ethereally even as I continued to be oblivious to its presence.
The arcade experience cultivated deep habits of independence and introspection. Since Grade 9, I had become accustomed to creating my own schedules, pursuing my own goals, and developing my own plans with little or no outside involvement. Furthermore, the goals were very much internal. The vast majority of people didn’t care about Initial D — few people even knew what it was. Yet there was a strong and independent drive that motivated my behaviour. I liked figuring out myself what I wanted to do with my life and did not like to be told what to do. This motivation was like a separate internal beast, which had its own mind and its own desires.
The consequence of adopting this independent thought process while still in my adolescence meant that (1) I was not particularly good at following rules or authority unless I independently came to the same conclusion and (2) I constantly doubted myself and engaged in re-evaluating the overall logic and meaning of my decisions. In other words, at a very young age, I was forming the habit of having frequent ‘mini’ existential crises.
See it’s like this: the beauty of being a follower is that the proper path is usually preset for you. You need only follow that preset path the best you can to achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. Your preset path will also have the added benefit of built-in signposts that can tell you whether you are succeeding or failing.
The danger of course is that life is unpredictable and all sorts of things can not only impede your path, but may also show that your path is a wrong-headed or meaningless one, in which case the structure of your life can collapse and sink you into an enormous depressive bog. Unintentionally, I managed to avoid this problem by adopting a very flexible mindset, constantly questioning my underlying values and motives on a frequent basis.
The inherent danger of having rigid or dogmatic maps of meaning and following the direction of others unquestioningly is pretty well understood. What is less understood however is the danger of having too flexible a structure of meaning.
In this latter circumstance, you are constantly searching for meaning, which often eludes you as soon as you think you’ve found it. It is like grasping at a cloud; you can never fully get a hold of it — it moves and disperses as soon as you touch it. I have found that over time, this sort of constant self-critique and re-evaluation, can also take a psychological toll.
Act Two — College and Career
These two traits: a general suspicion of rules and authority as well as a constant need to self-evaluate, ended up largely determining the course of the next ten years of my life.
For instance, in high school I determined that, because of my strong desire for independence, I wanted to achieve financial freedom as soon as possible so that I could free my time for more meaningful pursuits without being chained to a job that I hated for the rest of my life.
I studied people who had done it well, like Warren Buffett and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger. I read as much as I could about value investing, from Benjamin Graham to Seth Klarman. Along that line of thinking, I entered the Commerce program at the University of Toronto, hoping to encounter colleagues and classmates who shared the same values, goals, and ideals as myself.
Much to my surprise however, the majority of the individuals I met in the Commerce program did not share my values or goals at all. Although all the students shared the common goal of achieving financial success, the money was most often the ends, not the means to some greater meaning.
There was also very little independent and/or critical thinking, truth be told. Instead, an overarching herd mentality took control of most of the students and dictated what courses they took, what questions they asked (or didn’t ask), what jobs they applied for, and what extracurricular activities they took on.
In the above critique, I do not mean to insinuate that my values or goals were any more or less important than others in the program. Furthermore, I met many people in the program that I greatly respect and have learned much from. I only mean to highlight how different and in some cases, alienating, my adopted way of thinking was in the new environment that I found myself in.
But it was really in the corporate working world where it became apparent how poorly my way of thinking aligned with what formal business education was preparing me for. I had three successive summer positions in banking and finance, two in large financial institutions and one in a small hedge fund. I learned two major lessons during this time:
(1) When money is the ends in and of itself, there is precious little room for the consideration of collateral damage involved in obtaining that money. This really hit home after the financial industry’s resistance to increased regulation in the housing and securitization markets after the 2008–2009 meltdown.
(2) Working in a large corporate environment was a soul crushing experience. The work was so drab, the rules were so arbitrary, the (majority of) people so boring, the goal of making rich people even richer so uninspiring, that I literally applied to law school primarily to run away from the financial world. Working those jobs made me question my existence almost every single day — particularly when I was the last person at the office burning the midnight oil on yet another slide deck.
When I tell people about how generally averse I am to rules and authority, they find it very odd that I made the decision to go to law school and become a lawyer. Aren’t lawyers the very guardians of rules, authority, and order?
In fact, it was probably due to that very aversion and suspicion of authority that I decided to go to law school in the first place. I needed to understand the structure of power, the sources of authority, different kinds of argumentation and reasoning. I needed tools in the toolbox so I could challenge authority where I thought it was just to do so. Law school provided me the intellectual sandbox in which to develop those tools and skills. Unfortunately, this type of thinking again alienated me to the majority of students at law school who were focused on the preset path to success.
In law school, I pretty signed up for anything that peaked my interest with no regard for how (or even if) it would help me find a job. I recall taking classes and doing extracurricular activities in climate change law, Indigenous law, law and economics, and law and development, Chinese legal systems, comparative constitutional law, international humanitarian law, etc. It was all very interesting, but still brought me no further in terms of trying to answer the big question: what the heck should I do with my life?
I’m not a strong believer in fate, but somehow in this hour of confusion, an old friend from the past would pay me a visit.
Act Three — Reconciliation
The big break occurred during the summer of my second year in law school (2L) in 2012. The University of Toronto has a wonderful clinic called the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) which sends a dozen or so law students every year abroad for a four month summer human rights internship. My internship sent me to the University of Hong Kong (HKU) to research the issue of forced expropriation and land rights in Mainland China.
Hong Kong also happened to be holy ground for Initial D Arcade players. Many of the legendary players, from Extra_HC (who popularized the feint drift technique) to MSK (who had a stranglehold on almost all the most important world records at one point), hailed from Hong Kong.
Even though it was now 2012 and most people had already moved on from the glory days, there were still several Initial D Version 3 machines which could be found in various arcades around the city. As an added bonus, most machines were $2 HKD to play, which roughly worked out to be a third of the price of Canadian machines!
I quickly found myself coming back every night to a basement arcade in Mong Kok called Smart Game, which had all the familiar trappings of a legitimate arcade — the loud music and noise, the faint body odor, the stale smell of cigarettes from over a decade of indoor smoking — it was an Arcade Rat’s heaven. Sitting down at the Initial D cabinet was like discovering home again. The muscle memory from 6 years ago still hadn’t left me and I still remembered how to drive nearly all of the dozen or so courses.
Soon I had developed a daily routine: commute to HKU campus in the morning and work on my research project until 5 pm, have an early dinner, minibus back to Mong Kok in the evening, play Initial D straight for 2–3 hours before catching the late night minibus back home.
Amazingly, now that money wasn’t an overriding constraint, I was demolishing my previous best times on nearly all courses. My love and focus for the game had returned, along with a passion to implement and perfect all the new driving techniques that had been developed in the 6 years or so since I had left the game. I even had the extra pleasure of introducing Initial D to my girlfriend, who was also on exchange at HKU. We had a blast.
Still, I knew that I was merely revisiting my childhood nostalgia and once the 4 month internship was over, the spell would be removed and I would have to grow up again.
Act Four — Evolution
Then came a fateful encounter on August 7, 2012, only two days before I was scheduled to fly out of Hong Kong and back to Toronto. It was my final night at the arcade and time to say my goodbyes. The research paper I had been working on was largely finished and the next day would be occupied with seeing family and packing for the long trip home. As per usual, I dropped by the Mong Kok arcade around 7:30 pm. However, I noticed a local gentleman doing time attacks on the Initial D machine who I did not recognize and had not seen before in my several months of visiting the arcade.
This dude was an absolute monster, scorching fast. He was by far the fastest player I had ever seen with my own two eyes, in another league even compared to Jobo and 2Fast, the two top players in Canada during my time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make out his card name because it was Japanese Hiragana, so I will refer to him from now on as Player X. While he raced down Akina, Happogahara, and Shomaru, setting new machine records along the way, Player X was beginning to attract a small crowd of admiring onlookers.
Again, while I don’t believe in fate, I do believe in recognizing the importance of the moment. Here I was, on effectively the last day of my Initial D career, and I happened upon the greatest player I had ever seen play. What were the chances? It had to be a sign. My competitive instincts took over and I immediately sat down and put my coins into the machine to challenge him before he could finish his run.
In Initial D, the most accurate benchmark for a player’s skill level is how far away your best times are from the world record. A new player might be nearly a full minute off the world record pace, depending on how long and difficult the course was. A regular player (who can hold his own at the arcade but is not considered particularly good) might be around 15–20 seconds off the pace. A really good player (which, subjectively speaking, I consider myself to be) might be around 3–6 seconds off the pace.
Most of Player X’s times were around 1 second off the world record pace, which is ridiculously fast. Furthermore, any serious player would also have multiple cars and multiple cards, which means that I may have been only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of his time records.
In other words, given Player X’s time records, it was very likely that I was dealing with someone who held a world records himself and was likely a top 20, possibly a top 10 player in the world.
One of the very best in the world…how would I do against him? Could I keep up? Could I win? I wanted, nay, I needed to know.
The very act of an outsider like me challenging him seemed like a minor affront for Player X. Initially, he seemed pestered by the challenge, as if during his time attack, an annoying fly was buzzing around and distracting his attention from more pressing matters.
But if there was one thing that was on my side, it was the knowledge that great players like him, because of their obvious skill and blistering times, usually are very rusty during battle, since few players would dare even challenge them to races. I quickly found that to be the case with Player X.
In our first race down Akagi, I immediately rammed him off the start line to take advantage of the game’s physics engine and jump out in front. In doing so, I was sending him a message: “you might be a better time attacker than I am, but I don’t believe you are more battle tested”. It also sent the message that, in order to bridge our skills gap, I would be pulling out all the tricks I had to win: ramming, blocking, turning off my headlights, whatever it took.
It worked, I won the first race.
Player X was taken aback by the disrespect I was showing him, cursing at me in Cantonese. He told his friend to get some change from the cashier; it might be a long night. He changed his car to a Lancer Evolution IV and took me to Irohazaka Downhill Rain, where he would have the biggest possible advantage against my car, a RX-8. Needless to say, he slaughtered me on the second race by nearly 200 metres.
But I kept playing back at him, using different cars, different courses, different strategies, just mixing it up as much as I could, drawing all my years of experience. I won some, I lost some, but each race was at an unbelievable level of intensity. I was having so much fun. Just following behind him, I could see that he was taking lines that I had never even contemplated. Even in the heat of a race, he was setting times that I could have never set on my own.
At the beginning, Player X was racing cleanly, taking pains to race smart and avoid bumping into my car. But by the end, he was ramming me on every corner entry and blocking me on every straightaway. Any pretense that he had brought to the match about etiquette had gone out the window — in the end we were just two guys that hated to lose. I could tell that he too, was rediscovering something in the heat of competition.
After about an hour and a half of uninterrupted racing, I had just beat Player X by a hair on Tsuchizaka, my favourite course. He made a move for his wallet to get more change, then stopped short and put his wallet away. Without a word spoken, he extended his hand and I shook it. He then left silently with his friend.
I was covered in sweat and trying to comtemplate what had just happened. Out of 13 total races, I took 8 of them down.
I felt like Matt Damon’s character in Rounders, when he runs into Poker World Champion Johnny Chan in Atlantic City and ends up bluffing him out of a pot, just so he could test whether or not he had the goods to run with the top dogs. It was a life changing experience.
I realized then my experience with Initial D had given me a present, a far more precious gift than I could fully comprehend when I was just a teenager: confidence.
It was a confidence born out of the knowledge that if I put my heart, my soul, my time, and my energy into something, I could compete with the very best, at the very highest level. That unshakeable belief was seared into me and has proven extremely useful in life.
Nowadays, my arcade days are properly behind me and I work as a social justice lawyer in Toronto. In my line of work, there are plenty of battles to be fought both in the courtroom and in the wider political arena. Sometimes I get hit, sometimes I lose, sometimes I think I don’t belong, sometimes I think the path ahead is simply impassable.
In those dire moments, I always think back to the night of August 7, 2012, in that dingy, smoke-filled basement arcade in Hong Kong and I remind myself of Matt Damon’s line in Rounders:
“I sat with the best in the world, and I won.”
