The fighting game community, usually shortened to the FGC, is the scene built by people who play one-on-one fighting games against each other to win. It began in the arcades in 1991, when Street Fighter II made two players standing side by side at a cabinet the main event. It grew up in public places, among strangers, and it organised its own tournaments long before publishers took an interest, and it kept playing games that the industry had moved on from.
Fast facts
- Began: in arcades, with Street Fighter II (Capcom, 1991).
- Early centres in the US: Chinatown Fair in New York, Super Just Games near Chicago, and the Golfland arcades at Sunnyvale and Southern Hills in California.
- Biggest event: Evo, which began as Battle by the Bay in 1996.
- Games: Capcom’s Street Fighter and Vs. series at first, then Tekken, Guilty Gear, Super Smash Bros. and many others.
- Known for: open tournaments, local weekly events (“locals”), and its own vocabulary for the games’ techniques.
Street Fighter II and the arcades
Street Fighter II reached arcades in March 1991. You chose one of eight fighters and fought your way around the world against the others, or against whoever put in a coin beside you. Computer and Video Games called it “a beat ’em up classic” that June.
The machines were everywhere. John Choi, who became one of the best American players, remembered cabinets “in laundry mats, bowling alleys, 7-11s, video rental stores”, and started by riding his bike to his local 7-Eleven. As he improved he travelled further to find better opponents, until he settled on Golfland in Sunnyvale because it had the best competition. At one point he was entering three tournaments a week. Tom Cannon, who later co-founded Evo, described how naturally it happened: “Players would gather at arcades to play and compete, and it was just a totally natural thing to say, ‘Hey, let’s hold a tournament!’”
By the mid-1990s American competition had gathered around a few arcades with reputations for the best players: Chinatown Fair in New York, Super Just Games in the Chicago area, and Sunnyvale Golfland and Southern Hills Golfland in California. Meetings between their players were rare, and, Cannon said, “high stakes”: the winner had bragging rights until the next big tournament. The rivalry between northern and southern California was especially fierce.
Message boards and tournaments
The internet let players in different arcades talk to each other. On newsgroups and early message boards, then mostly used at colleges and universities, they typed out long descriptions of tactics, in threads that Cannon said often turned into arguments about who was worse. Battle by the Bay, held at Sunnyvale Golfland in 1996, was a chance to settle those arguments in person, and it grew into Evo.
Japanese players were regarded as the strongest, and contact with them came slowly. In 2000 Peter Kang arranged a five-against-five match between American and Japanese players for his documentary Bang the Machine. The American champion at Street Fighter Alpha 3, Alex Valle, also played an exhibition against the Japanese champion, Daigo Umehara. When Japanese players started travelling to American tournaments, Umehara said, the prize money was part of the attraction, because Japanese players could not win cash prizes at home.
The community was international from early on. At Evo 2005 in Las Vegas, Hardcore Gamer reported players from England, Japan, Korea and Canada. The Tekken 5 title went to Christopher “Crow” Villareal from Houston, who said the strong Tekken scene in his home town had pushed him: “if you raise their level, they’ll raise yours in return.”
The lean years and 3rd Strike
The late 1990s were hard on 2D fighting games. So many had been made, Retro Gamer wrote in 2012, that “not even the hardcore could really bring themselves to care”, apathy had set in “within the fighting community to a dangerous degree”, and 3D fighting games were taking over. Capcom’s Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike (1999) was the last main Street Fighter game until Street Fighter IV.
Its players kept it going anyway. Edge thought its depth made it ideal for tournament play, above all because of the parry, which let a player take no damage by pressing towards an attack at the moment it landed. In 2004 it produced Evo Moment 37, when Umehara parried all 15 hits of Justin Wong’s Super Art and won. When Retro Gamer explained 3rd Strike to its readers in 2006, years of competition in Japan, America and central Europe had narrowed its winning characters down to three: Yun, Chun-Li and Ken. When Capcom re-released the game online in 2011, Edge saw its trials as tributes to “the competitive scene that kept Third Strike alive for over a decade”.
A language of its own
Players developed names for the techniques they found. A few examples from 3rd Strike:
- Parry: pressing towards an attack at the moment it lands, taking no damage. Unlike a block, a successful parry leaves the player free to act at once.
- Kara-cancel: from the Japanese for “empty cancel”, starting one move and cancelling it almost immediately into another to gain extra range. The most common was Chun-Li’s medium kick cancelled into a throw.
- Footsies: what Retro Gamer called “the art of dancing outside your opponent’s optimum attack range, trying to bait a mistake”.
- Super Art: a special move paid for from a meter that fills as the player attacks, whether the attacks hit or miss. Wong’s 15-hit Super Art was the move Umehara parried in 2004.
Street Fighter IV and after
Seth Killian, one of Battle by the Bay’s founders, spent years as a philosophy teacher at the University of Illinois by day and a Street Fighter player and tournament organiser by night. He was, Edge wrote, “part of a small group of US players who were collectively laying the foundations for what is now a highly organised nationwide scene”. Capcom hired him to help make Street Fighter IV, which reached arcades in 2008 and home consoles in 2009. By 2013 it had sold more than six million copies and, in Edge’s words, “breathed new life into a genre that had spent the best part of a decade on life support”.
Edge described the resurgence bringing “an influx of new blood”, with “the Internet enabling players to be more connected than ever”. USgamer noted that Evo’s attendance had grown every year, and in 2023 it passed 9,000 entrants. The industry began to draw on the community’s expertise: the 2013 Killer Instinct on the Xbox One was tested by an “army of playtesters culled from the fighting game community”, Edge reported.
The scene has also faced hard questions. In the summer of 2020, GameSpot reported, several high-profile members of the fighting game community, particularly in the Super Smash Bros. scene, were accused of sexual misconduct with minors. The allegations against Evo’s co-founder Joey Cuellar that July led to Evo’s online event being cancelled. When Evo passed into Saudi ownership in 2026, IGN quoted one fan’s reaction: “Evo is dead. Go to your locals.” Critics, IGN reported, cited Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and its repression of LGBTQ+ people, noting that many members of the fighting game community are LGBTQ+ themselves.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 115, June 1991: Street Fighter II reviewed in the arcades.
- Capcom, “Corporate History”, Capcom investor relations (web, secondary): Street Fighter II in March 1991. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html
- USgamer, “The Oral History of EVO: The Story of the World’s Largest Fighting Game Tournament”, 17 July 2017, page 1 (web, secondary): John Choi’s and Tom Cannon’s recollections of the arcade scene, the main arcades, message boards and newsgroups, Battle by the Bay, Bang the Machine and the Valle–Umehara exhibition, Umehara on prize money, and Evo’s year-on-year growth. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-oral-history-of-evo
- “Evolution 2k5”, Hardcore Gamer vol. 1 issue 5, November 2005: the players at Evo 2005 and the interview with Christopher “Crow” Villareal.
- Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012, p. 65: the late-1990s decline of 2D fighters and 3rd Strike.
- “Why You Must Play: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike”, Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006, pp. 74–75: the parry, kara-cancelling, footsies and the three leading characters.
- “Time Extend: Street Fighter III: Third Strike”, Edge issue 182, December 2007: 3rd Strike as the last mainline Street Fighter, its suitability for tournaments, the parry compared with blocking, Super Arts, and the 2004 match.
- Edge issue 230, August 2011: 3rd Strike Online Edition and the competitive scene.
- “People: Seth Killian”, Edge issue 251, March 2013, pp. 114–115: Killian’s background, his hiring by Capcom, Street Fighter IV’s sales and effect on the genre, and the scene’s new players.
- Edge issue 259, November 2013: Killer Instinct’s “army of playtesters culled from the fighting game community”.
- James O’Connor, “EVO 2020 Online Has Been Cancelled”, GameSpot, 6 July 2020 (web, secondary): the 2020 allegations in the community. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evo-2020-has-been-cancelled/1100-6479302/
- Rebekah Valentine, “Saudi-owned RTS Takes Full Ownership of EVO”, IGN, 20 February 2026 (web, secondary): the community’s reaction and the reasons given. https://www.ign.com/articles/saudi-owned-rts-takes-full-ownership-of-evo
- Virginia Glaze, Dexerto, August 2023 (web, secondary): Evo 2023’s 9,182 entrants. https://www.dexerto.com/esports/evo-founders-awarded-key-to-the-city-of-las-vegas-as-evo-day-is-born-2239014/