Where Did You Start?

the first game i remember playing ever was mk2. i dont remember much from it other than i was like 2 or 3 at my cousins place playing it and i used to cry when fatalities happened. yep.

i figured id give you a little bit of my backstory on fighting games while im at it. im really bored and i actually kind of kind of want to try to remember what i can in the past 4 years that i've been involved with the FGC

okay so im in the middle of typing this and HOLY SHIT THIS IS LONG but if ive met you at a tournament or you stayed in the nitti room, it might be some good reads to bring back some memories of the past.

as far as competitive play goes, i started with SF4 at the end of 2009 (super was already announced). as soon as i got the game, i ordered a shitty Hori Fighting Stick 3 and started mashing. i had no idea what the fuck i was doing but i was having a lot of fun with it. i had a friend who was really into GGPO 3s but he didn't really like sf4. he introduced me to SRK where i found out about competitive play. i honestly didn't do much reading up on things in the beginning, i didn't know where to start and being completely honest, the friend that i had, while he was a pretty good player from what i remember (which was a long time ago and at the time i didnt know what i was doing), i didnt learn much from him and just got bopped all the time. i went to my first tournament less than a month after i bought the game, where i met KDZ and Darth Arma very briefly. it was a local in some shitty hotel about 10 minutes away from where i grew up and that was the start of it all. i was really quiet back then, didn't really know what i was getting myself into but i really liked being around the game and i really appreciated watching the better players go at it. i just practiced my combos but didnt understand how to use/deal with footsies, zoning, anti airs and nonsense for a while. it took me a really long time to get anywhere. it probably wasnt until close to the time AE came out where i actually learned how to use these things, but not really how to deal with things. i also settled on a character (seth) and a playstyle (i always leaned towards zoning and lame play) and this is around the time i started to actually feel some progress. so fast forward to 2010, AE comes out on arcades and is in CF and i was retardedly hype. i was really excited to see yun and yang in the game because i always thought they were cool characters. however as time went on and i saw more and more AE 2010 edition, i started to really lose interest in the game (i think most people that play/played sf4 can all agree that AE 2010 edition was by far the worst). first off, it seemed like a 6 character game to me (yun, yang, cammy, akuma, fei and viper). on top of that, its the only time i can really remember SF4 players saying that a character has no bad matchups (as in yun, im pretty sure people said that about yang but i honestly cant remember but he was also talked about a lot) on top of that, my character was completely changed and the way i played him didn't exist anymore. i was finally getting somewhere and everything i have learned and built my playstyle upon with my character i chose was thrown out the window. during this whole SF4 time, i didn't really meet many people. i just really liked fighting games and i always thought it was exciting to be aorund them.

So at this point in my fighting game career, i start to look at other games that arent SF4. the first game i decided to try out was arcana heart 3. looking back im not entirely sure why i settled on that, but i think homingcancel.com was the first community site that i found outside of SRK if you can believe it. i think it was from arturo posting about it. i imported it from playasia and it took fucking forever to get here. i was really bad at anime, didn't really understand anime mechanics at the time but i mashed in it and had a lot of fun. through this game i met players like Achtzhen and Danny Schme who were always real cool dudes. Achtzhen happened to live relatively close to me so we would always push buttons in anime. games i generally don't play or have heard of. he would always come to my place with some poverty ass shit and bop the shit out of me. he would try to teach me how to play but honestly it all went over my head.

AH3 never caught on however so i wasnt really in there for very long. i think after ECT3 i stopped playing (oddly i really want to pick it up again and play it when i go to majors, game is actually really fun!) and didn't really play anything seriously. i would still play SF4 but i always thought that SSF4 was much better than AE (i actually think SSF4 is the only good version, lets see how ultra is but im not really interested). i remember getting vanilla marvel 3 5 days before street date and went in on that. i really liked it for the first few weeks but then people found the real cheap shit and i wasn't really about it. i was still actively going to tournaments, playing SF4 (i believe i was playing sakura at this time) and still not really knowing many people. AE2012 got announced and i was actually petty hype. however, for whatever reason i ended up picking up UMVC3 and liking it a lot more than vanilla marvel 3, probably because by this time i was able to land combos consistently and i could xfactor wesker people to death. AE2012 came out and i dabbled in that for a bit. anyways, in between all this time i started attending rutgers where i found the UGS club (underground gaming society) which at the time was mostly focused on competitive play (now its all casual bullshit and i dont even go). here i met the rutgers heads such as Rokunaya, Colpevole and Grover (those are the ones who have done well). Rokunaya was a melty blood guy and he always wanted to show off the game to everyone there. he knew me from homingcancel and he actually hit me up there and told me about the club. also, because Roku existed, pretty much everyone who played fighting games at rutgers played melty blood. i still didnt have a game that i really considered to be my main game, just mashed in games and potmonstered tournaments. at this point i started to really understand how to get better at games after playing with those guys a lot (mainly Colpevole, Grover, Paul, Greg).

So coming into my second semester im just chillin in my room one night and im like, hey fuck it im going to preorder sc5. i figured i might as well try it. sc1 and sc2 were 2 of my favorite games as a little kid and i figured if i didnt like the fighting, sc has historically had great single player. turns out i get the game, the single player experience is mad bullshit, but i remembered all the fighting styles from back when i was younger and i was in there. i guess since i still had pretty shitty 2d fundamentals, i didnt find it that hard to pick up 3d games. there was one other sc player in the UGS club (randy) who played NM but i never really got the chance to play him much. i was really the only one that picked it up as their main focus. i went to one of the early break tournaments for sc5 where i played aeon and my first round i played Bibulus, but didnt actually formally meet him. it was week 1 or 2 and i was still just figuring things out. i wasnt used to a block button, 3d movement, air control or teching in 3d. i ended up going to the break a second time about a month later but for some reason they didnt ahve a tournament. i remember being kinda upset about this one because i was practicing pat a lot for it. the next week sc5 was dropped from the break. it wasn't until after school was out that locals started happening again at local battles. this is where i met Ramon, Jaxel, Bibulus, Royal Lance and JJJ. my first local battles tournament i ended up getting 4th, losing to Ramon (for some reason he was playing Ezio) and Bibulus's Algol (who was a character i never played against before). next i went to ECT4 where i met ZeroEffect and OmegaXCN (dont know if i really met anyone else there, i was mostly chilling with LI peoples) were I probably had my best showing up to that point. i lost first round in a mirror match (i dont think ive ever won a mirror match in tournament in any game, i just suck at them) and then i lost to a raphael player. I also met YoungFox there, who made top 4 with raph, but to my knowledge that was the only tournament he was really able to go to. so time goes on, i hit up a jaxeldome where i met Thermidor and Dreamkiller. it was also the last one for whatever reason so i guess i killed the jdome lol.

after that, no locals for sc5 really existed anymore. so i had to wait till NEC to get my next tournament in for sc5. in between this time i dabbled in ttt2 for a few months but didn't really get too into it because i just liked sc5 more. i started to become a regular at the break with that game and i met players like BrianH and the RealLaw. I had fun playing tekken but honestly i found that it was the only game where i would always rage really hard when i lost. so NEC rolls around and this is the tournament where i really decided that i absolutely love this community. ive said this a few times but this is the first time i can remember being part of the FGC where it didn't feel like a bunch of cliquey top player worship and like an actual community. here i met most of you guys, Jimbo, IRM, Sandman, Xeph, Chicago, Partisan, Reptile, GO, Sporko, RTD, Malice and a bunch of other people i cant remember. it was also probably my strongest showing overall in sc5. first round i had to play the raphael player who beat me at ECT and i ended up 3-0ing him in pretty sure. i also remember playing black mamba in winners and almost beating his pyrrha which got me mad hype for whatever reason. i just thought it was awesome that i was able to keep up with an established name. leaving NEC i realized i wanted to somehow give back to the community. some people say i ended up doing so, im not sure, you guys can say so for yourselves.

after this apex happened, which was at my school. here i housed a bunch of people at my apartment and met Woahhzz. small turnout for this one but it was a hell of a lot of fun. i had an awesome time streaming in my room and i also felt like it had a great pool of talent regardless of the number of players.

next tournament was winter brawl and this is when i started doing the hot dog thing. here i met kAb and harry (mad props for coming out from Washington by yourself), most of the Avylon guys, Jazz, as well as a shit ton of other random people who just wanted to talk to me cuz i was the hot dog. this was one of my favorite events because i thought it was fucking hilarious how everyone wanted IRM to lose and he made winners finals and everyone was like wuuuuut. and we saw the original maxi pop off when he made winners finals there (only to be followed up by the legendary TFC pop off). and this is when i randomly got random FGC hollywood status just by doing something incredibly stupid, but for some reason they all know i play soul calibur so im all about it.

final round was my next event and it was the first time i ever really did any significant traveling for a tournament. also it was the only time i went 0-2 in sc5 while actively playing it other than that one time i showed up at the break. here i met Heaton, SomethingUnique, mkl, ringout, coolc, zoom, partywolf, jansaur, whatever Chicago people werent at NEC, psychochronic and a whole bunch of random people from the south that also were about the hot dog. this was by far the most fun ive ever had at a tournament. i went 0-2 in every game but gave no fucks and just had an awesome time (i also come to realize that i tend to scrub it out when im not int he north east).

after final round i started dabbling with injustice and i became a regular at the break again. i had that one time where i made winners finals using nothing but deathstroke guns and that was absolutely legendary how bad i scrubbed it out at the end.

after that ECT happened. here i met MastaCJ, Kvasir, Jailhouse, DragonGod and MikeMetroid. This was the first major where i didn't focus on calibur, but i was trying to get do the best i could in injustice while it was still new. i actually did pretty damn good against REO i remember. unfortunately, that was the only major i played in where i feel like Deathstroke was a top tier character. calibur i didn't really focus on too much but that had probably one of the most hilarious calibur tournaments ever. ZeroEffect as JJJ, sporko coming too late to register and then later finding out that someone signed him up before he got there and he was already drunk, the glorious losers finals picture that had me, jim, IRM, OmegaXCN and lordsavior in, ninjaguy asking me how to beat sporko and actually beating sporko and plenty of other nonsense. also, this was the first time the nitti room got shut down. apparently when i was getting food or watching injustice or something like 25 calibur players ended up in my room.

after that summer jam came around and that was my first time coming in with avylon. i was really grinding up injustice but i played like shit all weekend so nothing really came out of it. i remember losing to maxout in the losers side in injustice and raging mega hard hahaha. at this tournament i pretty much knew everyone there. also i decided to enter AH3 for nostalgia sake, didnt remember how to play it at all but landed one of my old setups once and i got hype lol. i also entered chaos code which ended up getting stupid amounts of money in bonuses for a 2 dollar entry game. i ended up getting second having never played the game before.

at TFC, this is when i really started doing shit for avylon. i didnt really prepare for this one, i just wanted to be there for the sake of being there. before this one i was playing mad Dota2 and was taking a break from fighting games. i thoguht i was lost forever but after leaving i barely played. all it took was for me to go to an fgc event for me to be like "okay i want to play fighting games again". here i met a lot of injustice players, honestly i cant even list them all because it was ridiculous how many i met. this tournament also had the most hype 10 AM finals ever. shoutouts to being louder than smash while having like half the people there.


HOLY SHIT THAT WAS FUCKING LONG
 
i actually never have been to an anime convention. i never really got into anime myself other than a select few here and there.

Lol well it's just like a gaming convention except more people, and everyone is pretty horrible at all the games in the main game room.. xD They usually have Call of Duty tournaments, smash Bros tournaments, Soul Calibur, and Tekken. But everyone is usually just casuals. It's like the exact opposite of EVO skill wise somewhat, lol.

EDIT: The best thing I like about anime convention tournaments is it's like you can play any game when they set up the tournament brackets, and you get to play a lot of Japanese exclusive fighting games you'd never be able to play on your own.
 
Lol well it's just like a gaming convention except more people, and everyone is pretty horrible at all the games in the main game room.. xD They usually have Call of Duty tournaments, smash Bros tournaments, Soul Calibur, and Tekken. But everyone is usually just casuals. It's like the exact opposite of EVO skill wise somewhat, lol.

EDIT: The best thing I like about anime convention tournaments is it's like you can play any game when they set up the tournament brackets, and you get to play a lot of Japanese exclusive fighting games you'd never be able to play on your own.

out of the major tournaments ive been to, they have an anime room that has games like p4a, blazblue, guilty gear, melty blood, arcana heart, chaos code and sometimes other stuff. for a little bit aquapazza was happening but i havent seen that be played there since about a year ago. i havent been to a tournament on the west coast so i cant tell you if they do it or not.
 
crazy long snip
Thanks for the life story haha. Interesting :D

As for me my first fighting game and game in general was SF then from there I went back and played older gen games because it was all we had. Beyond local small tournaments at a little place in my town called cyberstar that no longer exists I had never been to a big tournament until TFC last month. Which I enjoyed and now I will be going to many more in the next few years.
 
I'mma chine in on this so here goes. My 1st FG was TMNT tournament fighters on the SNES not that Genesis shit and Killer Instincts 1 and I loved FG since. I always loved going to arcades and playing FG's and that's when I payed Tekken 2, Bloody Roar 1 which was know as Blood Roar in arcades I beleive and Soul Calibur 1 as well for the first time. Afterwards I grew in love with Super Smash Brothers on the N64 when it came out and it had Fox Mcccloud from Star Fox cause that was my favorite game of all time growing up and that became my favorite FG throughout the years and Bloody Roar and for some strange reason Battle Arena Toshiden 3 and Def Jam Fight For New York if you count that as a FG. Later on when I around 12 I learned of EVO and B5( Battle By The Bay) through G4 back when it was new, innovative and fresh and not that EX Spike TV crap that what it is now.

I played Soul Calibur 2 a year later when it came out and went crazy finding out that the GC version had Link in it being a Nintendo fanboy at the time and the other versions had Heihachi Mishima from Tekken in the PS2 version and Spawn for the Xbox version and Super Smash Brothers Melee later on when I got a chance to buy it. I played Soul Calibur 3 casually while brawl was coming out and hated it cause of the changes from Soul 2 then loved it then hated it several years later cause of the busted shit in it. Years later when people were waiting for Super Smash Brothers Brawl to come out around 06-08 I starting learning how to L-Cancel and WaveDash and other advance techniques waiting for Brawl as well as being very active on Youtube and did small time video game reviews I came up with my name weeks before I made my orignal youtube and my brother called me GameGenie cause I used to be a massive cheat code nerd with GameShark and Action Replay and such.

Brawl came out and I saved a grip of money and bought it day 1 for it and starting playing it with friends for such and played online and online was decent for me when it came out then I learned how utterly shitty online is for the game and how Mario Kart Wii came out a week or two later and how good that online was. I entered a tourney for Brawl with friends 2 months later at the Family Fun Center when the arcade was still decent running and didnt went to crap and a did ok for my first ever tourney. After getting bopped and seeing new tricks and strategies for the game I eyes opened and got seriously afterwards and got serious at the game around the later half of the year to New Years so I'm a borderline o9er perhapes on your opinion. Start going out to my local scene for the game whenever I can get a chance to despite my area being all about melee and played Brawl for 2 and a half years and learned to play melee seriously as well and after a while our brawl scene died cause our players grew up hating the game or had to move out of state for school or moved on to Marvel 3 or SF4 or went back to playing Melee except for one person and as me I got fed up on the game and stopped playing seriously cause I have to focus on school and life as well as starting to hate the game cause all of the silly stuff brawl had in it and didnt feel rewarded for my style of play and offense is completely punished unless you was MetaKnight but I still supported our scene despite this at times.

Once the end of 2011 came around I was bored on Youtube one day and was interested in competitive Soul Calibur 2 and 4 videos and such after being fed up with stream monsters and commetary in a Team Spooky stream one day during NEC 11 and went to the side stream and wanted to watch non-Capcom games and watched some KOF13 then was also interested in the beta version of SCV and watched the 5 man USA vs France SCIV crew battle and got hella hyped for it and got me excited for SCV and played close attetion to the game since release and learned the system for Calibur more deeply and made a account on 8wayrun several weeks later. Two weeks before SCV came out I was on a IGN stream and they were giving away 5 copies of SCV collecters edition and seen some people I knew from Youtube and I seen on 8way asking questions about the game and I realized I had to dumb down my question so I can win a copy of the game so I asked them if they had a Japanese voice option so I didnt have to hear Pryhha's dumb ass whiny english voice and was very seriously when I asked that question and suprisingly I won that and when I told people on here that I won some gave me congrats and other were shocked and salty that I won cause I asked a really dump question and won because of it.

The game comes out yay for everyone and played it at friends house and local tourneys when I can cause I couldnt play it at home cause I didnt have a PS3 till the middle of the summer of 2012 when I got a job and started playing seriously and entered tournies when I can and wanted a scene for the game and talked to a old smash buddy of mine who I used to play Brawl seriously with and who was down to play Calibur seriously with me and he was down and we then met with MKL waiting for the game and gather interest and then months later we got interest and a scene for the game in Lincoln and I was in Omaha so I come out when I get a chance to cause I love traveling for video games and meeting new people and kicking it at despite winning or lossing.

JESUS that was long sorry about that.
 
Last edited:
First fighting game: UMK for N64 and I mashed buttons.
Second fighting game: MK9 and I mashed buttons.
Current fighting game: SCV and I still mash buttons.
 
Last edited:
the gamegenie22 saga

awesome story man! im glad other people are doing the same that i did too. on the subject of being an 09er i kind of consider smash and FGC to be two different things because they have their own events but some people will consider you that. not that it matters but whatever. neways im pretty sure i used to be subscribed to your youtube account now that you mention it. i used to have a game blog back from 2008-20010 and the account was jonnitti1. i do make random videos still if i see someone talkin about something and i want to chime in but it aint like it used to be when i made a few videos a week and had people actually watch them lol. neways hopefully ill run into you at an event at some point!
 
Let´s see, the first fighting game i really liked was Pocket Fighter of PSOne, but this was an exception, back there i hated fighting games, i found them so boring...

But the one who made me love the fighting games was Soul Calibur IV, wich was also my first Soul Calibur, so thanks to it i´m big fan of SC too

And to be honest, i can´t find any other game so great as SC, DoA is the only one i find it close.
 
awesome story man! im glad other people are doing the same that i did too. on the subject of being an 09er i kind of consider smash and FGC to be two different things because they have their own events but some people will consider you that. not that it matters but whatever. neways im pretty sure i used to be subscribed to your youtube account now that you mention it. i used to have a game blog back from 2008-20010 and the account was jonnitti1. i do make random videos still if i see someone talkin about something and i want to chime in but it aint like it used to be when i made a few videos a week and had people actually watch them lol. neways hopefully ill run into you at an event at some point!
Likewise I still have some of my old reviews on my new channel which is Gamegenie22 as for my Gamegenie222 channel I abandoned it cause I made a fake email and forgot the password for it at the time. I wanna start doing video game reviews again and let's plays pretty soon so if your interested look out for it. Hope I get a chance to kick it with you in the future.

EDIT: Scumbag channel push.
 
Last edited:
My first fighter was Street Fighter II Turbo in the Genesis in like 1994-5. Older kids whooped up on me until I finally got my own copy and learned all the little shit and then started beating on them. They started to pimp me out to beat their friends and make money off of me. My Blanka and Sagat was pretty much undefeated in that town.

I then moved and the new town's local diner had Tekken 1 arcade in there and I swapped to 3D games from that point on (except for a love affair with CvS2). My first tournament game was Tekken 4 at age 12ish. I went to 3-4 tournaments for it and realized what a broken piece of shit Jin was.
 
The first fighting game I fell in love with was MK2, it got me into the lore of MK. I was very young at the time, so I didn't know how to play, but Sub Zero and Scorpion really stuck out to me. Years later, I picked up Soul Calibur II and fell in love with it. Time went on and I casually played the mk games on ps2 and soul caliber III. When MK9 came out, it brought me back to my childhood days playing trilogy with all the characters I loved. MK9 got me into play fighters competitively involved with the FGC, I'd like to see Soul Calibur do what MK9 did for me.
 
Alright, so since I haven't really seen anyone say what other genre of games they first started playing, I might as well kick it off.

My first RPG was Secret Of Evermore on the SNES. Still one of my favorite games till this day, due to the storyline and characters. Plus, the dog is a badass.

First shooter game, was in fact the old 007 on the N64. Used to play the shit out of it with my friends. I'm talking 1AM or later still shooting each other up.

First Platform Game, none other than Mega Man X. I remember whenever I was stuck on the bosses, I'd ask my older brother for help and he'd tell me "No, you need to do it, on your own."

Next first, Racing Game. Super Mario Cart. I'd play Toad and I wouldn't allow anyone else to play him. The Ghost House is still one of my favorite tracks. Rainbow Road can go into oblivion.

Tomb Raider was my first Adventure Game. Took me ages to adapt to the gameplay, doing backflips and trying to remember how I died and not repeating it, those were good times.
 
My first mmo was PSO (Phantasy Star Online), played that for so long, I don't remember when I started, or how long I've been there. All I know is, I've been there until the end came. Which was when Microsoft shut down the online servers for the original Xbox, so I was forced to quit. Didn't want to either. I could have stayed there for more years then I know. That mmo was my number 1 favorite game in the whole damn world. I would play 20/7, getting myself 3-4 hours of sleep & skip school A LOT. I would wake up with over whelming excitement, & IMMEDIETLY turn on the Xbox, just to play that damn game. That taste of a game being that good still has never left me. When ever I hear just one sound track from the game, my hairs stand right the fuck up! I get goose bumps hardcore, my nips get hard, I arch my back like somebody got me up the butt, & my bullz get so wet. I cry a little...

Now I'm stuck without a place to call home. My world has been lost from me. I find myself looking for a new world. Every where I go, I can't seem to call a game home anymore. Future games just suck that badly. The only one that I seem to love the most so far is SC, but not even that could compare the power of the love I had for something that rare & unique. That game had everything! Quests, Battle Modes, Challenge Modes, CaS, Classes, Races, Lobbies, Parties! everything I wanted.
 
Back