Good Game
We arrive in Las Vegas at 3 AM Saturday morning, which, by Vegas standards, is Friday night. Our room won’t be ready until after the sun is up. We kill time by eating at Johnny Rockets while watching competitive Tetris, gambling, and eating breakfast while watching gamers argue with servers. Our room is ready at 7 AM. We get in there by 8, crash by 8:30, and wake up by 11:30. We have nerd fights to watch.
We are here for EVO 2023 – an international fighting game competition where the best of the best come prove their button-mashing mettle. A friend from my hometown is here to compete in two versions of Street Fighter, and we’re here to cheer him on.
When you picture “gamer” you probably have a distinct image in your mind that may or may not involve basements, bad hairlines, B.O., being socially awkward. Some of those stereotypes are true. If you ever want to see people who have bad posture and hate making eye contact, with bathrooms that smell worse than any sports stadium you will ever attend, a video game tournament should be at the top of your list.
However, what we see at EVO largely defies stereotypes. The vibe is less “incel meetup” and more “United Colors of Benetton ad, but geekier.” For every unhealthy-looking dude who looks like they still have a secret stash of Mountain Dew GamerFuel, there is a tall, in-shape guy who looks like he made the wrong turn at basketball tryouts in middle school and never looked back. For every pale white guy staring longingly at a poster of a big-titted anime girl, there are a dozen dudes with supportive wives or girlfriends in tow – and sometimes kids, too.
There are no loners, only boisterous groups of friends, even if they only know each other by their gamertags because this is the first time they’ve met in person. They’ve all brought their own controllers from home, immaculately maintained. They are friendly, they are energetic, they are competitive.
I see Sliding Doors versions of myself a dozen times over. Multiverse Jays who didn’t stop playing Magic: The Gathering at comic book shops in 8th and 9th grade, who went to more LAN parties after high school, who learned advanced Super Smash Bros. techniques by watching YouTube videos on Wavedashing and was more than content to be the best of his college dorm-mates and frat brothers.
We watch my friend Ehie play Street Fighter IV until he is eliminated from contention. We watch the top three of a game called King Of Fighters XV alongside thousands of others in the audience. We don’t start as fans, but we become fans. We go fucking nuts when our preferred player, a Taiwanese guy named E.T., the seeming underdog, wins the losers’ bracket. We cheer as he takes his seat for the grand final next to his Chinese opponent Xiaohai. The diplomatic undertones of a Taiwanese player taking on a Chinese player are not lost on us.
We watch them duke it out in awe. E.T. gives it his all, pushing the set to a full five games. We are chanting his name. We are chanting “RESET!” hoping he’ll win, reset the bracket, and force one final set out of Xiaohai. But his timing is off. He takes a fatal blow. We applaud for the absolute slugfest we just witnessed. E.T. and Xiaohai hug.
We decide to go eat Mexican food. We walk past a guy taking his waifu body pillow to go watch the Tekken 7 quarterfinals.
Full of enchiladas, we return to the convention center. We see cosplayers dressed as Ken from Street Fighter and Ken from Barbie. We see furries waiting in line to play the new League of Legends fighting game. We go to the arcade and play Mario Kart Arcade GP and Time Crisis and a wacky Japanese game operated by a pull-crank that helps us saw logs, climb bamboo, and karate-chop watermelons. We watch groups of gamers pull up chairs around Dance Dance Revolution machines and wild out in pairs with precise, practiced timing.
We lug a Red Bull bar table near the big screen to watch the top six of Dragon Ball FighterZ. I know nothing about this game and very little about the anime/manga series its based on – I rarely made it home in time for Toonami as a kid – so I resort to the same technique I used at the lone pro wrestling match I attended: keep asking whoever seems like they’re in the know "do we like this guy? Are we rooting for this guy?" and find out who is the heel, who is the face. We find ourselves rooting for Garlic Bread and Gropis, entirely based on their handles.
Watching the elite players here is as thrilling as watching the best athletes, and several orders of magnitude more entertaining than the Jake Paul/Nate Diaz fight that’s happening at the exact same time. If you give these guys an inch, they will take ten miles. If you mis-time one block, they will unleash colorful combos that decimate your health bar before you can say “Kamehameha.”
We are rapt at attention for three hours. We find ourselves saying things like "once they manage to get rid of Gotenks, Nitro's in real trouble." We do the Super Saiyan yells in unison with the characters onscreen, thousands of voices tapping into something primal with our diaphragms and bringing the energy to a crescendo.
Garlic Bread falls early. Gropis falls shortly after. Hikari, who manages to pull off multiple comebacks from an 0-2 start, becomes our new favorite. He has, as they say, that dog in him. In his final game, he times the perfect combo. The commentators call it out as its happening: “that’s gonna be it! As long as he finishes the combo!” The crowd goes bonkers, rising to their feet and miming Vegito’s energy blast right along with the screen. Hikari is jumping up and down before the game even finishes, exuberant with the energy of a new champion.
We leave, exhilarated, because there’s no way we couldn’t be. We say goodbye to Ehie, who is going to play more games with his online friends. We go back to our regularly scheduled Vegas programming. We head to Planet Hollywood where we catch one of those long, lucky craps rolls that, if you don’t make money off it, you aren’t playing craps correctly. We eat some Dave’s Hot Chicken in our beds while watching SportsCenter.
We’ve been in Vegas for 22 hours, and been awake for 19 of them. We go to bed. We have a long, hot drive ahead of us in the morning.