This past Saturday I hosted locals at my local library. I had been talking about doing that for a while, but my time at the last Climax of Night really inspired me to go for it. I took the week off, reserved a meeting room, and made the rest happen.
I gotta say I was nervous at first. I didn't initially have all my ducks in a row. My miSTer had a corrupted SD card. I needed to get an HDMI splitter, and there were plenty of other technical issues i needed to straighten out before the day of. Even now there's still a few things I need to figure out, but it was good enough for the crowd that came out.
I invited some of my close gamer friends. I put the word out to some of my IRL discord servers and reached out to a few coworkers that are into gaming. On the day of I had three folks and my mom show up. It was great.
My work friend J was big on fighting games back in the day and happy to come by on his day off. I also convinced a local shmup friend to come by with her girlfriend. Everybody wasn't a certified fighting gamer, but everyone seemed to have a good time. It was only two hours, but we had a nice spread of games we played. The list was....
- Twinkle Star Sprites
- Gururin
- Cotton Boomerang
- Tekken 3
- Game Tengoku
- Cyber-Lip
- Final Fight 3
- Ultra Street Fighter IV
- Last Bronx
- Inuyasha Feudal Fairy Taile
- and Slap Happy Rhythm Busters
There are some things I would do a little differently, but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Competition got a bit heated, but there were some nice moments like how I inspired J to bust out the USFIV by doing the Sky Rocket > Side Switch > Chainsaw Combo in Tekken 3. I introduced my shmup friend to alot of random new shmups that we both enjoyed. I REALLY loved Cotton Boomerang. You can just pick up and throw shit in that game. It's amazing.
I'll say my favorite part about running locals was the people that showed up were willing to play whatever junk I put in front of them. Even if it wasn't their strongest game they were at least willing to give it a try and that's why I wanted to run my own local
There's also the fact that I don't have a car and most of the other local scenes in Metro ATL are too far away for me to reliably go to at the moment. Not to mention that I'm not a huge fan of one of them also.
One of the reasons I wanted to run my own thing was to have a place where I can play weird and old games with other folks that are willing to clown around. I also wanted to have a place where folks that aren't super familiar with fighting games feel comfortable to dip their feet in the water and give it a try. I think maybe I was lucky enough to have a good sample, but I'm willing to try this again in January.
One concern I have is that the library has it's limitations, but the benefit is that it's free to host there. I'm super against paying for a venue, but if the tax becomes too high then I'll have to pay the bill with ugh... Street Fighter 6.
BOOOOO!!!!!
Fortunately some other options are opening up so I'll see what I can do and try to keep this going.
I wanna take some time near the end of this blog to give a shout out to GaymerHerb. They used to bring their gaming setups to alot of nightlife spots in Atlanta and it really helped my fall back in love with fighting games. I was sorta getting my ass beat by depression and feeling worhtless about my life and going to Herb's gaming setups at Controllerise and other spots helped me have fun with the genre again. I learned that fighting games aren't just about being good, but having good people to enjoy them with. When I was working up the nerve to make this happen, I always remember what Herb did and how it changed my relation to fighting games. I hope and can help others develop a healthy relationship with fighting games by doing this also.
There's alot of other things that helped me enjoy fighting games more, but Herb was a pivotal person and I can't even imagine who i'd be now if I never met them.