Gaming
Games
The past, present and future of London’s iconic fighting game scene
Ahead of Red Bull Kumite London, we examine why the UK capital is has been so historically important to the fighting game community, and what the future holds...
In the mid-to-late 00s, Ryan King spent practically every Friday night knocking virtual heads together in central London. He would be in one of two places: Street Fighter Third Strike in Piccadilly Circus’ Trocadero, or at Goodge Street’s Casino.
“It’s hard to explain why we would tend to gravitate to one or the other,” says King, who is nowadays senior international PR Manager for SEGA Europe. “But we would – almost without agreement or discussion – start going to one or another for a few months.
Back then, London’s arcade scene was fairly underground – especially compared to the glitz and mainstream attention of modern esports – and you’d find your venues of choice (Trocadero, Silver Dollar, Play 2 Win, Namco Wonderpark, Las Vegas and many more besides) often inhabited by small and passionate gangs of fighting game devotees.
“Many of us preferred going to Casino because it felt more like ‘our’ arcade – it was run down and it was grubby, but it was ours.” Ryan recalls.
One friend that used to visit Las Vegas on Wardour Street in the 90s described it to me as the 'big boy, bad man arcade'
“We basically kept that place open – there was the Tekken community, there was a shmup community, there was a guy called Pac-Man – who only played Pac-Man and could play on a single credit all night – and then there was us, the Street Fighter: Third Strike lot. We were like 99% of that place’s business. Any tourists that made their way to that lonely basement would have turned heel and walked off – the smell of that place was not particularly friendly, and the atmosphere was quite hostile, too, if you didn’t know your fighting games.”
“One friend that used to visit Las Vegas on Wardour Street in the 90s described it to me as the 'big boy, bad man arcade',” says Matt Edwards, community & esports manager for Capcom Europe, and fighting game veteran. “He said it was four credits for £1 and that the arcade fighting games were surrounded by gambling machines. This was the place where the gangster-types used to hang out, and this was where everyone got really good.”
Las Vegas, Wardour Street, London. Aka the 'big boy, bad man arcade'.
© Bella Constantine
Back in the halcyon days, you’d find arcade machines practically everywhere if you looked hard enough: chicken shops, chip shops, pizza parlours, taxi ranks, cinema foyers, leisure centres – the list goes on. Though while a dimly-lit version of Killer Instinct in a soft-play area may have been your first taste of what fighting games could do, it wasn’t until you played it in a real arcade that you really understood how special the experience could be.
In the Zone
There was a draw to the city's arcades; London was a hub for competitive players, hungry to test skills they might have trained up in more regional areas. You’d come to the capital to test your mettle against the best players in the country – stride into an arcade, put your money into the machine and fight. Money – and a long wait until your next go if you weren’t good enough – was on the line. These were real stakes.
Communities were born in the arcades.
“I’d visit London arcades like the Trocadero and the Casino to play a few rounds of Tekken 6 [in 2007] and Street Fighter IV [in 2008],” Matt tells us. “There would always be a gathering of players around those machines, everyone transfixed on the match currently taking place and thinking about what they were going to do when it was finally their turn. Winning would mean staying on for longer and losing would mean going to the back of the queue. There was always a tangible sense of energy to that. That’s always been what arcade fighting games are about.”
Marc Denton, CEO of Visual Platform and content creator and tournament wrangler for both Bandai Namco and Capcom, agrees.“The arcades are where the competitiveness in the scene really began, because you’d go there with your money. The only way you could play fighting games in the 80s and 90s was in the arcades, if you wanted to really compete: the SNES version of Street Fighter II wasn’t out, and the only way to play the game was with your hard-earned money and in the middle of the madness of the community.”
Street Fighter in particular has been a central part of London’s heritage; Matt tells us that the Trocadero even played host to the original Street Fighter (1987) arcade machine at one time. “It was literally there from the start,” he says. “Then, from the release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior [in 1991] onwards, the London arcades were at the epicentre of the UK fighting games scene.”
“Quintessentially, the arcade scene in London was the foundation for the whole [fighting game community] in the UK,” Marc agrees. “People would come from different areas after training up in their own towns and cities and realise there’s a bigger community – there’s a goal at the end, this Mecca, in the London scene. [...] Communities were born in the arcades. We had our local arcades growing up, and we thought we were pretty good, but going to London… that’s when you really learned.”
Smaller arcade communities from Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Belfast and Nottingham would gravitate to London, and the capital soon began to get a reputation for hosting some of the best players in the UK. International players started to take note of the city’s budding scene, too, and London began to attract the best fighters in the world.
“Slightly before my time, there was a Street Fighter tournament in the basement of Trocadero – not up the long escalators where all the fighting games were when I started going in the early 00s,” recalls Ryan. “This was the first tournament that was held in Trocadero in arcade cabinets at the bottom of the building, and loads of Japanese players came over for it. The whole thing was a shitshow, and tons of Japanese players swore off coming to the UK after that!”
Ryan laughs as he recalls a story of dubious origin that he was told about legendary Street Fighter player Daigo coming to the Trocadero straight from a London airport, sitting down to play Street Fighter Alpha 3 – and getting beaten. Constantly. “All my friend saw was Daigo getting up and going to the change machine, apparently, so his immortal line was ‘I sent Daigo to the change machine’... although there was never any proof of this and no-one had seen it happen.”
Insert Coin
Play 2 Win, on Gerrard Street in Chinatown, was another popular FGC haunt.
© In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
Little stories like this, as well as the electric atmosphere in the arcades themselves, galvanized a generation of fighters and readied them up for a world that was starting to get more interconnected. But arcade play is always going to be more immediate than online play, and more adrenaline-fuelled, too. Having real humans fight you – often very close to your personal space – is its own special kind of thrill.
“You have to remember, you were playing with your hard-earned money; there weren’t any esports handshakes back then, you couldn’t beat me online and just send me a message after,” says Marc. “If you banged me up and I didn’t like it, I had a choice of what I had to do with my reaction. There were a lot of rivalries, and sometimes you’d get brave – your community would walk into Casino and bang ‘em up! If you really wanted to test your skills, you’d walk into Las Vegas where the big boys were at. But then sooner or later, we became the big boys!”
“I think playing arcade is a really good way of learning how to play in competitive situations,” agrees Ryan. “On Twitter recently, there was a statement going around that said ‘people don’t wanna play ranked unless it’s a money match these days’. The argument is that if you play someone online, there’s nothing at stake any more – just ranking points. As such, people make stupid decisions and gamble on wake-up supers or something. Playing arcade was perfect to teach you the value of a match; it costs money to play on a machine – going back again and again with 50p or £1 adds up in the end, right? And you had to wait your turn if you lost, and that’s a bigger problem.”
Traditionally, with fighting games, if you lose you’re sent to the back of the queue. And it can be a long time before you get to play again if there are only a couple of machines in a working state. “As much as we support each other in that environment, I hate watching other people play,” laughs Ryan. “If you see someone make a mistake, you think ‘why didn’t he do that against me? I could still be on the machine!’
Having worked closely with the Street Fighter brand since it made the jump to online console play, Matt can see the effect this genesis in the arcades has had on the fighting game community as a whole. “The sense of camaraderie and being part of a 'scene' is something that definitely evolved from the arcades,” he tells us. “With fighting games, there’s always been different levels of competition. Maybe you’re content with being the best player in your group of friends, or maybe that ambition stretches to being the best in the country, or even the best in the world. Or it could even be that you just want to be the best with a specific character. Those levels existed in the arcade scene – be it London, New York or Osaka – and they’ve only become more varied as fighting games have embraced esports.”
Connection Lost
The arcade at London's Trocadero was one of the FGC community's main spots.
© Getty/Mike Kemp/Contributor
It's probably for the best that players have been able to take their experience online; the arcade scene, in London especially, is dying. “You know, eventually, it became a bit like a pub crawl – you’d start at Trocadero, then you’d go to Namco Wonderpark, then you’d go to Las Vegas and then you’d go to Casino to finish the day,” Marc reminisces. “There was a real sense of community back then.
“But the bottom-line is that the community does not exist in arcades anymore. Yes, you’ve got Heart of Gaming, SuperArcade, and so on all around, but arcades are a dying breed. The community doesn't want to go there – arcades these days don’t have the up-to-date games, they don’t have the network infrastructure or they don’t have the real estate. You go to an arcade now and gamble whether someone is going to be there. Online, you can cherry-pick what you want, and you don’t have to leave. The arcade scene is gone. It doesn't exist. It’s all online now, and it’ll never come back.”
People who discovered competitive fighting games playing online don’t understand why you’d travel to London, Zone 1 to fight other people at 50p a go
“Arcades like the Heart of Gaming [in Croydon] – shout-out to Mark Starkey who runs it – still exist, but they aren’t the focal point for the fighting game community and haven’t been for some time,” agrees Matt.
“I think it’s a sign of the times; online is too good to ignore, and there’s now a generation of players who have grown up online and who are used to that way of playing,” Ryan says. “Street Fighter IV was the crossover and that’s been solidified with Street Fighter V. People who discovered competitive fighting games playing online don’t understand why you’d travel to London, Zone 1 to fight other people at 50p a go. To them, that probably sounds insane. I think that era’s been lost, which is a shame.”
What's it really like to fight in a Street Fighter tournament?
Here Comes A New Challenger
Street Fighter V has built a solid foundation for whatever comes next
© Capcom
Fighting games have never been healthier, though. The arcade scene might be dying – and COVID-19 was certainly a complicating factor the last hangers-on really didn’t need to deal with – but fighting games are enjoying a renaissance. Sales numbers are through the roof: Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V are leading a charge, and have paved the way for the likes of DragonBallFighterZ, Guilty Gear Strive, SkullGirls, King Of Fighters XV, Soulcalibur VI and many more besides to perform extremely well in terms of sales and viewership.
Face-to-face interaction is something that the fighting game community tends to favour
The different communities that now exist to support fighting games are fractured and exist in various splinters, though the internet allows them all to organise and play without pause. “Discord groups, online tournaments like Saltmine League, popular fighting game streamers like Maximilian and weekly offline tournaments and meet-ups like WSO, NLBC and WNF are all still going, [despite the pandemic],” says Matt.
Red Bull Gaming Sphere London is one of the IRL venues on the FGC circuit.
© Mark Roe
“The offline events have taken a hit due to COVID-19 but the fighting game community still hungers for local play,” he continues. “This is partly due to fighting games being more stable when played offline and partly because face-to-face interaction is something that – in my experience – the fighting game community tends to favour more than most other gaming communities.”
This hunger for in-person events currently has no solution: the UK is just about tentatively ready to start stepping out of its 16-months-plus in lockdowns, and international communities are similarly cagey about in-person events. “That's the thing about arcades; they were grubby,” says Ryan. “Some of them had never seen a vacuum cleaner or a clean surface in years. Post-pandemic, is that the environment people want to go back to? I’ve probably lost years of my life being in that environment with smells and odours and God-knows what else.”
“There’s so many things that the pandemic has destroyed, that we need to pull back when the world has healed,” Marc says. “It’s good that we have these exhibitions like Red Bull Kumite London to remind ourselves that online isn’t the entire future. Yes, it is the way forward, because things are evolving in a different way and people don’t always have the opportunity to travel all around the world, but there’s a fire still burning – people want to go to physical events. When we come back from COVID-19, we’re going to have a new console generation, a new generation of fighting games [in the next Tekken, the next Street Fighter, in Guilty Gear Strive] and people will be hungry to fight.”
London remains a vibrant place to play games in a community
Get Ready For the Next Battle
Luckily, then, the fighting game scene hasn’t escaped London completely. No, just because the arcades are declining and the Trocadero’s once-buzzing lower halls sit silent and neglected on a corner of Piccadilly, that doesn’t mean the fighting game community in London is dead. Far from it.
“London remains a vibrant place to play games in a community,” explains Sam Collins, Ukie’s head of commercial and membership and runs the Ukie esports working group, which brings together industry experts dedicated to growing the UK’s esports scene. “Traditional arcades might have been superseded by consoles, but there are venues popping up all over the capital that let people meet and play games together. Combined with the rise of locations like Here East, which is developing into an esports hub, and the way that venues like the Copper Box have been adapted successfully for esports events, London could be as much of a destination for esports as it is for other sports and culture.”
There’s nothing quite like going to an event, hanging out with all your international friends and then playing long sets into the early hours of the morning
Enter Red Bull Kumite London; the first proper, in-person fighting game event to take place in the capital since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It’s an event designed to celebrate the best of the best, and showcase the exemplary fighting game talent the UK – and beyond! – has to offer to the world.
“I’m very much looking forward to offline leagues, tournaments and expos returning once it’s safe to do so,” says Matt. “I think most of the Street Fighter community – and fighting game community in general – is looking forward to this as well. There’s nothing quite like going to an event, hanging out with all your international friends and then playing long sets into the early hours of the morning. There are often language barriers but it matters less when you all play the same game and you all want to test your skills and level-up”.
Matt concedes that you can do that online, too – and many of us have been during lockdown – but agrees that it’s no substitute for in-person interaction. “You can win big tournaments with big prize pools from the comfort of your home streaming setup. But the highest high is beating all the other killers who made it to Top 8 and then holding that trophy aloft on the big stage as the crowd applauds and acknowledges all the blood, sweat and effort it took to get there. You can see it on the top players' faces when they pull it off. An EVO win, a Capcom Cup win or a Red Bull Kumite win. That win didn’t happen overnight. The road was long, but, in that moment of time, they were the best of the best.”
There’s a magic to in-person events that both the public and the athletes themselves feed off. A perfect future would see online modes and decent fighting game netcode exist alongside a robust and well-supported calendar of in-person events – coaxing players to compete and feel the thrill of being onstage themselves. Red Bull Kumite London is the first step towards that future.
Red Bull Kumite 2018
© Red Bull
“Kumite has done an amazing job of combining online competitive playing with a really compelling in person event,” says Sam. “This provides a focal point for the community, which is great, but it also demonstrates that point about London becoming a destination for competitive games.”
It’s something Ukie – and the UK gaming industry at large – wants to see more of in the future. “Ukie has called for the Government to support the creation of a flagship esports event in the UK as a whole to support the scene. Kumite is a big help in demonstrating why events like this could make a big difference to London, and the country, as a whole.”
“As a spectator, I want to see those Street Fighter V battles unfold on the big stage once again,” concludes Matt. “Bring on the Red Bull Kumite London. I’ll be rooting for one of the UK lads to take it. Let’s go Problem X, Hurricane, Jones and Boltstrike!”
Red Bull Kumite has struck a match for the interest in fighting games again, but the gasoline is already there to burn
London has historically been the hub of the UK fighting games scene, and though the landscape is almost unrecognizable now, there’s still a bright future for the UK’s capital as a center for esports as a whole, and fighting games in particular.
“There’s no doubt that when things will come back, online will still be the way we play fighting games,” says Marc. “But it’ll also come with its ally and its sister: offline. It’ll take time to establish where each one sits and how the scene will look in the future, but Red Bull Kumite has struck a match for the interest in fighting games again, but the gasoline is already there to burn.”
