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Class in Session: Anakin's TEKKEN lessons straight from his arcade days
TEKKEN pro Anakin talks about community-focused teaching and how he’ll help you go from zero to pro with Red Bull’s Class in Session series.
11 min
アナキンのTEKKEN塾
TEKKEN≪鉄拳≫のプロプレイヤーであるアナキンが、世界中の猛者に打ち勝つための戦いの真髄を惜しみなく伝授する。基本的な操作を徹底的に体に叩き込んでから、徐々に高度なテクニックを身につけよう。次々に課せられるチャレンジをこなして、プロが磨き抜いた鋭いキレ味のムーヴを我が物に。（日本語字幕）
“It’s always been important to me when teaching the game to simplify the more difficult and complex elements as much as possible. For a lot of people who are curious about the game and don’t want to get involved too much in things like the frame data or the technical things, this series would be perfect because it breaks things down on a much simpler level.”
Anakin in his element
© Brian Hall/Red Bull Content Pool
This passion to elevate others and bring people along for the ride was instilled in him about 20 years ago, when he first discovered his talent for competing in the King of Iron Fist Tournament.
“I started playing TEKKEN in the early 2000s, I was really, really young and I was sort of like the prodigy in the arcades,” Anakin says. “There were a lot more arcades back then, back when just going to shopping malls was a big thing. A lot of shopping malls had little arcades in them and that was where I guess parents would just throw their kids when they go shopping.”
The flashing lights and sounds are siren songs to prospective fighting game heroes, even today, despite arcades becoming rarer and more endangered every year. But the cabinets of Bandai Namco’s fighting series weren’t his first introduction to TEKKEN, nor was he a perfect natural when it came to challenging others.
Anakin ready for Class In Session
© Brian Hall/Red Bull Content Pool
“I actually started playing alone at home when one of my friends let me borrow TEKKEN 3, and then one day in the arcade I saw a bunch of people huddled around the TEKKEN machine,” Anakin reminisces. “So I thought ‘hey, I play this game, I’m pretty good!’ Me, being the naive young kid, stepped up to the plate and got whupped really hard. But you know, it was kind of what drew me in even more, just not being able to defeat the other players and being a different game entirely from the ones that I was used to playing. In the arcade as a little kid, I’d play games to win tickets and redeem prizes. But you try and just challenge another person, heads up and fight, that was kind of the new thing that I really wanted to do.”
Misjudging his own ability, and paying the price for that hubris, didn’t scare him off from the game. Far from it. The players he lost to saw the potential in him and helped him train, as members of the local ATL crew that played around arcades in the Atlanta area he grew up in. In fact, they saw so much potential in him they even gave him his name.
Anakin poses for a portrait in Atlanta
© Brian Hall/Red Bull Content Pool
“That’s how they gave me the nickname, to call me the young Anakin chosen one, who would one day grow up and play TEKKEN,” he explains, referencing the iconic hero of the less-than-iconic Star Wars prequels that came out the same year. “That’s kind of what I went with, that’s my long road, and I guess the rest is history. There’s been a lot of traveling, competing, working my way up as a TEKKEN amateur as I was finishing school and started working, but it wasn’t until 2018 when I started my professional career being sponsored by Red Bull. And that definitely put a more official seal on everything.”
That career has since taken him to the EVO top 8 twice, with thousands of dollars in prize money. But his goal now is to go back to those arcade roots, to the help he received from the community, and give others a way to get into TEKKEN by seeing the game the way he sees it.
“The purpose of the academy is to just try and get everybody introduced to TEKKEN, it’s a hard game to get acclimated with at first, but the goal is to just try and make it fun,” Anakin explains. “That’s how I remembered playing the game as a kid, not really trying to be a pro, trying to be the best, but playing the game because it’s fun, it’s challenging and there’s always the next guy up to beat in the arcade. And that’s the case with fighting games, when you’re playing against other people instead of against the computer there really is no beating the game. It’s an endless quest to be the best player you can be essentially.”
Anakin plays TEKKEN 7 against fans at a Red Bull Conquest Qualifier
© Colin Kerrigan / Red Bull Content Pool
As Anakin did, many players try their best to get good at fighting games like TEKKEN on their own, at home. While this gives you all the time in the world (and saves thousands of quarters) there are some lessons you can’t teach yourself. The community spirit of the arcade means that there’s always someone there to look over your shoulder and let you know something about the game you might be missing, and that’s Anakin’s plan for the Class in Session series. Six weekly videos explaining everything from the basics of executing moves, to learning how to read your opponent – another important skill you’ll never develop if you don’t put your ego on the line, like he did. That’s not to say the series is purely for noobs, though.
“Although the videos in the series start off teaching players as complete beginners, there are a lot of things that could be mentioned throughout that could be new information learned even by more experienced players,” Anakin says. “Just because there’s so many things to learn, there are things that I even learn for the first time each time I play the game. So if you’re an experienced player and thinking this is just for beginners, that’s definitely not the case. Because I hear it all the time when I’m teaching basic easy things, I’ll notice even more experienced players saying ‘Oh hey, I didn’t know this or that.’ Just little small things to add to their game, or good ways to erase those bad habits.”
Anakin celebrates a victory in the finals of TEKKEN 7 at Evo 2019
© Li Hoang / Red Bull Content Pool
As with any good education, the teacher will be on hand to answer any questions. After each week’s videos, Anakin will host a livestream where anyone can drop in and find out where they’ve been going wrong, or get extra help to keep them up to speed with the rest of the class. And, of course, in between the weekly lessons there will be homework to make sure you’ve mastered the last techniques before beginning more advanced lessons.
“I’m always just really responsive to people trying to learn the game, I love people who ask good questions, I’m always trying to help people in that regard,” he says. “I want to be there definitely at all points of the lesson so people are all caught up, don’t want to leave anybody behind. So start fresh but end as someone ready to enter their first tournament, or go to their offline meeting place to play games once, you know, people can start going out again.”
While the arcades are closed at the moment, offering the same level of one-to-one interaction that helped him improve his game all those years ago is difficult. Which is another reason why this academy is so important to Anakin. Reaching a much larger group than he’d usually be able to help out, and keep them from stumbling into the pitfalls that new players sometimes find themselves in.
Anakin gets a view of Atlanta
© Brian Hall/Red Bull Content Pool
“If it weren’t for certain pieces of advice, a lot of people including myself as a kid would be stuck at certain parts of the game, trying to learn certain things,” he says. “And with the help of friends at the arcade, they really helped expedite the process and helped me get to the next step that much quicker. That’s one of the things I feel like I’ve learned to do really well, see where people are making mistakes trying to get better and trying to put them on the right track. As long as you put someone on the right track they’ll be motivated and they’ll be able to learn on their own, but if they somehow fall to bad tutelage then that’s a problem.”
Once players have got the tools they need to keep going on their own, Anakin’s hopeful that beginners and competent players, on the cusp of being threats at local level, will create a new wave of tournament challengers emerging at the end of lockdown. “It’s gonna be unexpected results coming, for sure," he says.
And that’s not just for the experienced players, labbing away until their next offline event. Even brand new players can pose the sort of threat that could make a big entrance to the fighting game community. “Being unknown or being newer can definitely prove to be an advantage in certain situations,” Anakin says. “Also as a new player you haven’t been playing the game for years and you haven’t developed bad habits, you haven’t been working for a long time and developed crutches which are really difficult to erase and get rid of. So as a new player it’s like a fresh blank canvas and the potential is pretty high, for someone just starting off, just because you can mold them the way you want to mold them as a teacher.”
Anakin at Red Bull Conquest Orlando
© Ian Witlen/Red Bull Content Pool
For Anakin, creating that next wave of contenders at offline events isn’t just a way of passing on his knowledge – or making life harder for himself at his next local tournament. It’s a way of keeping his community alive, the same community that gave him a lasting home in the arcades of Atlanta.
“I feel like people who are in the fighting game community, at least in the past, really treasured the possibility of new players coming into the scene,” he says. “A lot of people just don’t stick with fighting games so whenever I guess you see new potential people who want to play the games you play, it becomes a really cool thing and everybody really welcomed me with open arms. And these guys that I played TEKKEN with, I’m still friends with today, so it’s a really cool thing that’s been building for the past 20 years or so.”
If you’d like to take the first step on your journey to join the TEKKEN community, or just want to pick up a few tips from a master, tune in to Class in Session: Anakin’s TEKKEN Academy beginning July 23 on the Red Bull YouTube channel. Then head over to Anakin’s Twitch channel on Friday, July 24 for extra lessons and to ask questions if you’re stuck.
