« Starbase Arcade: How We Built Our Own Fighting Game Community »

Jay "VDon" Nguyen gives us a run down of what it takes to build successful fighting game scene based on his experiences managing the Wednesday night sessions at Starbase Arcade. Everyone's scene is different, but hopefully these pointers will give players looking to start a scene or build upon their current scene some ideas on how to do so.

When I first got reacquainted with the fighting game community 10 months ago it was because of a little game called Street Fighter IV.  I was excited to play and desperately looking for some competition.  Like many others, I started my search online at the matchmaking forums of Shoryuken.com.  Doing this enabled me to connect with a couple of local players.  Like me, they also were looking for more competition and driving all across the San Francisco Bay Area to meet this competition.  Our crew consisted of 1 fledgling player (me!) and 2 tournament players with a vast lack of matchup experience needed to win.

Today, we enjoy a flourishing fight game community.  We hold weekly Wednesday sessions and have one of the largest attendances of any NorCal session currently active.  Our player base has gone from 3 to an average of 25-30 players per session.  We’ve had as many as 50 players at one of our casual sessions.  Not tournament, just a casual session.  How did this happen?  When did this happen?  What changed?

I’d like to share my experience from 10 months ago up until today and give a recollection of how NorCal’s North Bay went from nothing, to one of the hypest sessions this side of California.

Step One: Attending Other People’s Events

North Bay had a few issues when I first started playing here.  First off, no one knew if there were any serious players here.  The other issue is that our location is secluded from the rest of the scene.  We’re essentially way off in the corner and for anyone to come to us, they’d have to pay toll, cross bridges and go a long ways to play in an unproven territory.  Let’s face it; no one’s coming to North Bay just because we asked.  We had to attend tournaments and sessions and prove ourselves.  The first thing we did was practiced.  A lot.  Soon after, we attended tournaments all across the Bay Area.  It was a long drive everywhere we went, but if people saw how dedicated we were, it might make them wonder how much of a scene we have back home.  The goal wasn’t to win tournaments, although we did try our damnedest.  The goal was to show consistent improvement and dedication so people knew that we were serious. 

Step Two: Find Out if Any of Your Neighbors Play

Now, I don’t mean that I went door to door asking, “Hey! Do you play Street Fighter?”  Our goal here was to find any active players nearby with a similar situation to ours – small group, trying to grow, looking for more competition locally.  First place we looked, SRK.  Second thing we did was to ask other players if they knew of anyone in or around our area that played.  Our first step in the right direction was connecting with a group of players about 30 minutes north of us in Santa Rosa.  Those guys were even more secluded than we were, and they also had less than a handful of players who took the game seriously.  Once we met, played some games and got to know each other, we coordinated our sessions for maximum attendance.  We’d attend their sessions one day of the week, and they’d attend ours another day and when we left the North Bay to attend tournaments, we’d go together.  Now our group is twice as big as it was, and our matchup variations had greatly improved. 

Step Three: Find a Regular RELIABLE Location to Hold Sessions

Going from house to house was fine with a small group, but in our case, we wanted our session to grow beyond small house sessions.  The top players were everywhere in NorCal BUT North Bay, and we needed to get our games in with them to improve.  We needed a location that would accommodate more people so that players from all over NorCal would feel comfortable establishing it as a meeting place.  Luckily for us, the one thing we had on our side was that we have a local arcade with an owner very willing to accommodate fighting gamers’ needs.  With that, the Starbase Crew was born.  Once we got comfortable playing at Starbase, we made sure that we were able to have multiple setups and even went as far as fashioning our own Sanwa cabinet from an old airplane game that we gutted and replaced with an Asus monitor and rewired controllers and Sanwa parts.  After establishing setups and the location, all we needed to do was pick a day we wanted to play.  Everyone agreed on Wednesday and Starbase’s Wednesday Night Casuals began.

Step Four: Get Our Name Out There in Any Way Possible!

We started by making our own SRK thread which got us a few new players.  From there, we simply asked any new players that came in and had a good time to please tell their friends and bring more people.  At this point, I’d met many great players at tournaments who would go on to be great friends and just kept telling them that I’d love to see them Wednesday.  We’d get a few random people here and there on Wednesday, but never that full blown crowd that we’d wanted.  I then started to relentlessly promote our session on Twitter, Facebook, through word of mouth and through as many online outlets as possible.  The turning point came when one of our regulars introduced the idea of doing an online stream.  Now we’ve got multiple setups, a dedicated group, a live internet stream and lots of people who knew we had a regular session.  IPW was gracious enough to introduce us at tournaments as members of the Starbase crew and people were starting to know who we were.

Step Five: Give People an Incentive to Come

With all the parts in place, I wanted to throw one large session together.  I wanted everyone to come and see how much the North Bay had changed.  It’s now April, and Super Street Fighter IV was coming out.  I decided to plan one big and I literally called everyone I knew in the community and personally invited them.  Our Wednesday session happened to fall upon the day after SSFIV’s release.  I had the session catered and had the arcade rearranged to accommodate more people.  The food was free, and while I didn’t plan on buying everyone food every session, I just wanted to do it one time to give people the incentive to show up, and hopefully when they see how hype our session is that they’d be motivated to come back on their own. 

At this point we’d never had a session with much more than 20 people on a good day.  The day after SSFIV’s release, we had 38 people.  A few of NorCal’s top players showed up and the response was pretty similar across the board.  “When the hell did this happen?!  I thought North Bay died a long time ago!” 

Aftermath

Ever since the session after SSFIV’s release, our sessions have been very successful.  We average 25-30 people per week with an occasional spike in attendance going upwards of 48-50 people with players coming from all areas of the Bay.  Our sessions require 6-8 setups and there are new faces every time.  Our stream was able to get the attention of Mad Catz, who went on to sponsor our tournament and allowed us to award TE’s to the top placers.  One of our regulars was 1 match shy of making top 8 at NCR.  We’ve been able to come as close as cashing out at tournaments a couple of times but narrowly losing and 1 of our guys was 2 matches from making it out of a pool at Evolution.  We haven’t had any major wins yet, but for a session that started with 3 scrubs in the middle of nowhere, that’s something to be proud of in the short period of 10 months.