| 06 June 2010
I'm sure when Striderzer0 posts the videos sometime in the future, you're going to shake your head and wonder what made this final match different than the rest. No, it wasn't Andy OCR making the run of a lifetime. No, it wasn't Combofiend using Cammy and going toe-to-toe against Justin Wong.
Futile vs. Hugo101 doesn't have that ring of "memorable moment" or "scene-changing match." Hardly. These two guys were trying to stay in the top three overall standings so they can make it onto Team FFA United.
Five hundred people didn't go to the Abel forum on SRK to talk about how Futile finished second to Hugo's Dictator. Futile doesn't have that type of pull. A win over Hugo wouldn't have made that happen.
But had Futile won, it would have been the biggest tournament win of 2010. Yes, there's still 6 months left, but it would have been that significant.
I still associate Futile as being a Brawl player. That's just how I've known him to start. He's a top-five player, one of the best Warios in the West Coast. But over the past few months, he's also played the Street Fighter IV series.
Brawl and Melee players in Southern California do play other fighting games, Super Street Fighter IV included. I've had some of those players ask me about the scene and what it's like to cover it. A part of me has this feeling that a lot of them want to compete in tournaments, that they want to be immersed in the scene because it would be a change from what Brawl or Melee has offered.
Some players have done that. Earlier this year, Plan 9 won the BlazBlue tournament at West Coast Warzone 2, perhaps the biggest tournament win for a Smash player to date. That was the first signal to the Smash community that it's OK to come out and compete, that you can be successful in another game.
But there needed to be something else. There needed to be another moment. Saturday could have been it. A tournament win by Futile would have sent the signal to Brawl and Melee players that it's possible to make the switch and be successful.
It's OK, it's not that bad to compete.
A lot more Smash players would have went to The Block on Wednesdays, FedEx on Thursdays or a local weekend ranbat and still got the shit kicked out of them, but they would have surfaced and stayed to improve, and that's what's important.
I noticed a few Smash players, when Street Fighter IV first came to console, did compete in local tournaments. But they were one-tourney-and-done. They took their ass kickings and went back to Brawl or Melee. There was nothing to grab onto, no hope of staying being worth it because no other Smash player had success.
Saturday wasn't the last time in a lifetime. Let's not kid ourselves. Futile is eventually going to win a tournament. He proved he can hang with the contenders. And Futile may not be the first top-Smash player in SoCal to win a different tournament -- someone else could surface and do it.
When that moment happens -- be it Futile or someone else -- we'll see how Brawl and Melee players respond. Will more of them try their hand at Super Street Fighter IV and other fighting game tournaments and not run away after getting beat down?
It's very possible. The community is waiting for someone to show them it is.
