Devastation Week: The Pre-Ramble

This is a very big week for Arcade-In-A-Box, the company I work for by building custom-made arcade-style controllers for the XBox 360/PlayStation 3. We will be heading up to Phoenix for the very large Devastation event, which is basically three days of tournaments, the four largest of which will offer the victor a $2,000 grand prize, plus the players' cash pot.

Now, those are the bare facts. For most of you who may read this, a lot of that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I will attempt to boil down the nearly twenty years of the US arcade fighting game scene into a few spare paragraphs just to try and communicate the intense nature of what this is all about.

The time was March of 1991. The video arcade scene, remembered by most laypeople symbolically through such games as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, was on the way down. Profits had shrunk, arcades were closing, lots of me-too clone games lined the arcades, and players had become somewhat disinterested. The Nintendo Entertainment System, which had come out in 1985, had taken a chunk out of the business and a lot of gamers were content to simply play Super Mario Bros. at home.

Into this malaise came a revolutionary video game, Street Fighter II by Capcom. The game had a more complex control scheme than any other arcade game that preceded it. A joystick and six buttons, three for punches, three for kicks, each movement having a different property of speed and strength. The movements on the joystick would be mirrored by the character's positioning, one would pull the stick away from the opponent to block, up to jump, forward to walk towards the opponent. It was as close to a virtual martial art has had ever been devised, and the game went on to smash every known arcade sales record ever kept. SFII machines not only appeared in arcades, but in grocery stores, convenience stores, laundromats....EVERYWHERE.

Of course, a legion of Street Fighter clones would emerge as Capcom's industry rivals sought to cash in on the craze. They took their share, but the competitive scene around SFII still survived. Street Fighter II had five updates, and the hardcore who loved the game kept honing their skills, finding new avenues to meet up and play for prizes. By the end of the 1990s, the power of the home video game consoles spelled the end of arcades in the United States, but this simply meant that the tournament scene would end up using the home machines to play on at big gatherings as the first decade of the 21st century rolled on.

Of course, the controllers for the home video game consoles are quite different than the controls used on a vintage Street Fighter II machine or any of its numerous sequels. A joypad such as the one that ships with a PlayStation has a radically different feel than a real joystick and six buttons. As the competitive scene gravitated towards the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, an underground cottage industry was spawned that sought to build arcade panel-like controllers that would duplicate the real arcade feel.

This, of course, is where my boss Ed and Arcade-In-A-Box stepped in. We make controllers that are made of the exact same parts found in all of those dusty arcade cabinets of old. We're getting ready for this big tournament and bringing a load of really sweet sticks for these crazy players to get their filthy paws on.

This week I will be posting a lot of photos and insight from this big gathering. I hope to capture the passion, the fun, the occasional assholish outburst, all of it. It has an energy and chaos all of its own and I hope I can give my readers just a little bit of an inkling into this strange scene.