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As a kid, video games were nothing more than mild amusement for families, treated as something more like a novelty. This, of course, was more a limit of the technology at the time than anything else, but also in the 1980s video games were barely around for 20 years. Music was minimal at best, with your standard bleeps and bloops until the NES came around which provided us with a much variety of channels. In super rare cases, you would have PCM voice in certain games which was unprecedented at the time. Wanted soundtracks to these games? Either you had to record it yourself with a tape recorder (if you were lucky), or somehow know of a music distributor from Japan who would sell you one for $30-40.

Tournaments? Blockbuster and Nintendo had a Super Mario Bros. 3 tournament for the US; competitors would play in a chain store and acquire a certain amount of achievements in a given time. Winners would eventually compete on a national stage for huge prizes. Since this was five years before the internet became remotely something used in private households, the best medium for promotion is a full-length movie. Street Fighter 2, the Eve of all modern fighting games, was not yet released to the public. That would come one year later, in 1991.

Twenty years later, it is an amazing new world for both video games and its fans. These changes have been exponential in both scope and substance. Let’s go back to the above areas.

First, video game music. Composers who did their best to come up with memorable music in the 1980s and 90s are now recognized worldwide for certain tunes or themes from the same games that have evolved. The most prominent, Nobuo Uematsu, composed most or all of the 8- and 16-bit music from the Final Fantasy series, and stayed on until only recently. It’s this series’ music that started what would become a fairly successful series of live video game music concerts. The following are the big three:

1. Dear Friends – Final Fantasy songs spanning across 16+ games.
2. Zelda Symphony – Songs from across the 15+ game series Legend of Zelda
3. Video Games Live – Songs from a wide spectrum of video games, including the above two.

Personally, I’ve been to the first and third one, and they were wonderful. The reason such concerts can exist now is those of us who grew up on the songs that we can play by memory at an instant are of age now to pay for a professional production of them by musicians. These games have so firmly entrenched themselves into our memories of childhood that these concerts are massive nostalgia bombs, complete with custom game footage to accompany the music. Some people will even dress as characters they like for the concerts, but overall it’s a very classy affair.

To give you an idea of the evolution of the songs we gew up with, here’s an example (also a personal favorite).

As the technology improved and the musicians used that extra horsepower, certain songs matured in their style. And its these specific songs that have become iconic and revered by many. They are becoming an institution unto themselves now.

Now, onto tournaments. Back in the early 90s fighting games were still relatively new. Not “Ye-Ar Kung Fu” type of fighting, or side-scroll beat-em-up fighting, but a deep, combo-linking, tactics-necessary, versus grudge match. No amount of blogging I can do will bring justice to what Capcom’s Street Fighter 2 and its numerous successors did for the entire franchise, but they opened the floodgates. However, until the internet was as ubiquitous and powerful as it has become in the last 5 years it would still be a local or after-the-fact event.

When Street Fighter II Turbo was released in 1993, at the time being the best version yet, a group of us who always graced one of two pinball parlors to play it tried to organize a tournament with the locals. If fizzled mostly due to people looking at us weird, but the seed was planted. Then after college, in 2000 and 2001, a new group of friends and I ran a few local tournaments that we’d advertise on our collective website, saikyo.com, or the fighting game community’s premier forum, shoryuken.com. We got a few entrants and made some friendships out of it for awhile, but the venues were both expensive and shared (i.e. billiard halls). After awhile we abandoned it when the numbers simply weren’t working. Our only memories are of VHS tapes that recorded all the matches.

These days, you can video stream tournaments of not just casual players online 24 hours a day, but of local, regional, and national tournaments. Evolution Championship Gaming, or evo for short, is the pre-eminent annual even in Las Vegas. People from all over the globe play year round in regional matches, acquiring points by winning, which overall determines their eligibility to qualify and play at evo in one or more games; the big title being Street Fighter (multiple versions), King of Fighters, Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom 3, and the most recent Injustice: Gods Among Us. Both the tournament itself and certain players now have corporate sponsors. Cash prizes in the tens of thousands go to top winners. Certain individuals take on their own following for extraordinary tactics and comebacks in high profile matches. Thousands of people descend upon Vegas to watch, and tens of thousands more around the world watch these matches online. It’s a brave new world.

A few lucky people can actually make a living off of winning at tournaments since so many occur at any given time. After airfare and other expenses they can still see a solid buck in their pocket, but this is dubious at best. High school or college students looking to earn extra money fit this category the best. And they will play for hours a day, like training for an actual sport, to be the best. In this respect it’s a young person’s world. If we had the internet and social media of today a decade ago, my friends and I would have certainly tried to partake in this global phenomenon, but now we’re happy to just sit back and watch as the young kids duke it out, comfortable in the knowledge that we are no longer a fringe.