Interview: David Philip Graham
Legal Phenom, Fighting Game Aficionado, Split-Box Guru, the Most Ultra of Davids...
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with David Philip Graham. We talked for almost 90 minutes, discussing David’s 11+ year career as an eSports attorney and the emerging impact of intellectual property rights on live events (1:42); his personal struggles with a hypermobility disorder that pushed him to build his own “Split-Box” controllers (24:10); his experience as a globally-recognized professional commentator (with a rising tide of young talent all around him today - 38:13); and his thoughts on the hopefully-imminent release of Street Fighter 6 (1:05:20).
The text of the interview is presented below. As always, it has been edited for clarity and readability.
If you prefer, you can also stream this via various podcasting platforms.
LINK: Interview with David Philip Graham (Podcast)
I. Introduction - Ultimate Contractual David
J: I'm J. Ellis, the creator of 40 more, a publication about video games that delves into history, design, technology, culture, achievement, significance and connection. Today I have with me David Philip Graham - better known as UltraDavid - an attorney, media personality, and competitor, known for his deep involvement in the world of fighting games. David holds a law degree from Georgetown and operates a thriving practice in Los Angeles. Most visibly his clients include eSports players negotiating contracts with teams and sponsors, as well as production companies like ten/o, who run large scale international tournaments, including the Evolution Championship Series. David also travels the world as a professional commentator, and is known to audiences who tune in for fierce competition in franchises like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And on Twitter, you can find David occasionally showcasing his latest ‘Split box,’ these are arcade sticks he assembles from scratch designed to be more ergonomic and produce less long term issues with hand control, joints and ligaments, posture, and so on.
Welcome David! Thank you, for joining me.
David: Thanks for having me.
J: So there's all kinds of stuff I want to talk about today, but I figure we'd start with law. I should preface all of this by saying… I sort of realize that it’s a common thing when someone who is not a lawyer is talking with someone who IS a lawyer… and does not grasp some of the precision involved. So I'll try not to lead us into into areas where you feel like you’re being pinned down.1 With that said, how would you characterize the range of work that you do?
David: First of all, I would say that Law is no more precise than many other professions. I think law has a reputation as being more difficult or more convoluted than other things that is not really deserved. Many other professions, in my experience, have very similar requirements on all of those fronts - they just don't require a six-figure investment and 3 years of time to get a law degree. That's the major barrier (that, and passing the bar exam). Other than that, it's normal profession.
I really enjoy it, though!
My work is in eSports law, and that is mostly in contracts. Mostly just setting up & negotiating contracts, and that can take any number of different forms. Sometimes there's intellectual property involved, but that is definitely a secondary focus.
Recently, I have mostly given up my private practice, which I ran for 11 years, in favor of joining ten/o - the company that you mentioned earlier. So I'm now their general counsel, and I've been doing that at this point for a few months. They were previously my client, so it's not like, a big jump, but it is…it's new, you know? Working with people after having your own business and being a solo practitioner for 11 years. Now you're in a company with lots of other people - definitely a different experience, but I'm really happy about it, really excited about it so far.
So what we do is I put together venue contracts.
So: contracts to run events at venues, or, if we're operating the venue, contracts with talent, or contracts with people who are doing production and crew work, or sponsorship agreements, rights transfers… you know generally just business agreements is really what it is. So I’m negotiating, and I’m putting together the contracts themselves.
II. Boundaries - Gaming IP Rights and Live Events
J. So this is actually perfect - a question I wanted to ask leads into this kind of thing pretty directly. If you were to go back 10 years, tournaments and other live competitions would be organized more locally and independently by people who had an interest in the scene, in the competition, in the culture. But they're not employed by game developers. They're not really in contractual agreements with game developers, either, for the most part. At that time, people are used to it being separate enterprises, right? A developer makes and sells a video game, and an organizer plans and hosts an event.
Where do you think those boundaries stand today?
David: The boundaries are still pretty distinct. So… it's rarely the case that a game rights-holder will be the one to organize their tournaments.
This is true even at the fanciest level, where, for example, Valve or Riot will often have other parties actually doing the work, even if those events are branded as League of Legends (Riot) or DOTA (Valve). But it's usually third parties who are putting it together - not exclusively, I should say - but usually that’s the case, and for fighting games, it definitely is almost always the case.
I can really only think of a few examples where the rights-holder itself directly put on the tournament.
That's only been for a few finals, and most of them haven't even done that. They've still contracted with third parties. This is also true for even things like the Capcom Pro Tour. So even if the finals themselves are maybe run by Capcom (they’re often not), and even if they were to have a [branded tournament] at a larger event, even in those cases, what’s happening is that Capcom has an agreement with the people who are running that larger event, like with CEO, with Combo Breaker, etc.
So [game developers/publishers and event producers/organizers] are still quite distinct.
What’s developed [over the last decade] is a set of experts at organizing and broadcasting. Ten/o is a great example of that, probably the foremost one in in the fighting game scene, certainly. As far as the rest of the eSports ecosystem… there’s a lot, maybe a half dozen or more [third-party production companies] and they all have their different areas of expertise.
Many of them focus on specific game subgenres like fighting games, or Smash, or other, larger eSports games. So there there still remains quite a distinction.
I would be surprised if that ever really changed. That is to say, surprised if these organizers were brought in house. It’s not impossible, but I haven't heard any movement towards that yet.
III. Tension - Player Passion and Corporate Goals
J. You mentioned a number of games and competitive scenes, but one that jumped out to me just for a moment was Smash, because (without needing to provide really deep context on this), I think most people realize there's been some tension or wariness between Nintendo and competitive Smash, right? So, in cases like that, where people sense, that the passion of the organizers might not be the fully aligned with the goals of the company (or at least how this the company sees its goals) do you feel like, as we move forward, and as this matures and develops…
…is there an increasing tension between (more player-rooted) production companies and rights-holders? How is that space trending at the moment? Is that stuff settling into place? How are those frictions being worked out?
David: Yeah, I think you've identified really the biggest issue in eSports. Not just for Smash for the fighting game scene - in my view the biggest issue for eSports is that games are owned. It’s very different from traditional sports - nobody owns the sport of baseball, basketball, hockey…
You can just go outside and do it whenever you want. Somebody owns the Leagues. But nobody owns the sport. Whereas, for video games, they are entirely owned, licensed out, etc.
And that really does create a different situation with copyright ownership, with the contractual aspects of that, etc. So that's always being navigated and it’s hard for me to imagine there being a satisfying agreement to all parties. The rights-holder wants to have as much control as possible. I get it. You've put a lot of work into this game, you've sold the game and you want to use eSports as advertising, or maybe just to make money itself. The law allows you to do that.
I wish it didn't. I wish the law didn’t allow that, but it does. That's the law. So I get why video game rights-holders2 want [that level of control]. On the other side of things, people who are running organizations like mine, like ten/o, we like the idea that there are rights-holders who have some power, because that's where a bunch of our funding comes from. Certainly not exclusively, but sometimes we'll get hired by developers or publishers to put on an event. And then, on maybe the farthest side, there are more traditional tournament organizers (ten/o is really more on the broadcasting side, especially for online events). But for [these traditional organizers of large in-person events that involve a wide range of gaming IP] - an Evo, a Combo Breaker, etc - they would like it if the rights-holders had no power, right?
I mean, ideally they would love to just be able to run whatever game they wanted for zero fee without worrying about licensing or any other demands that may come with that. So there's all these different views. Even eSports teams have a different take on this. There are all of these stakeholders, and they all have different views on this topic, which are all understandable given their own incentives and legal situations.
J. Some of the people listening to this will be pretty steeped in [fighting games], and for some it'll be a bit of a new world. But events like Combo Breaker and Evolution, you know, they transcend being tournaments. They do hold a number of tournaments, and they are prestigious, they are anticipated, the results carry weight, etc. But those events are…
…sometimes players say that Evo is like Disneyland for fighting game people, or Combo Breaker is almost more of a convention or more of a community Mecca than it is: “I’m going to compete at Combo Breaker.” That sense of identity complicates the simple notion of, “you’re streaming a game but the rights-holder has something to say about it.” Some of what goes on at these events is very informal and more ‘fun-oriented’ in a way that is not as strict as people imagine when you say “tournament.”
Right? You know what I mean?
David: That's true. But I wouldn't say that that changes the analysis very much.
So, for example, you're right about Combo Breaker: a lot of people like to go there and just play games. People don't even enter tournaments, they're just there to play games the entire time. Playing games in a public format like that almost certainly is one of the things that the copyright allows a rights-holder to shut down. [Some of this] hasn’t been directly tested, but it has been in arcades back in the day, and it was found that this was, in fact, public performance, which is something that is exclusively controlled by a copyright owner.
It's really up to the whim of the rights-holder to be cool with this. Historically, as you talked about 10 plus years ago, they either didn't know about it or didn't care, or even if they did, they kind of let it be. It just wasn't a big deal. They didn't have the money for it. They didn't have people at the company who even wanted to support or cared about supporting these events. So it wasn't an issue.
We were used to that.
That [hands-off approach] began to change around a decade ago, I would say, and has changed substantially now, even in fighting games. Certainly in other eSports it changed even earlier. But even in fighting games it's mostly changed now.
As an example: last year Capcom put out an explicit license that says, here are the rules under which you can play our game in your tournament. If you have a certain amount of prizing up for grabs, then you have to have a new & different license, more of an eSports license. And although I don't have any specific eyes on this, we all guess that means they're trying to charge the tournaments that are offering prizes of that size. They’re trying to make some revenue doing that.
J. They’re establishing a more elite lane. A small weekly event like Wednesday Night Fights might not fall into that category, right? They’re trying to establish if you’re up in that tier.
David: I think that is the separation that they're going for.
So again, that’s a little different [from what we’re used to]. They only put that license out last year. Other games have put out licenses as well, so there’s quite a bit of precedent at this point.
J. So here's a quick follow up, just because I think it it makes for an interesting case.
If I'm streaming Combo Breaker, one of the things I look forward to for it's sheer wackiness is the mystery game tournament. The non-legal (I hesitate to say, “common sense”) part of my brain that feels like, “well, they probably keep doing mystery tournament and they figure nobody cares.” Everybody just knows it’s this fun wacky thing that involves a lot of unexpected games and a lot of obscure games. But, going by the letter of what you were just describing as a shifting set of norms…
I imagine it could seem like quite a potential headache to include things like that. We have this tournament, but maybe 30 different games come on at different points. Is that a case where you just assume, “well, we're not going to hear from those rights-holders?”
David (chuckling): Absolutely.
Yeah, you just assume that you're not going to. Some of those games are probably even orphan works. That is to say, their ownership is probably not even around anymore. They may be very old, or they are made by some random guy who hasn't really paid attention to it in the last 20 years.
So that is a pretty unique situation.
There are other game developers and rights-holders who are haven’t even put out licenses like this and are basically cool with it. So we’re still not entirely all on the same page. We still have disagreement on how to deal with things, or even whether to deal with them at all.
IV. Law, Business Advantage, and Public Relations
J. So last question kind in the legal space. This is a little bit open-ended, and I think we've touched on it a bit already.
I have a sense when when I watch gaming scenes evolve and encounter other topics with legal implications…
…people talking about games preservation, emulation, dumping your own games, jail-breaking your own hardware… there are a lot of these gray areas.
And sometimes I wonder, if you're a lawyer working for a big gaming company like a Capcom or a Square Enix, how much do you think a legal department at a company like that focuses on: “Here's what we think the letter in the law says about our authority.” And how much do you think they focus on: “here’s what the gaming public believes about our authority.”
I feel like there's a difference between treating the law a little bit more technically versus looking at the culture a bit more in terms of public relations. Do you feel like like rights holders try to blur some of those lines? On purpose? Strategically?
David: I think rights soldiers are trying to do what many people are trying to do in business, which is just get all the advantage that they can, and law is one way to do that. It is not the only way, but it's a way to do it by maximizing your legal rights.
So for council at rights-holders, that is a bunch of their job. They're business people who are using the law to further business rather than just being lawyers who are only concerned with what the letter of the law says. They're trying to get paid and they're trying to get their company paid.
That’s not to say that they're doing illegal things. But they're they are acting in a world where business is the goal and law is the way that they do it.
Certainly, they have to abide by the law. But there are plenty of ways in which you can maybe over-emphasize what your legal position actually would allow for if there were a court.
Sure, that totally happens.
That's not a game-developer-only thing. That's just how it works for a lot of stuff, right?
J. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't mean to imply that it is or to villainize game companies. But sometimes you do see an event like this, and you feel like, as you say, a rights-holder’s position is… exaggerated… in a way that that is meant to leave an impression on the consumer.
David: I don't want to make it seem like I think that they 'over emphasize'3 too much.
Maybe with their like end user license agreements they'll like say a little bit too much. I think, maybe, what your focus more is on is whether maximizing legal, [as an approach to] business, is better than maximizing a more PR take on business. So there can definitely be tension between the business trying to actually sell to consumers, getting marketing involved to increase sales of their game, versus, “what's the most we can get from our rights from the licenses that we can could give out.”
Yeah, I think that that's totally in tension sometimes.
My take? That I would end on? I would like to be more open. That's just me, personally. I don't work for a game developer, but that's my take.
It is better for business to kind of let things slide, and you know, I think that even the Capcom license that I was talking about, is an example of that. They were a little hamfisted about it at first, but after community feedback they made some good changes to it, and the idea with that license is basically, “you guys can do whatever you want within these certain bounds.” You know, don't have an alcohol company sponsoring your event, or don't have a gambling company sponsor your event. Don't use a mod in a public tournament. Pretty reasonable things.
And so that is an example of something approaching permissiveness in copyright, and that's good. That is, I would say, good for the company and good for the scene.
[I understand the feeling of] “Oh, I already bought your game. That's enough. I paid you the $60. Why are you still involved? Get outta here!”
That may be what [players and event organizers] would really want, but that's just not how what the law is, and so in the context of what the law actually does allow for, situations like [the recently debuted Capcom license] are reasonably good.
J. Right.
Well, in the example you give. I think some people, because the situation is evolving, just the fact that Capcom sets up a framework at all… there can be an initial reaction where it feels like a burden. But then, as you say, once it is established it gives events some stability & sets some boundaries.
David: Stability. Exactly. Yeah, you don't have to worry about us coming to sue you if you meet these certain demands. That's about as good as it gets for for things like that.
Or, as I said, some companies don't even get involved at all, so maybe that is actually as good as it gets.
But for companies who are more aware of what's up and are trying to run their own eSports side, which Capcom is trying to do, I think that the license that they put out is a pretty reasonable take on things.
V. A Return from the Wilderness - Hypermobility and the “Split Box.”
J. Let's pivot a little bit. I want to talk about the Split Boxes.
I know you haven't posted super recently about this, but I would follow you on Twitter, and I'd see these pictures of what you're building, and it was just blowing my mind.
That you could, from scratch, put together something that gave you this sort of solution. So, just for the people listening, my understanding of what David did is that, using off the shelf parts you took the concept a standard arcade stick…
(David gestures to several different arcade sticks and Split Boxes behind him while I’m explaining)
…and split it into two parts. There are cords connecting each half - you could think of it as similar to the Wii-mote and Nunchuck from 15 years ago - and you're able to splay your hands apart and you're not hunched into a controller.
In a moment, I want to talk about the controllers, and the process of putting them together, because I think that's really fascinating.
But before we do that, can you just share a little bit with us about what started you down that path, or about the issues you've experienced with hand control?
David: Sure, sure.
So the backstory ultimately is that I have a hypermobility disorder, and that hypermobility disorder has made it so that I've had a bunch of physical issues like tendon problems, various joint problems, a bunch of broken bones, poor blood flow in some areas. One of the areas that got affected was my cervical spine, and specifically the area where the nerve that comes out and goes to your hands goes through. And so that impinges on the nerves there, and that means that, specifically, I had a lot of pain and loss of control in my hands and arms and upper back. A bunch of other stuff as well. But that's sort of the short story of it.
That really started to become an issue for me in 2010 or 2011. Before that, I had competed in fighting games since about 2002, and while I wasn't super great, by the end of 2008 or 2009 I was winning a bunch of local tournaments in Street Fighter IV in the strongest region in North America (at that time). So it was cool! I was really having a good time.
And you know, it was huge, huge bummer to suddenly find that my control was worse.
I never would say that I had great control. It was never… as good as some people I know. But, you know, it was good enough to certainly win tournaments, and I could.
That changed in a pretty quick period of time.
In about a year, it went from that, to: I entered a tournament, and my opponent realized that I couldn't block. That is to say, I'm trying to hold a certain direction on the joystick in order to make my character block, and my hands just wouldn't go along with that and my opponent started just doing whatever they wanted.
Stuff that became very frustrating for me. I got so frustrated that in 2012 I played my last tournament for a long time at Evo, where the same kind of stuff happened: I really tried to do well in that tournament and regardless of mental preparation my hands just wouldn't do it. The pain and loss of control, and all that stuff, was just too much. So I quit, and it wasn't for, boy, probably until 2018 that I started thinking that I could play again.
The reason that happened was that things actually got even worse.
So my shoulder rotator cuffs both began to fray, even as I was not doing very much physically, to the degree that like I had to go see a doctor and he had me do physical therapy. The physical therapist helped me out with that problem, and then asked me, “What's the ideal way to move forward for you? Like, what's what's your ideal result?”
And I said I would like to A.) not be in pain, but also B.) I'd really like to play video games again, and sure enough, after a good 6 months of really working on it with them, my hand control began to get better, and that was huge. But that wasn't the only thing that I required, and I found that I was not able to really move well, or as well as I could before. The way that I used to play on a joystick was just not gonna cut it for how I needed to play with my current body.
You know? I just… I needed a different way of of handling it. So yeah, the idea for the Split Box basically was, “what's the most ergonomic way that I could play with the current limitations that I have.”
And that's what I came up with. The inspiration in part was definitely a Wii-mote & Nunchuck situation. I was definitely thinking about that. I was also thinking about ergonomic keyboards, some of which are split in two in that same way, with a little wire combining them. And so those two were the inspiration.
I guess I should say another one is that, in the meantime, while I hadn't been playing, Hitboxes had become popular.
(David explains what a Hitbox is - a leverless controller that uses buttons for all directional inputs)
And so I kind of combined all of these into a “split box,” - no joystick, all button controls. It's almost like typing, and I can separate the two halves. With the different designs that I've had so far, the two halves are either connected by magnets or by kind of like a sliding situation.
So I'm still working on it. They’re a work in progress. I have my 3D printer just behind me here.
I don't know if I'll ever be done. It's just like a fun process for me at this point, so I maybe it'll never reach a fully complete version. But at some point pretty soon it'll get close enough to where I don't need to be constantly working on it.
I can just play. It really does have a big impact for me.
J. Right, and you might end up with more than one model, too.
David: I have like 5 models. My first one was made out of Lexan that I kind of cut together. I had one that was made out of wood, and the latest ones are all 3D printed. So lots of evolution.
It's been really fun for me. I've always really liked tinkering. I started making my own joysticks back in 2005, so it’s been a long-term hobby for me anyway, that I've just kind of adapted to this new situation.
It's been really cool to see the response to it. When I go to tournaments and show it off, I often will have people say, “Oh man, that looks like it's super cool. I'd love to try it out.” So I often find that people have a lot of interest in it. I would love to sell the actual, physical, built versions of it sometime soon. I'd love to give away the .stl file for the 3D-printed ones.
All sorts of stuff that I'm thinking about doing with it. The main goal is just for me to be able to play, in something approaching how I used to be able to play, and…I'm making that happen!
J. Gotta find some way for those 720s, right?
David: (laughing) Yeah.
VI. Do-it-yourself Controllers
J. Let’s talk about the tinkering.
For me, the idea that you could get all of the different pieces you need, and sort of work with it, and adjust the build…
…. can you talk more about it from that physical component standpoint? If someone were wanting to take on a project like this for themselves or for their own needs (which could obviously be a little bit different), what kind of challenges or barriers did you face from a hardware standpoint?
David: Well, I'm definitely no electrical engineer. I'm not trained in that, that's for sure! But I've always enjoyed messing around with stuff like that, even back in when I was growing up… we had a local community college, and my dad took me to some electrical engineering / tinkering classes just to have fun. So it's just something that I've always thought was cool, and it doesn't feel any more complicated than anything else. I don't know.
I mean, if you have the desire to be able to sit there and learn a little bit, then it's pretty approachable. It's fulfilling, so I keep doing it. I really think it's fun.
It's a fun, different way of working than I typically work. My day-to-day work is stuff that doesn't have any physical output. My output is digital contracts, or I guess now, part of my output is putting on events. But it's not… I can't hold it in my hands, being able to hold something that I make in my hands is really awesome, and I've always enjoyed that. So, just having the love for tinkering, and, in previous days, doing some woodworking, and doing some tinkering on old PCBs… stuff like that is really cool.
For other people getting into that? If you don't have that kind of interest, I mean, I don't know. That seems like it's important to have. But if you are into that, it's totally learnable.
J. Yeah. It's kind of a prerequisite.
David: Anything you might need is online. Head to Youtube and search up, “How do I solder?” There are a bunch of great guides. Or look up, what kind of PCB do I need? Or what kind of electronics? What kind of internal parts would I need to make my project? There are lots of places where you can go to talk about it. There are subreddits for this stuff. There are Discords. There's a ton of information out there and a lot of people who are really into it who are always willing to help.
J. So, from a parts standpoint, how much does the 3D printing help? Do you feel like it was a critical addition for you, or just more of a style change?
David: It's… maybe… in between? This old lexan one that I have over here actually works fine still. I didn't really need to make changes, it's more that I'm a hobbyist. I want to make stuff, and so I've wanted to have a 3D printer for a long time, and I didn't have the time or resources or space for it, until just the last couple of years, and and getting it was definitely a way to keep doing more split box stuff.
But it's also just something I really enjoy messing around with.
Man, it is not a hobby to get into if you don't have a love of problem-solving when it comes to electronics! [Points at 3D Printer behind him] That dude is broken right now, like the 3D printer is broken today. And I'm not really sure why, like I have tried all these different ways of trying to figure it out. My best guess right now is that the filament itself that I got may be funky. I don't know! There is constantly stuff to figure out on it, and I really like that. I don't get frustrated when I approach problems like that, I feel like, when something breaks, it's an opportunity. Now I get to figure out like something else about this that I didn't realize before. So that mentality really makes it… not annoying. And, if you do get annoyed, it's probably pretty tough to do.
But yeah, 3D printing has been very helpful.
With things like wood and lexan? Either I need to have way more tools at my disposal, or I need to have different resources at my disposal than I had, for those things, in order to make different shapes.
But for 3D printing? As long as it's something that can be printed, which is most shapes to be honest, it's doable. And it has made it much easier for me to experiment with new ways of doing things. The current design that I'm working on is like a sliding-interlocking mechanism… I just would never would have been able to do that with the tools that I had for wood or for lexan, or anything like that.
J. And so you had actually mentioned at the start that you feel like you're far enough along… you've done enough prototyping that you can at least imagine the Split Box as a product, as something where other people could order their own. How much is that something you are interested in?
David: I'd love to do that. I think that'd be great.
I get emails pretty regularly, including just in the last couple of days ago, from people who are asking about split boxes who have all sorts of different physical issues on their own.
Some don't! Some are just interested in it. But a lot of the context that I get are from people who have their own mobility issues or their own injuries that they're trying to overcome, and they feel that having something that lets them position their body in any way, essentially, while still being able to play games, would be helpful. And that's great! I would love to be able to help those people out.
I don't think it would be my goal to make a million dollars selling split boxes (laughs). Doesn't seem plausible. But yeah I'd love to. I'd love to sell some physical versions and give away the files for it if people have their own printers.
VII. UltraChen
J. So for this next block of the interview, I want to talk a little bit about your experience working in commentary.
I know that’s something that you have pulled back from a little bit, although the pandemic sort of resets everything, and it's harder to tell who's active. The Pandemic is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it at all, because I feel like things have really changed.
Before we get caught up to the present day, is it all right if I throw a couple of more historical questions at you, so we can put it in context?
David: Sure.
J. Alright! So, in my own understanding, if you go back and think about the development of commentary at these events, I think of the second half of the Street Fighter IV era, right?
I guess if we had to bracket it, I might say between Evo 2012 and Capcom Cup 2015.
In that period of time, you were really part of one of the most recognizable commentary teams in the world. Everybody talked about “UltraChen,” which for listeners is a blend of James Chen and UltraDavid, and it seemed from an outside perspective like we almost reached this point where, for the people holding the event, you guys had to be there or it wasn’t a big-time event. Can you talk a little bit about that earlier period of convergence where it felt like you guys were everywhere, and widely recognized, and in high demand?
David: Sure, yeah, I appreciate you saying that.
It was a very lucky situation that James and I happened to have. We both knew people here in the Los Angeles area who were starting some of the very first fighting game streams. In fact, some of the first eSports-related streams at all, were run by people who we knew, and we had known for a long time, and who knew that we knew games well, and who thought that we could speak about them well. We basically just were in the right place, at the right time, and knew the right people. So, when they asked us to commentate regularly it didn't feel like anything big.
It felt like we were talking about fighting games the same way that we always had. We were just wearing headsets while doing it.
We had talked on Shoryuken Forums back in the day, or on IRC in almost the same way that we talked about games on commentary. That did not make for super interesting viewing in retrospect (laughs), but because there were so few people doing it at the time, we were considered good.
Looking back… we wouldn't have been able to start now with the quality that we had. That's for sure. But since we had this very lucky situation, we had the ability to work together a tremendous amount on Wednesday Night Fights, which is a weekly thing. So we were together every week, we would drive about two hours out to where WNF was held from where we lived, and practice practice practice, and then on the drive home we would both critique each other's work, trying to come up with better ways to approach situations, and for both of us that was extremely helpful. That lasted for a good couple of years and in the meantime we were getting flown out to tournaments. Well, really, it started out as us flying out to the tournaments (and not getting paid).
At some point the fights get paid, but there's no fee on top of it. That kind of slowly snowballed until the point where it was becoming a second job. We were in fact getting paid. But you're right. We were all over the place, and again, I really think that was because we had this lucky situation. Our faces were up there often enough that people associated us with running well-run tournaments and having good streams. So I appreciate how that went. I think that was a very, very lucky situation, and but for that, hard to imagine me getting into it in the same way that I did.
James and I really worked hard at it. There were other people who had similar situations, and for whatever reason they they chose not to continue doing it, or they couldn't continue doing it, due to life or work. For James and me, we had the time, and we had the luck of the draw in terms of geography and in terms of the people we were with, and just in terms of that relationship that we had. Other people who were commentating at the time didn't have a dedicated partner, and so they didn't have somebody to spitball with: How do we improve? What do we need to work on?
Again, super lucky that all that stuff came together in the way that it did, and after would say a couple of years, we were getting flown out pretty regularly, so that began in 2010, and by 2012ish we are all over the place.
That was not that easy sometimes (laughs).
Sometimes there was too much flying around. There was one tournament in particular, where James and I had to do about 14 hours of commentary per day, together with no backups. It was fun - I wasn't, like, mad about it, but it was a lot of work.
J. It speaks to the growing pains of that whole era.
David: Yeah. I mean in everything with respect to the fighting community… everybody else was in a similar position of making it up on the fly, just as James and I were. There are people who had been running tournaments for years - some of them 15 years already by that point, but as far as how to expand, how to cater to the fact that Street Fighter IV brought in so many new players…
How do the different tournaments show themselves as being different? The people who are doing the broadcasting & streaming [are] making it up [as they go along]. How do we improve? What kind of stuff could we be showing? We're all just kind of making it up for years until it felt like any of us had become good enough, and for many of those other people looking back, their work was not what we would consider top tier work today, right? Like the people who are doing streaming were doing it on relatively cheap rigs, which felt very expensive at the time, but were relatively cheap to be honest. We hadn't really figured out a bunch of the procedural stuff, the splitting of duties, and all that sort of thing.
Tournaments 10-15 years ago were quite a different beast than they are today.
J. I hadn’t planned on mentioning this, but I have to share this with you.
I go way back with Street Fighter, but the advent of streaming and Twitch and competitions - that was all very new for me, and so I kind of re-engaged because of that stuff. I'm pretty sure I had a moment early on… it might have been Evo 2012 or 2011… but I'm pretty sure I had a a moment where I was watching the finals, and James came on with with Seth Killian, right?
And I was like, “who's this guy??? That's not David.”
David: (trying not to laugh)
J. Like it's funny, because of course, once you learn almost anything, you realize, “Oh, I just didn't know the context, I didn’t know who Seth was. I didn’t know the history.”
I'm pretty sure I had that brand-new-viewer moment, like, “That’s not David.”
It was an interesting time period for the scene.
VIII. Commentary Grows Up, and then… Covid
So that kind of brings us up to the release of SFV. SFV comes out in early 2016, almost 7 years ago. The pandemic starts in early 2020. You’ve got about a 4-year period during which things really change, right? From a commentary perspective, it feels like you get a big influx of talent. It's more diverse. The age range is much wider. There are faces that become recognized from different regions of the world, and then also, who begin traveling internationally.
That period of time really, to me, felt like this sort of growing-up.
How did it feel to you? We just talked about this early period, where in some ways you were… almost in too much demand. How did it feel to you as things fleshed out a bit?Did you experience that… as a mentor? Did it feel like it was a lot of cutthroat competition?
David: Well, I would say… it’s important for my mindset on this that I never wanted commentary to be my career, and I still don't. I always wanted to be a lawyer first. And so, the changing commentary [scene] was OK with me. Honestly, I didn't think about Commentary as a [possible] career until late Street Fighter IV. I didn't think about it as even a side job until about that time.
Late SF4 (2014-2015) is when I began to feel like it was becoming more of a profession, more of a career, with more people. [By then], it wasn’t just James and me, and I think that's more where I would locate that [shift].
But certainly by SFV, there were a bunch of people who could do it well, and that was great! I was really excited about that, for a couple of reasons. One is that, even as I was doing less actual work - I wasn’t doing 14 hour days anymore - I was being paid as much or more, just because there was a little bit more money in it [by then].
So that was great. But I also was really happy that other people got in there. I didn't feel like I wanted to monopolize it, and that was not just about me being cool with other people taking the reins. I also felt like I didn't want to overexpose myself (from a more selfish point of view). The business aspect of it for me would be negative if I was at every single tournament. People would get tired of that. I feel like I did start to notice that in early SF4, and so I was happy with doing less for both of those reasons.
I should say also I was just happy for other friends of mine, who began to pick it up, many of whom were from Southern California, but others from all over the country or world, and everybody brings a different voice. While lots of people like my voice, lots of people did not, and still don't. There are people who prefer other styles of commentary. So we should give [the audience] lots of different styles.
We need to have people from different places, with different backgrounds, different perspectives, and different things that they like about games or do well in commentating. I think that's true from a scene-wide perspective - it's good for the scene, it's good for people who are viewing to be able to have all these different options. It's also good for each of us (the commentators).
We've never really had a cutthroat experience. Everybody who's commentating fighting games, basically, is doing it because they like fighting games a lot. Almost all of us are just long-term community people. Even people who [seem] relatively new are people who, almost in every case, were first players/competitors for years.
The mindset of somebody who has been cool with playing in the fighting game scene for a long time is just, you know… there's a certain mindset there!
Even as we have all these other differences, we're not a cutthroat kind of community. We may try to beat each other in games, but it's not a cutthroat community. That's definitely my experience with all the people in our scene.
There could be annoyances or hurt feelings sometimes. People may want to get particularly prized commentary positions which may only have a couple of slots. Maybe somebody wants to do Evo Grand Finals, right? There's only a few people who get to do that, or maybe somebody wants to be at whatever their game’s finals is - the Capcom Pro Tour, Tekken World Tour, or whatever it may be. In those cases, sure, people may get upset. I didn't get to do Capcom Cup one year. I feel bad about it to be honest, but that was not expressed by me, nor by anybody else, as being mad at the other people who did get those gigs. I was happy for them. I thought that was really great.
I wish that I also got it rather than that I got it instead of them.
IX. The Pandemic Reshuffles the Deck
J: Certainly that lines up with… I mean, it has always seemed to me that it is a pretty mutually supportive group of people.
The Pandemic obviously upended lots of things. I remember when it started, and I realized how severe it was going to be, and you know it hit me.
Street Fighter is obviously a small thing compared to the natural flow of your life, but it hit me all of a sudden: all of this Street Fighter stuff that I'm into… it depends on an incredible amount of national and international travel, almost every weekend for 9 months out of the year. I realized how different things were going to be with people trying to adapt and take events online.
So. I don't want to come off as cynical, but post-pandemic4 a lot of the live events are resuming, and when I look at things getting back on their feet, the commentary part looks like it's become a tough gig. Maybe that's just because the pandemic kicked the financial legs out from under everything. But it looks like, whereas we talked about that early era where you and James were kind of the most recognized people and that sort of snowballed, now commentators appear... interchangeable? As if companies feel like they'll always be able to afford someone else for less.
Again. I don't want to be negative or cynical about it, but it it feels a little bit to me like we swung this other way. Does that line up with your experience? How would you describe the health of the scene, specifically with commentary, in late 2022?
David: Commentary is not a full time job. It's not a full time job for anybody.
The closest that it gets for anybody is somebody who has a stream that gives them most of their money, and then they also commentate. Which I would categorize as a side-job.
It’s like that for everybody. So for me it's law, and for other people, maybe they work for an eSports team or they work for ESL or one of the other production houses, or they have their own stream. Or they have their normal job, whatever it is.
Commentary5 is not enough on its own to make a living. Maybe the closest that anybody gets would be a couple of people I know who just don't have very high expenses. But that's a rarity. As far as having something that can sustain yourself - [fighting game] commentary has never been like that.
To be honest, with the pandemic, I think the bigger impact that it had was that so many more people began commentating.
Of course at first there was almost a total shutdown of commentating opportunities. Things stopped being offline, stopped being in person. That lasted for a few months, and at that point, once we all realized, “Oh, we're at home for the long haul,” online events began to be more popular. And that actually came with a lot of online commentary opportunities which had a lot of positive impact.
So, as I was saying before, my experience is maybe illustrative in the sense that I was lucky to be at the place and time that I was when I began commentating. Other people who started later than me didn't have quite the absurd luck that I think I had. But in almost in every case, they had the geographic luck of living next to some big streamer that would make them popular. [Los Angeles, New York, London, etc.]
It was very geographically based.
For that reason, during the Pandemic, as everybody was at home, that really gave opportunities to people who didn't live in those cities.
This year at Evo (which resumed in person), I don't remember the exact number, but something like a couple dozen of the commentators had come up during the pandemic. They had put in so much work that they had become good commentators. They had my [2009-2010] experience of doing Wednesday Night Fights every week in LA, but in an online format [in 2020-2021], which was super awesome. So that was actually a really positive impact that came out of a bad situation.
Before the Pandemic, it had really ossified. I basically knew who would be at each Evo Finals, Capcom Cup, Tekken World Tour - you know, whatever game you followed.
Now, it's not like that in even in the most popular games.
X. First, Gaming IP Bleeds into Real Events. Now, Real Commentary Bleeds into Games.
J. So here's a more future-oriented question. As you know, with Street Fighter 6 (slated for release next Spring/Summer, but with no set launch date), Capcom is taking the step of incorporating voice work from a handful of people that have name recognition. I know James is doing it. I think Vicious is doing it. A couple of others. I think people joke about you being DLC.
But you're not doing it as of now, right?
David: (laughing) I’m not.
J. Of course, I don't know the ins and outs, and probably only the people who sat down in the recording booths do. But the idea is that the commentator provides a lot of input, and then Capcom has a dynamic way to create appropriate reactions to what players are doing in a match, right?
Do you think that's going to shape or impact people's real-world opportunities? So when Street Fighter 6 comes out, how much is it going to matter that the mass audience for the game already has voices that they know and recognize from the game itself? Do you think that's going to change things in person?
David: Sure, yeah, I think it might have an impact!
I would say it's not the first game that has done this. Yata-garasu… maybe a decade ago, a long time ago, actually did the same idea. It had a much smaller reach, which I think is probably the actual difference. But I think that it's a super sick idea.
I was really happy to see people involved in that [for Street Fighter 6]. And yeah, I do think that it probably will have an impact. If you're somebody who's coming into fighting games for the first time, and like Jeremy (Vicious) is there talking about it on your screen, and you get to pick him, and you see his face, you hear his voice…
I'm sure that'll have an impact. I expect most of that will be positive for the people who are in the game. Again, it's always going to be the case that some people won't like a particular style of commentary or particular lines that people say.
But I think they're all really good so I think that most people will probably say that it has a positive impact on who they like in fighting game commentary.
I don't really expect it to have a a bigger result in the sense that commentary is not going to be… it's not going to be automated on big tournaments.
J. I hope not.
David: AI is not coming for that job.
Honestly it's more likely that AI comes from my legal job before it comes from my commentary job (neither one is going to happen anytime soon).
The artistic stuff - people are going to want humans to do that. Even if a robot can paint a picture like other people, we still want humans to do it. There’s value in that. And I think that's the same feeling for commentating.
So: super cool idea, I'm sure it'll help out the commentators who are in there, and I look forward to hearing it. I haven't actually had a chance to play SF6 yet. I’m looking forward to hearing all the lines.
(David was traveling during the recent Open Beta)
XI. Ultra Easter Egg
J. I'm pretty casual with fighting games these days. Street Fighter has always been a fun series for me, and at this point, with a decade invested in the larger event-based scene, the idea that you could just select, you know, James or whoever, and have it come out of Your TV…
It sounds pretty wild.
I have no idea what Capcom’s plans are. But if I could choose one UltraDavid Easter Egg, to be on commentary in SF6…
This may sound very specific, but it it cracks me up every time it happens. Every now and then, if you're commentating a match… let's say a player makes a read, and they're just totally wrong. So of course they try it and it blows up in their face (maybe if they were correct, it would look different, and you'd feel differently about it).
But it just backfires spectacularly. In that situation there are a few times where I've seen you on the microphone, and there's this split second pause of disbelief, and then you just say, “You can't do that!!”
And I want that to come out of my TV.
David: (trying not to laugh)
J. I want people to screw up spectacularly, and for David to just say, “you can't do that!!”
David: I agree that would be funny.
So I was in Yata-garasu, and I wrote all my own voice lines, which I, in retrospect, highly wish had not happened.
J. (trying not to laugh)
David: My idea going into it was like, all right, I'm gonna be the caustic jerk on commentary. I'm gonna be the one who's talking trash the whole time. There were some funny lines in there, but they were also just way too long. I didn't really know how long to make them, and some of them were like 30 seconds long, which is just absurd in the context of a fighting game match.
So I wish I hadn’t actually written all of my own (laughing).
I don't think I said that in there, but you know, similar stuff was definitely in there.
XII. Hyping SF6: Fire-hose PR, Unapologetic Complexity
J. So, speaking of Street Fighter 6, we can end on that note. We've got about 10 minutes or so - we'll just do a little bit of Street Fighter 6. It’s still probably 6 months away (we don't have a date). I have kind of an open ended question for you, and it'll take me a moment to to set it up.
So from what I can tell, following along a little bit with Capcom media coverage, press conferences, trailers, and all of that… with SF6 it feels like a fire hose approach to PR with the players.
Rather than, “in 2 weeks there's going to be a 60 second trailer, or we're going announce one character, or we're going to have one very specific reveal,” instead it's been a ‘flood the zone’ approach. There's so much to react to. You're like, “Whoa!”
Players know so much about the systems, and there's been this open beta, right? There's been a lot of exposure to the game is what I'm saying, even though it's not out yet. People have a lot to look at and form some sort of anticipation about.
I've seen you tweet… I think the phrase you used was that it was “the good kind of complicated.” It appears to be a complicated system, a complicated game, but in a good sense. You were careful to say, just being complicated doesn't make fighting games more interesting. But this one looks like it's the good kind of complicated.
And then in parallel with that, I saw a comment from Maximilian Dood, who I know you're familiar with (for listeners: he’s a big voice in fighting game culture on Youtube). He periodically does these topics where he talks about whether fighting games are really loose, or whether they're really tight, and then explains what he means by that. I believe he said, regarding the Street Fighter 6 beta, that it was “loose AF.”
So.
You're sort of looking at it, saying, “This is complicated, but it's good, I like it.” He's saying it's really loose, but he means it in this positive way, as in, there are all of these different options, a richness to the system.
But if you step back to the launch of Street Fighter V…
…and I don't mean to like relitigate SFV and dog pile on the first year of it. But I think just from conceptual perspective, people would have said, “This is a simplified product. This is a product based on certain ideas about constraint.”
So here's my my question for you as someone who's been really passionately involved in the scene for a long time: What do you think is the underlying strategy behind cases that are this different? We’re generalizing a bit, but when companies go in one direction or the other, what do you think the strategy is from a player-enthusiasm perspective?
David: Well, game developers are trying to make fun games, games that they think will sell. This is a product, right?
And so that means that there are all different takes on it.
I think we've seen everything.
Not too long ago, when DNF Duel came out, there was almost no info about that game before it launched. [Developers could take that approach, or go] all the way up to Street Fighter 6, where there is all sorts of stuff.
Historically, when a Mortal Kombat game is coming out, they'd have weekly streams: here’s all of the updates, here's new characters, etc. So we have all of these different takes on this and I don't know if there's a single best strategy.
I could say that what I prefer is having a lot of info, and it seems to me like that's what a lot of people prefer as well. SF6 is doing that for sure.
(Although I thought it was fun that I went into DNF Duel completely blind. I didn't even know what the mechanics were, and that kind of reminded me of the old Arcade days, where you see a new game and think, “what’s this??” You just have to completely come up with everything and you don't know anything about the game at all. That’s also a fun experience for me.)
But yeah, it's also fun to have an idea of what I'm getting into, especially when the game looks like it’s really good.
Dude, everybody is excited for SF6. They're doing something right! I haven't talked with anybody yet in any side of the fighting game scene, regardless of whatever subgenre that they prefer, who isn’t excited about SF6. I think that’s with good reason. There’s a lot to commend it so far.
The contrast with SFV… is pretty obvious.
J. (chuckling)
David: I don't think you need to feel bad about dumping on that initial version of the game.
Endgame SFV is my favorite Street Fighter. I really love what they've ended up doing with it.
J. It's leaps and bounds different.
David: I love it. I just played it yesterday, I really love the game.
But that said, it took a few years to get there. I wouldn't have said that even in year three of the game. It's taken a while.
At launch, in my opinion, not that it was less complex than SF4, which I also felt was pretty simple, but that it had only a couple of effective playstyles. The character archetypes were limited, in my opinion, and SF4 wasn't like that. SF4 had a bunch of different archetypes. So that was the layer of complexity: more stuff to do, more play ways to play.
SFV didn’t start that way.
Street Fighter 6 looks like it is starting that way, and I think that's great, because in the meantime, there were lots of games with such incredible character variety [and SFV built that up eventually]. This is, right now, a particularly excellent time for that. Every other game that's out there has fantastic character variety, really interesting characters as characters, as well as interesting in-game options. It's like a golden age of fighting games. There's so much good stuff.
So they (Capcom) could not come out, in my opinion, with Launch Street Fighter 5, and expect to have success again.
In fact, the way they launched SFV… I feel like that had a big impact on other games getting more popular. People went, “Oh, SFV. It's not really for me, time to check out Tekken, Guilty Gear” etc. I really think that had a big impact.
So for SF6 Capcom can't let that happen again. Street Fighter is super popular. It's probably never going to not sell, but it has way more competition than it did in previous eras. They know that, and they have to make a really good product on launch.
I am a little surprised to see that SF6 seems really complex. I feel like lots of other games have dropped relatively simply, and then become more complex - SFV is an example of that. But the same thing could be said for Guilty Gear. The same thing could be said for Mortal Kombat over the last couple of iterations. There are many examples of that, and with Street Fighter 6, that’s how I thought it would go too, but it’s not.
They're just putting in the zany options right from the start, and they're putting in really different characters from the start, with options that seem really cool and with game mechanics that seem complicated. At the same time, I like Max's terminology of saying that it's loose. It seems like it's very open to player expression, which is really what I want. Part of why I love SFV in the endgame, and with my other favorite games too, is that I feel like I can really put myself into it. I'm expressing my own way of playing, my desire to play in the way that I want to.
That’s really important for me. And SF6 looks like it's doing that well.
I'm very excited for the game - like I said, I haven't played it yet. I wasn't around for the Beta (I was traveling).
J. You know, it strikes me sometimes - I know I felt this way toward the end of Street Fighter IV - that it’s a strange conundrum for any developer when their game goes through several versions and refinements.
As you just said, SFV in its final form is a pretty robust game. I think a lot of people feel the way you do about it. Even if they were soured on it at first, it's turned out pretty well, and has a lot going for it. But that took a long time to build by degrees, and it almost feels like the developer sets themselves up for an unfair comparison. They've refined something over quite a long period of time with a lot of player input and a lot of experience to judge against. And then they have to start fresh, right? Everybody’s used to being at the top of the mountain.
Sometimes you feel like it must be hard to to win.
XIII. I Accidentally Ask David to Solve FG Development, Marketing, and Identity
So, one more Street Fighter 6 topic and we’ll call it a day. I’m curious about your thoughts on this. It it seemed to me that if you go back, not exactly to the launch of SFV, but around that time, maybe 6-8 years ago…
There was a moment in the culture around fighting games and the development around fighting games, where it felt like, with developers especially, a real focus and emphasis on decision-making emerged. As though, decision-making were the most prized and core element of the one-on-one match, the purest part of the match. You have the decisions that players make against each other, and then you have these other elements, other layers to competing - the complexity of the inputs, or strict timing and requirements around execution, etc.
I think there was a moment where decision-making was really centered, and there was this idea that other elements could sort of obscure it or make the game less accessible. There were games that tried to experiment with centering the decision-making more clearly and more accessibly. I may be wrong, but I feel like the intensity around that has faded a bit.
I was wondering where you think we are now, and where we're headed with those notions of: what are the important pieces of the fighting game experience and what draws people into them?
David: Sure, yeah, I've never felt like there's any unanimity on that.
And I don't expect that there will be.
I think, to the extent you mean that games were trying to dumb-down execution, there were a few examples of that. SFV had an easier input window. Guilty Gear Strive’s execution, at least on launch, is a little bit easier than previous Gear.
So there are some examples of that. But I also think, in the meantime, there are examples of games that were still hard - as hard as Classic Previous versions had been. Or, that were still popular without being easy to play. Marvel. Blaz Blue.
So I've always felt like there's not one way that is more prevalent than another of making fighting games and of designing them. And that's what I like. I don't want there to be one way of doing it. I like the fact that games are very different (they're all the same genre, so… they're not super different, right)? But within the genre there are a lot of differences.
At least as much now, as ever.
Street Fighter 6 looks like it has a lot of unique takes on stuff. It has a lot of old callbacks, but it seems like it's combining so many previous mechanics in a way that's pretty unique to itself.
So I don't think that there's one way of doing it. I never felt like one is more popular than anything else, and that's what I want to continue. But it's also… what I think will continue.
Every game developer has its own way of doing things, and each producer or director (whichever one is more relevant at the company) has a big impact on the way that games go. That's a big reason why SF6 looks really different than launch SFV - different leadership.
J. Well, I certainly…
I would 100% agree with you about feeling encouraged by the fact that there are a lot of different ways to design the games. You can get a lot of different experiences out of the games. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that scenes are really into specifics in one game that might not carry over to another.
That's all normal, and probably really good for the culture in general.
One of the reasons I was asking is that I felt like there was a moment where some number of developers…
There was real concern about, “How do we draw in new players? How do we cast a wide net?” And that seems to have passed to some degree.
I guess that's my question for you: would you agree with that? Would you agree that, right now in the fighting game scene, if you're making a new fighting game, you're just more confident that people are of accepting of the breadth of experience you just described? Do you feel like there is a general comfort with that? Do you feel like developers are still searching for a way to bring in new people above everything else?
David: I think game designers have always tried to make fun games and games that will at least end up complicated, if not launch complicated. I don't think that is new, or that that will change. What you may be identifying is that, in the marketing departments, there was a conversation around, “How do we market this game?”
The people who are dedicated hardcore FGC folks are relatively small group of people, and you certainly need way more than that, if you're gonna make your money back, or if you can make a lot of money which you hope to do.
With running a business, the question is how do you get people to do that. I felt like there were quite a few examples of games that were actually launching really complicated, where game developers would say, “Oh, this is supposed to be easier, or this is supposed to be more approachable for the new player.” Or, just because you were a god at Guilty Gear in the past doesn't mean you're going to be a god at this one.
That felt like PR to me. I didn't feel like any of the actual games, as they launched, were actually that way, because it's hard to do that. It's hard to make any game, that is at all worthwhile of your competition and your time, that won’t immediately become hard for a noob to beat an expert in.
I don't know how you do that. I wouldn't want to play that game. That's not the game for me, right? I think that's the case for a lot of us.
So that was much more about wanting to proclaim that the game would be more approachable than it actually being, in fact, more approachable.
That marketing mentality, I think, is changing. My take is that they've seen that players do want interesting fun stuff. They've seen that Melee has lived forever. This super complicated game, where the execution is terrifying, and yet it's still one of the most popular fighting games. It's still extremely popular, both to watch and to play.
Elden Ring just sold a trillion copies. The whole shtick of that series is, “here’s a hard-to-beat game.” People were into that, it turns out.
If you're somebody who's trying to sell games, you don't need to be like, “our game's easy.” In fact, maybe it's worthwhile to say: check out all the sick things that are doable in our game!
(That are always doable in any fighting game worth its salt - it’s just always been that way, whether the marketers say it or not)
But yeah, I'm totally down with them saying, “you know it's gonna be tough to get good at this game, but here are all the tools.” SF6 is doing a great job at that. They have all these tools in the game to actually help people figure things out. They have a whole first person mode that is much more in-depth than any previous Street Fighter game, to help make that happen. But they're not sugar coating it. I’ve seen the videos where Luke's in the training mode with you in the gym, working out, it because it's gonna be a lot of work. That's really good marketing. I think that people do like that stuff.
So…
I'd be cool with us not having the, “oh, this is an easy game!” (But actually it’s not).
I'd be cool with that going away.
But I do think it was more about the marketing side of things than games actually being easier.
J. I wanted your take on that, because it feels like something came and went, but as you laid it out, maybe it was more about the scene’s self-conception, than the games themselves going through a period of significant change.
David: Yeah, exactly.
I mean, look, some some things are different. Street Fighter 5 has this extra input window that didn't exist in Street Fighter 4. Some execution is easier.
J. I think they removed 1-frame links as well.
David: Right.
That said, there's other execution in the game that ended up effectively being 1-frame links any way, that people just figured out. If you press the button, and then walk forward for specifically just a couple of frames, now you're in range for another link. There are different… timing things that ended up being in the game, anyway.
J. Yeah, which in itself feels like an old story with fighting games.
Developers think they have smoothed off some things, but players get really experienced and those things end up ‘back in.’ I feel like that's a common pattern.
Marvel 3 trying to take out infinites, etc.
David: Well, what a lot of us like about fighting games is the sandbox aspect of them. I really think it's cool to be able to come up with your own stuff.
(Although developers know about lots of things - we give ourselves too much credit sometimes)
But just let letting players find things feels awesome. I've spent I don't know how many hundreds of hours, just like lab-ing up in fighting games over the years. I just like coming up with stuff in games, finding new ways to do things, new timings. I still do that. It's a fun use of my time - I'm trying to set up and solve little puzzles.
J. Well, David. I really appreciate your time. This has been a great conversation.
I think most readers understand what I mean here, but sometimes when people have a chance to speak to lawyers about a topic they’re curious about, they inadvertently ask for a tidy solution to a complex issue. I tried to keep that in mind in preparing for this interview.
We’re almost always talking about developers or publishers here, but David and I stick with the term “rights holder” throughout the conversation because that’s what matters in this context - who owns the intellectual property, which is not, strictly speaking, who made the game.
As an editorial note here, listening back to this portion of the interview, I think David and I are both trying to be diplomatic and not paint companies with a broad brush, which is good. I’ve included a link here to some Kotaku reporting over a showdown between Nintendo and the organizers of an event called The Big House, at the height of the pandemic. I chose not to ask David about this event directly because I felt like that would unbalance the conversation and also ask him to referee something that’s already happened and that you can read about for yourself, as just one thought-provoking example.
In the audio I clarify that there’s an ongoing public health threat, but most in-person events of all kinds have now resumed, with wide access to vaccines etc.
Probably important to clarify here that we’re talking about the job as it pertains to the Fighting Game Community and traditional 1v1 Fighting Games -Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Smash, Guilty Gear, Blaz Blue, Marvel, Soul Caliber, Skull Girls, DBFZ, Samurai Showdown, King of Fighters, Virtua Fighter, and so on. I imagine this is a different conversation for “casters” paid to work on broadcasts for Counter-Strike, LoL, etc.