I started competing in fighting games in 2002. I’d been playing casually with my brothers and friends since Street Fighter II came out for the SNES, but I rarely had access to arcades and had no idea there was a competitive community until I got to UC Berkeley in 2001.
I’d been accepted to a handful of schools, but the ones I was considering most strongly were UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. My dad and I went to check out UCSD first, and I loved it enough that I thought that was where I would end up. But then we visited UC Berkeley. There was a lot I loved about it: it was busy, so active, had so much culture, had so many weird and interesting people. Those are the reasons I told my parents about why I decided to go to Cal, and they were real, I wasn’t making them up. But the reason I didn’t tell them about was the Bearcade. Berkeley’s campus arcade was a poorly lit unventilated cave hidden away under Sproul Plaza, a den of digital bats and moles screaming DDR songs and Marvel 2 Storm heavy punches at any who would disturb them. It wasn’t very big, but it was a real fighting game arcade. And among the many other things I wanted to do in college was to spend 1000 hours there, kicking ass and showing everyone how good I was — in the end a huge underestimation of the time I’d spend there and a huge overestimation of my skills before getting there.
If you want to see my full competitive history to the best of my recollection, it’s here. One of these years I should really try my best.