Thank you for posting this Storms. I sent the link to his mother, I went to dinner with his family tonight. They were extremely supportive of his competitive gaming even when he was a kid and I remember even when I first met him they would talk him up about how good he was at various games. Tom Brady use to play against him at the Menlo Park Mall in NJ during the mid 90s in vanilla MK3, I'm sure some other players who are still around ran into him there and the Freehold Mall as well like Check. I wish he could be around to see how the community has grown, because without him, it wouldn't be what it is today.
Before I met him, I was a teenager who went around NJ with his family as much as possible playing people in various fighting games at arcades, malls, casinos, movie theaters, video stores, etc and UMK3 of course, as much as possible. In the mid 90s at age 13/14 I got destroyed in MK3 but by UMK3 I couldn't find anyone in NJ who was a match (and even then I wasn't that good because the entire skill level of the game was low). He reintroduced me to the Capcom Vs Series at MvC2's release, and then 3rd Strike on PS2, Alpha 3, all while building my skill level in UMK3/MKT to match his, which at the time was far greater than mine. Any give set in UMK3/MKT from 2000 to 2003 was like 9 to 1 and at best 7 to 3 easily. It wasn't until about 2004 did we level off, because we played mostly MKT until late 2003, when I got a computer that was powerful enough to emulate UMK3 with a full frame rate and sound.
However when I got the new PC, his old PSX to USB converters didn't work in windows XP, so we actually would run MAME from time to time on an old computer with the sound disabled, using Kaillera networked at 0ms to the newer PC with a crossover cable. This would allow him to use his PSone ASCII gamepad via Win2K and we'd just play on the monitor on the newer computer since the other would desync instantly. Ryan was a stick player at heart but having taken off years of playing on stick for consoles during a time when mass produced sticks were awful, he preferred the ASCII pad, which he for whatever reason pronounced "Ah-she" and I'll never forget that because no matter how many times I'd say "It's ask-ee" he would say "Nope. I say ah she."
I remember when he bought FOUR of these because he wanted to be sure he always had one available in case they broke.
He was the last player from the 90s with the pure love of the 2D MK games to keep them going and step over the logs of apathy towards MK rolled in front of him by people who said to give it up because no one could beat Chicago, posting threads on SRK when they would get trolled to the max. While Tom Brady was pushing the 3D MKs to icy silence of the FGC, we kept on trucking with UMK3. Almost no one here, I'm talking less than 1% of players who post on TYM, know what it was like to be an MK player trying to promote it on SRK during the early 2000s. This is why I always say, you guys think MK gets a bad rap NOW? I worked for 10 years building up a rep for MK in the FGC, and a solid staff of players who joined, left, came back, left, or stayed in the snowball, so when Midway/NRS actually released a game worth playing, it would have a place to call home. We scrapped and clawed for recognition to get a national scene for MK going, and scooped up players from every little site we could, taking the serious players from MKO, and the players who randomly asked about the games outside the fatalities and glitches on sites like gamespot, TRMK, TMK, etc.
His help with our first handful of combo videos, all the match videos we put up, even if it was just me vs him, the handful of tournaments he was able to participate in from 2001 to 2005 during his short time with the scene, and his endless promotion, and motivational trash talk, mixed with his legit skills in other games really helped us take off. His overall time in what could be considered the FGC (competing against players who are still around or were around when organized majors started popping up around the country) spanned from the mid 90s until his last tournament, NEC6 in 2005. I am so glad to have met him because not only am I part of a great community like the FGC, but I have a great job that I would never have gotten had I never got into the FGC.
RIP Old Man.
