What Attracted You To Fighting Games?

[Sothpaw]

Seeing a Street Fighter 2 arcade machine at my school's festival in 1992. I'll never forget that moment. I was hooked the second I saw that game, even before I played it. It was a fucking revolutionary game no exaggeration.

 

[Zaccel]

I still remember playing Street Fighter II' (Special Champion Edition) at the dentist's office. I must have been like 3-4 years old, and had no idea how to make it work. Ryu kicked my ass routinely. I could never get past him.

But I came back, every so often, and slowly stuff started to make sense. I learned blocking worked by holding back (by accident; I sheepishly tried to run away from a Hadouken), I learned how to approach without getting Dragon Punched every time, and learned how to play all 12 characters out of a sense of strategic desperation. I remember being so salty when I came this close to winning with Dhalsim and choked. I remember finally pulling it off with Balrog (and learned how good tick throws were in the process).

Somewhere around age 7-8, I would spend a lot of time at my babysitter's place. Her son used to play SFII (among many others) on the old SNES, and my brother and I would play for hours. I remember beating the game for the first time with E. Honda right as dad arrived to take me home.

I also remember one lazy summer where a friend of my brother's introduced us to Mortal Kombat. He showed off the Blood Code, the glitches, we played (and sucked). It was so foreign and unfamiliar. I remember him playing through MK Mythologies to show off the (N64) cutscenes. I remember watching the movie on TV with dad. I remember renting it many times thereafter.

I even remember my mom allowing us to rent MK4 under the logic that "if you can watch the movie, you can play the game." My brother and I laughed at the crazy moves and all the blood. And then we tried cheats to watch all the endings, and suddenly the lore of Mortal Kombat officially had its hooks in me and never let go.

Fighting games have always been a perfect playground to my tastes. Mano-e-mano, straightforward objectives, strategic depth, mechanical precision and a lot of guts. They're simultaneously incredibly accessible and endlessly abstract, and I'll always love them for it. I often play kusoge games and make notes to unwind.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of them.

Cool thread.

 

[Kroaken]

I always thought maining/being known for a character, especially at local tournaments, was really cool. I can't think of Nishikin and not think of Blanka, Tom and Sub, etc.

 

[LawAbidingCitizen]

What made me fall in love with fighting games was MK1 and Killer Instinct when I was 5 years old around 93-94ish.

What blew my mind was the fatalities and combos of Mortal Kombat franchise. The discovery of Unlockable content and labbing combos with no internet showing you how to do that finisher/combo is what made MK the greatest game in my book. The reason I preferred fighters to this day was the reads, mind games and depth of it as supposed to playing COD spraying randomly with no real strategy. This game requires more than just getting faster, it's learning on the fly, practice, reading your opponent, footsies, frame data, blockstrings, frame traps, punishing gaps, optimal combos, hitbox abnormalities, cancels and finding the perfect tech to make your favorite character shine when all seems lost.

I love setting in practice discovering setups and combos so I can use them in a live environment which is something I can't find in other types of games.

MK is my mental salvation, I had many childhood tramas where I was beaten by my step fathers and most of my family where on drugs so MO was my escape from it all. Me and my brother used to play MK 1 & 2 in our room finding hidden combos and fatalities it was and still is a blast and is very close to my heart.

 

[NaCl man]

I was always into martial arts as a kid and loved martial arts movies and alot of cheesy 80s horror. I used to watch alot of them. So when i saw video games with fighting in them i was drawn to them. I used to play beat em ups when i was really young. ( double dragon was my first video game love)
Street fighter 2 the world warrior was the first 1v1 fighting game. That was the arcade everybody stood around waiting for a turn. Then when mk1 dropped i was amazed. Real looking people fighting, blood everywhere and when i saw my first fatality( cage's uppercut) I couldn't believe what i saw. It was like horror fighting game. Stopped playing after mk after mk3. ( until mk9 which was banned in australia but we imported copies and got them in haha) Tekken 3 was the first fighting game i really learned and tried to be good at. Ive loved tekken ever since( even though i missed most of 6 and tag 2) man im old lol.

 

[Saint Op Omen]

Pizza, not getting murdered & a break from actually fighting people...MK arcade was my first.

 

[fireborg]

Of course I played the older MK's like everyone, as a kid. What really answer the question tho: after a long time it were honestly combos and YT videos. Seeing the SWAG of combos and progression of the game, made me try it again.

 

[Jynks]

Pretty simple for me....

I was a kid.. I used to go to the milk bar at the beech and surf and play video games... one of them was Street Fighter. There was no move lists, no internet... and one day I made Ryu do a fireball thing. I dumped my entire weeks paper run into until I work out how to do it. I still remember the way over done move I did to pull it off. It was amazing to me, and only I knew the secret. I was king of that machine for ages until word got out. Back then it was like a pool table in the pub. Once you owned it people paid to play you. I could sit there nearly all day. It was glorious. Ghost and Gouls, Elevator Action, all games I loved but playing other people was a total new deal. SF2 came out and MK and I never looked back.

The thing is I do not think people really change. Honest people anyway. Like the things you liked as a kid, as in really liked.. some people pretend to like things to fit in or w/e... but you just always like that stuff. I mean I do not listen to death metal anymore, I'm an old man.. but now and then I hear some old Napam Death or Cradle of Filth and I go.. yeah that stuff is still awesome. Likewse ... I just still really like Fighting Games... I always have and MK and SF particularly.

People don't change... it is that simple. I loved it as a kid and I still love MK and SF.

 

[callMEcrazy]

Competition.

When I first started playing games back in the mid '90s the only kind of game where you could compete against other human players in arcades was fighting game. I also played beat-em-ups and shooters occasionally but those were co-op. I liked going up against other players more than playing co-op with them. I caught the final days of the sf2 hype train but the games I played a lot were samurai shodown 2, kof '98, and real bout fatal fury special. ss2 was my favorite. The first time I played a mk game was mk1 in '96 on my pc.

 

[Tanno]

I started liking fighting games, when I saw others play them and tried them on as a lone kid. Since I didn't have anyone to teach me or play with me, I adapted too fast and found anything on my own. I used almost all my allowance to play MK1 at my village. I still remember the fatalities I found on my own or saw others do them. Time fled until I tried other games (DarkStalkers, Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, Mace: The Dark Age, etc). Every time I was in holidays and there was an arcade place, I'd go straight there and find any FG, even new, to play them.

The last time I played FG before going on a very long slumber was Tekken 3 and Mortal Kombat 4. At that time I was in disbelief regarding the 3D, because I thought of them as pseudo-3D. They were in the experimental phase at that time. Mortal Kombat 4 was suffered with a lot of bugs, and was the last one that I played as Fujin besides Sub Zero. Tekken 3 was one of my fav that I used to play with my childhood friends and my lil bro before ours friends moved to Connecticut, US, due of their pops' job as a colonel.

Since then I stopped playing FGs, because the arcade places were closing one after another, so I couldn't go there to play them anymore. Didn't have much money to play them until a friend of my parents got us a "chipped" PSX as a gift and gave us some games, including Street Fighter Ex Plus Alpha. I was the only one in the family to play FGs, while my bro played other games. I sat down and played SF Ex+ Alpha to complete all the challenges with PSX's pad. I still remember the arthritis I had back then as Allen.

And that SF was the last one before I seriously stop playing FGs since I had noone to play with anymore. I wish I had someone around me to play or to train, like you guys. I'd be stronger today.

If not for you, and my buddies, who were my mentors, I'd not return back. Unfortunately, when I returned back since MKX I was a complete scrub, so I did go to pilgrimage (did go to many FGs, and I still do) to gather what I learned before I return back in MK11.

 

[SaSSolino]

I used to be a TF2 competitive player, but life happens and my team went undone. I tried to find another one, then made one, but it never was the same: I could never find the same relationship with my teammates, and with time I lost interest and the skills to compete.

Shortly afterwards, while I was looking for a new main game to play, MK9 came out on PC and my times as a kid playing Deception with friends came to mind. I bought the game by selling some TF2 items and started nerding it.

I really liked it even though I was extremely bad at it, and I lost like 80% of my online matches for at least 6 mounths. With time and help from the MK9 PC community I eventually started to get decent though, and I've been here ever since.

 

[Vslayer]

It's so cool to see that most of us started because of the community, whether it was to challenge people at the arcade or play at home with friends or siblings.

What made me fall in love with fighting games was MK1 and Killer Instinct when I was 5 years old around 93-94ish.

What blew my mind was the fatalities and combos of Mortal Kombat franchise. The discovery of Unlockable content and labbing combos with no internet showing you how to do that finisher/combo is what made MK the greatest game in my book. The reason I preferred fighters to this day was the reads, mind games and depth of it as supposed to playing COD spraying randomly with no real strategy. This game requires more than just getting faster, it's learning on the fly, practice, reading your opponent, footsies, frame data, blockstrings, frame traps, punishing gaps, optimal combos, hitbox abnormalities, cancels and finding the perfect tech to make your favorite character shine when all seems lost.

I love setting in practice discovering setups and combos so I can use them in a live environment which is something I can't find in other types of games.

MK is my mental salvation, I had many childhood tramas where I was beaten by my step fathers and most of my family where on drugs so MO was my escape from it all. Me and my brother used to play MK 1 & 2 in our room finding hidden combos and fatalities it was and still is a blast and is very close to my heart.

So sorry that happened to you. Video games do have a tendency to keep us away from other things that would have been far more damaging. For all the mainstream media's talk on how violent video games make us bad people, statistics prove otherwise. For a lot of people, including myself, they helped us through really hard times.

 

[Ceroder]

I mostly played team games, such as Overwatch and Paragon, and even though I didnt blame my teammates, thinking "I could do better" there was just times that people annoyed the shit outta me and lost because of them. I wanted to lose to people because they were better than me, and I wanted to stomp people because I was better than them without bullshit.
Well that's fighting games basically, saw MKX from a random channel, researched a bit about fighting games, and it became my favourite genre.

 

[VSC_Supreme]

Originally it started with Mortal Kombat as a kid, loved the games on the SNES but I was mostly enthralled with the lore and aesthetics.

I loved Marvel vs Capcom when I was a kid because I could play as Megaman and Spiderman. In highschool I made friends with a guy who was big on fighting games. When he learned I played MvC he got excited and then he actually played against me, was confused, asked wtf I was doing and pretty much told me I sucked. He helped me through the scrub phase and taught me how to play fighting games, understanding frame data/priority/strategy and all that good stuff. Really helped me get my foot in the door on fighting games and made me want to get better.

Jokes on him tho, I still suck.

 

[SaSSolino]

MK is my mental salvation, I had many childhood tramas where I was beaten by my step fathers and most of my family where on drugs so MO was my escape from it all. Me and my brother used to play MK 1 & 2 in our room finding hidden combos and fatalities it was and still is a blast and is very close to my heart.

Life is always a terrible MU, we need to find all the tech we can to help our character overcome it.