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What Attracted You To Fighting Games?

fr stack

Noob's saibot or noob saibot's?
Thing is I always play against 0% players and look the way they play but a lot of times I can’t punish things even though i know they are unsafe. I get bodied by run cancel characers. Don’t know what to do. To top it off I’m playing Buzzsaw
Im a cyrax main trust me i know losing lol 7frame d1 boyz
 

Scyther

Mortal Kombat-phile
First fighting game for me was Mortal Kombat 1, and honestly, that's pretty much the only fighting game I've played in earnest. I've never been a fan of Tekken, Street Fighter, etc, although I did play a lot of Bloody Roar at times. None of them ever felt as fun as Mortal Kombat, however, and that extends even to NRS's own Injustice series. Don't get me wrong, Injustice is fun to play for a little while, but it's never really held my attention the way MK does. Beating your opponent to a bloody pulp and then finishing them off in some outlandish way just holds a sweet charm.

I think one of the reasons I'm so invested in MK is because it's something my brother and I have bonded over throughout the last 20 or so odd years (besides Command & Conquer, but that's another discussion entirely lol). Every new MK game that came out, my brother and I would play it endlessly, and nothing about that has really changed. I'm nearing 30 now, he's 34, and we still plan on kicking the snot out of each other come MK 11's release night.

Good times :)
 

AZ MotherBrain

If you believe enough, -7 could be +7
Personally and independence. I like being able to play a character according to my style. Also success is solely up to me and how much of a desire I want to win.
 

Blade4693

VIVIVI
What was the first FG you played? What made you stick to them and what made you take them seriously?
First fighting games I was exposed to/played were actually the first games I ever experienced in my life as my parents had a Sega. They had Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Primal Rage, and SF2 Championship Edition. I was attracted to MK and Primal Rage but didn't care for Street Fighter. Obviously ninjas and dinosaurs are cooler to a kid than regular looking people lol

I only stuck with MK throughout my life, usually playing it on consoles at home for fun trying to see all of the character endings and doing all of the fatalities. I had no idea the FGC even existed until a few years ago so when MKX was announced I decided that was going to be the game I actually try to learn. I had a hard time and ending up dropping the game and really got into KI which tbh was the game that taught me how to actually play fighting games, then SFV built upon that even further. SFV is actually my most played PS4 game lol

Anyway now that I have built some fundamentals and better game knowledge in general with my experiences in KI and SFV, I am excited to hop back into MK with 11 and see if I can be better at it. Looking back MKX was probably not the best game to learn first. Im still not great even at SFV, but I feel much more competent than I used to be and hope maybe some of what I have learned will carry over to MK11.

TLDR: Mortal Kombat was the first game I ever played and I just played them all growing up, and decided to take them seriously once I discovered the fgc and got good internet lol
 

sub_on_dubs

Online Scrub Lord
I always played games like MK and Tekken casually, but never took it that serious. Fast forward a decade or so, I happened to be shopping at GameStop and saw MK9 on the shelf. I honestly didn't know they were still making MK games at that point so I decided to buy it. I fell in love with the game and came upon this site when I was looking for combos. Been here ever since.

I haven't liked any fighting game as much as MK9, although SF5 was pretty close. The Injustice games were snooze fests for me although I did try to like them. I'm hoping MK11 will reignite that desire, if not, this will probably be my last fighting game.
 

Eddy Wang

Skarlet scientist
I play on the arcades since i was 5 years old my first game ever was Arcade Shadown Dancer, it was when i first new about fighting games.
And i do play fighting games since my 6 years old, this includes, SF and then Samurai shodown world heroes perfect and many other fighting games which came out as the years passed.
Played MK since i was 9 years old and never stopped ever since, i think i played every version of the game except for MK vs DC even the MK1 from NES i played and was really good at it.

When i was at that age i lost to my already deciesed cousin may his soul rest in peace into a SF game and he had a broken leg back then, it was the first and the only time i outraged on a defeat post salt and pushed him off the bench, gadly he didn't hurt himself, i was fucking salty on that day, gladly it never happened again.

i'm literally a dynossaur of time by now.
 

HeroesNZ

Baconlord's Billionaire Sugar Daddy
I'm super competitive - if I see even see a person walking faster than me in the street I speed up lmao. And other genres are either too easy or get boring fast

I main NRS games specifically because I like the community
 

Law Hero

There is a head on a pole behind you
I grew up with two brothers, so we all preferred games where two of us could play at once as opposed to single-player games, and as a result we gravitated towards fighting games (and sometimes racing games). Additionally, we spent a lot of time at our local Nickle Arcade where we would play fighting games together.

The first fighting game we play was Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and we were all blown away. We played some other fighting games like Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, and Soul Calibur, but MK was always our favorite. Much like K&M, we all played the robots with me using Smoke, and my brothers using Cyrax and Sektor. As you can imagine, there were a lot of Triborg mirror matches for a while in MKX.
 

Circus

Part-Time Kano Hostage
On topic:


UMK3 was my first fighting game. I was 7 years old and loved to do special moves and brutalities lol.
When Super Smash Bros 64 came out, my friends loved playing around and while we weren't the greatest, things got pretty competitive at times. The same happened when Smash Bros Melee came out two years later.

Then one day when I was 15 years old though , EVERYTHING CHANGED.

I found this video on YouTube and had to tell my best friends about it.


Looking back, none of this stuff is really that impressive anymore lol.
At the time though... we were SHOCKED.
We NEEDED to learn wavedashing, L-canceling, and all these other hard advanced techniques for Melee and we sure fucking did. We were hooked.

Flash forward a year and we were casually competing in local tournaments at colleges even though we were only 16.

After I graduated high school, things slowed down as far as fighting games....

....until online fighting games became a thing.

Online is what really drove me to play fighting games A TON more than I ever had.

I love the feeling of hard work paying off. With fighting games you could really experience this feeling all the time. You get as much as you put into them and it shows. I even love losing against great opponents because it makes me feel like I still have room to grow. I adore that feeling!

====================================================================

Nostalgia Trip:


Soul Calibur 4 was online so I played it a ton.

It was my first venture into the dark world of frame data lol. I became obsessed with it. I'm STILL obsessed with it. I found it super interesting how many different ways it could be implemented in the spacing and pressure game.

I fell in love with 3D fighters and my new obsession became leveling up so I'd be good enough to be on leaderboards with my troll username on Xbox Live:

Soul Calibur 4

Tekken 6



Yes, that says SipCumOffMyTits.
My current troll username (until it gets banned) on PSN is PumpCumUpMyAss lol.


Then MK9 came out and it also had great online! My favorite childhood fighter came back and I had to become good at it so I could stamp my troll name on the leaderboards lol. It quickly became my favorite franchise of all time and I don't think that'll ever change.

After I ended up placing 4th in the early life of MK9 at CEO 2011 and after I was lucky enough to win a few MLG tiny-prize pool tournies online as JTCircus, I decided to give the trolly names a break for a bit lol.

Since 2011 I really haven't had much time to go to tournaments but I hope I get the time to in MK11. If there is any prize-pool online tournaments I'm going to definitely participate too. I'm going to pour my heart, soul, and time into this new MK in a way I never have before.

Ugh, fuck I'm excited.
 
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Marinjuana

Up rock incoming, ETA 5 minutes
People getting hype around an arcade machine and badass characters. I think the RP aspect of playing as cool characters is the biggest draw for fighters. Like yeah, I love whiff punishes as much as the next guy, but it's the characters that are the soul of the game. It's not Mortal Kombat without Scorpion throwing spears.
 

Lun

proud TERF!
You get a good atmosphere and memorable characters, without the sitting around and waiting for a cutscene or a boring moment of the gameplay. Bonus points if my imagination can fill in the blanks in the story while fighting.

Growing up and discovering the online multiplayer, I also found out fighting games are quite challenging, which I like.

My first fighting games were Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 1 on the Sega Mega Drive. Even back then, I loved both games but liked Mortal Kombat much more.
 
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STB Sgt Reed

Online Warrior
FInal Round 2011/2012 (don't remember the actual year, it was after mk9 had come out tho).

Now I had played mk back when I was a kid and I thought it was fun to freeze ppl with sub zero, but I wasn't playing competitive or anything.

Then one day in 2011/12, I was searching google about the football player tom brady and something about an MK tom brady came up, and I was intrigued because I thought the football player was also playing games at a pro level and was like, wtf!!! I gotta see this. That lead me to a stream of Final Round. It was a match between GGA Waffles and like, a liu kang player or something. Anyway, you could see the crowd watching in the background and when smoke was doing his 3d21 string in a combo the crowd was going "oh, oh, oh" , "oh, oh, oh" and would do that leading up to the smoke reset.

It was so hype to me for some reason, so I watched the rest of the tournament and then moved my ass off the "official mk forums" for mk9 and here to tym and started reading up and watching more tournaments for the game while I was at work at my previous job (radio station, sole employee, lots of internet time lol).

That finally turned into me going to ATL locals for mk9 and I was hooked on MK.
 

Vslayer

Juiced Moose On The Loose
Lead Moderator
I loved reading all your stories <3 keep them coming.

What I like about fighting games:

I'm a very competitive person.

Back in the day I used to play a lot of 'World of Warcraft'. I pretty much only played PVP. Battlegrounds and arenas. The little bit of PVE I did was doing quests to get to the max level and then start doing PVP. Or a couple of raids, so that I could get better equipment and perform better in PVP.
I played a lot of Counter-Strike. And I played a lot of Overwatch. Both multiplayer PVP games.

I'm not big into PVE. The problem with PVE is that you're playing against NPCs with certain patterns. Once you figure their pattern out, it becomes too easy to beat them. You just have to follow a certain set of rules and you win. In PVP that's not the case. To me it's fascinating to go up against players, who all play differently. Players, who fight back until their last bit of health is gone. And it's always fascinating to me to see new stuff, which I haven't seen before. You don't get that level of excitement from PVE games, where you just go through the motions. In PVP if you encounter someone, who is dramatically better than you, then you get destroyed and you have to hold that. You know that the opponent is simply better than you and all you can do to negate that is to git gud. It's not about learning a pattern at that point, or grinding better gear. It's about getting better and getting the better of your opponent.

Fighting games are the purest form of competition in my eyes. It's you VS the opponent. There is no team to help you out. And luckily, there is also no team to eventually hold you back. If you win, it's on you. If you lose, it's on you. If you like competition, then you're simply bound to love fighting games.

What got me into fighting games:


As I said, mostly the pure and direct form of competition fighting games provide.

The first fighting game I ever played was 'UMK3', if I remember correctly. I remember always picking Noob Saibot and just mashing buttons, until shadows came out of the character and ran at the opponent. I was super young and I had no idea what was going on, but it looked cool as hell.
The fight "fighting game" I actually played A LOT and competed against friends was 'Super Smash Bros' for the N64. If you want to call that a fighting game. I always picked Kirby and just went for it. I lost some matches and I won some matches. It was tons of fun. Funnily enough we would always play our favorite songs during the fights, which would get us hyped and pumped up and perform better. My song was always the iconic Mortal Kombat movie theme.

When I really "got" into fighting games was a good while after 'MK9' came out. And I write "got", because I didn't really play MK9, but rather just watched tournaments. Same with 'Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3'. I wanted to get into the game, because it featured Deadpool, Dante and Vergil - some of my favorite fictional characters. They would have been my team. But I never really did pick it up.
Then 'Injustice 1' was announced and I wanted to play it as well, but I really didn't. I prefered to watch tournaments. Same with MKX and Injustice 2.

So even after watching so many tournaments and getting a good grasp of the theory behind fighting games, I never really got into fighting games. I never development the muscle memory for them, or the fundamentals. So I still consider myself a complete beginner, after all this time.
Now with MK 11 coming out, I will ACTUALLY try to ACTIVELY get into fighting games. I'll put in the hours and the hard work to git gud at them. So I'm very much looking forward to it all.

TL-DR: I like competition and I've played almost all fighting games you can imagine. From Super Smash Bros, to Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Tekken, Versus games, Soul Calibur, Injustice and others. But none of those I've played seriously to a point, where I would consider myself something more than a beginner. That is about to change with the upcoming MK 11. I'll play that game for sure and use that as a serious entry point into the genre.
Yeah, the drive to learn is really important and I feel like it's easier to do with a new game because it's just as new as everyone regardless of skill level. The trick really is to understand the game's core mechanics, how it plays and how the combos work because they're always different from game to game.

I'm super competitive - if I see even see a person walking faster than me in the street I speed up lmao. And other genres are either too easy or get boring fast

I main NRS games specifically because I like the community
I can relate, I think the competitive spirit is very strong in anyone who plays fighting games.
 
Got introduced to them by a cousin who brought over MK one day. Really talked it up about how gruesome it was. I was never into it initially, didn't like the blood/fatalities!

Then i think it was the story/characters that kept me playing. Always liked the eastern mythology/martial arts aesthetic. I got over the blood/guts thing and have bought every MK since, and have played at least one iteration of almost every other mainstream fighting game since.

Overall, apart from them being fun to watch/play, i think i like the 1-on-1 aspect, and that there's so much to learn between characters abilities and your opponents. It's like a chess game but with more interesting things happening.
 

Vslayer

Juiced Moose On The Loose
Lead Moderator
FInal Round 2011/2012 (don't remember the actual year, it was after mk9 had come out tho).

Now I had played mk back when I was a kid and I thought it was fun to freeze ppl with sub zero, but I wasn't playing competitive or anything.

Then one day in 2011/12, I was searching google about the football player tom brady and something about an MK tom brady came up, and I was intrigued because I thought the football player was also playing games at a pro level and was like, wtf!!! I gotta see this. That lead me to a stream of Final Round. It was a match between GGA Waffles and like, a liu kang player or something. Anyway, you could see the crowd watching in the background and when smoke was doing his 3d21 string in a combo the crowd was going "oh, oh, oh" , "oh, oh, oh" and would do that leading up to the smoke reset.

It was so hype to me for some reason, so I watched the rest of the tournament and then moved my ass off the "official mk forums" for mk9 and here to tym and started reading up and watching more tournaments for the game while I was at work at my previous job (radio station, sole employee, lots of internet time lol).

That finally turned into me going to ATL locals for mk9 and I was hooked on MK.
Watching tournaments is so awesome, even if you don't have knowledge of the game you get that what they're doing is pretty hard. It's cool that tournaments are what got you to start playing. The energy, the competition, all good reasons.
 

STB Sgt Reed

Online Warrior
Watching tournaments is so awesome, even if you don't have knowledge of the game you get that what they're doing is pretty hard. It's cool that tournaments are what got you to start playing. The energy, the competition, all good reasons.
Absolutely! And once you get a bit (or a lot) of that knowledge of the game yourself, they become even MORE hype because you know exactly how crazy something that just happened was.
 

Vslayer

Juiced Moose On The Loose
Lead Moderator
Absolutely! And once you get a bit (or a lot) of that knowledge of the game yourself, they become even MORE hype because you know exactly how crazy something that just happened was.
And then you manage to do some crazy hard stuff and it's the best feeling in the world. When I win hard matches online I pop off alone in my living room. I know my cats are really proud of me.
 

Evil Canadian

G O K U
Premium Supporter
I am in my mid thirties. I grew up on kung fu, ninja, and various martial art movies. There was basically no way I wouldn't have gotten attached to fighting games when they started hitting. SF2 and MK1 were revelations to me. I have never not been playing fighting games since then.
 

MrWarMachine

Jacqui/D'Vorah 2020
I played UMK3 on my Dad's Genesis at 4 years old, and then I saw the Tekken 3 intro on a PS1 Demo Disc. I went to a school in 3rd grade that was essentially a glorified daycare center (explains why I'm shit at math) and one kid used to bring in his PS2 to play Tekken 4 after school. I was hooked from there.

And like most, my interest in the FGC starts with EVO moment 37.