There's a pet theory of mine about the future of fighting games, or maybe the future of competitive video games in general. It's been stewing my head for a while but it really crystalized this last March with Capcom Cup 11.
Quick rundown for people with no context: Capcom Cup is an invitational Street Fighter tournament that has a years worth of qualifiers and build up leading into a prize of a million dollars for first place. This year, the Japanese player Kakeru won, a player who at least a few people had as their pick to win the tournament. No one was surprised to see Kakeru win a tournament of this caliber and weight, he had done it before.
The wild part that no one expected, though, was Blaz, the player who placed second. Blaz is a 15 year old from Chile who, while not completely unknown going into Capcom Cup, no one predicted him to play as well as he did and to place as highly as he placed. His level of play, confidence, and composure impressed everyone and made him the lasting story from the tournament. He looked like someone who had been playing Street Fighter for fifteen years, mainly because he was destroying a bunch of the best players in the world who have been playing fighting games longer than he's been alive.
Apparently Blaz was introduced to competitive fighting games at a very young age by his father, who was himself part of the Chilean FGC. And that's what my theory revolves around. I think that in the future, majority of the best players of a fighting game will be people who started playing them competitively as young children.
Let me clarify what I mean, and then maybe poke some holes in what I'm saying.
When I say "started playing as young children," I mean more than just playing the games casually. Being exposed to the games at all is probably helpful for any competitor, but me mashing on MvC1 as a kid isn't helping me win majors right now. What I mean is playing the games with a competitive mindset and with specific competitive guidance. This is speculation, but I'm guessing Blaz's dad was teaching him concepts like spacing and how to do real combos as he was growing up.
The analogue I'm thinking of, or maybe even the model of what's to come, is chess. I didn't really do that much research for this blog post, but I was looking at all the chess world champions from the past 30 years. I wasn't able to confirm this for every single one, but the vast majority of them not only learned chess at an early age, but started taking formal lessons and received structured guidance from a high level chess instructor for many hours per week from as early as five years old. Nowadays, there are kids obtaining chess grandmaster rank before they're 13.
Fighting games will probably never be a thing where parents are paying Justin Wong to come to their house and tell their kids what they're gonna learn today. But I think as we see more FGC parents, we're gonna see some strong FGC kids come out of it. Some combination of a very neuroplastic mind with a parent providing coaching and motivation is producing some real killers. Some kids are learning piano, some kids are getting tutored in math, and some kids are running oki.
There's already a lot of examples here, already, along with Blaz. There are players like Shanks and OnlineCale, who like Blaz had fathers who were long time FGC members. I'm not sure if he had any specific guidance, but NoahTheProdigy was living up to his name getting top 48 at Evo when he was 8 years old.
I got two more very important examples, but they kinda stretch my definition. These are not from the new young crop of players who had parental figures who were themselves part of the FGC, but I think they were definitely molded by being exposed to real competition early on. So it's a slight stretch, but I want to include them because they're two players with real claims to the crown of the GOAT of fighting games.
Xiao Hai (I think the most reasonable answer for fighting game GOAT) was winning tournaments as early as nine years old, with his dad being the one who took him around to different arcades to train and compete. His name itself means "Little Kid," which I assume is a name he picked up as he went around killing people in King of Fighters. Pure speculation here, but even if his father wasn't teaching him frame traps I imagine there was guidance on more general mental factors of competition.
The other one here is SonicFox (I think the player most likely to be called the GOAT in the future). While maybe not a parental figure that was pushing them along, Sonic's older brother is Kwiggle, who himself is a top Dead or Alive player. The two of them grew up playing each other, a relationship that surely formed the foundation for the player SonicFox is today.
That said, I think the comparison with chess really isn't airtight. It's not like SonicFox wins every tournament they enter, even in their home turf of NRS games (though a lot of their strongest competition are a new set of young players). Maybe there's a future where Blaz becomes a dominant force in Street Fighter, only challenged by other like him, but like, who knows? Maybe the physical aspect of fighting games is too big a difference from chess, or maybe this future only makes sense if we had the same amount of players and prestige as chess.
The other thing is that the FGC is still just so young. The first generation of competitive players, Tokido, Itazan, Knee, etc, they're still playing and still winning to this day. My theory claims that given enough time the top talent will all be child prodigies, but how long does that take for the old guard to cycle out and we reach that saturation? Will the FGC even last that long?
So yeah, that was a lot of words for a big speculative extrapolation of a very new, small sample size trend. I think there's something here, enough that it will be interesting to keep an eye on into the future, but I can't deny that it's at least partially me trying to find evidence to support a narrative I find interesting. Could I be right about this? Maybe, but honestly you shouldn't trust anyone who says "fighting games are kinda like chess."