Playing Street Fighter in a competitive arcade in Korea

My first time in Seoul, I decided to meet up with a curious character, who went by the name Wildcat. At one point he was making a 2D, pixel-based, proprietary engine fighting game, entirely by himself. In addition to doing odd things like coaxing my female translator into asking me whether I liked hentai manga (because he had some nice ones he could loan me), he took me to "the arcade." There aren't many arcades left in Seoul, as in the rest of the world, but even given the small numbers, this one was special. Here is where all the fighting game fans would meet, and train.

It took us some time to find the place, because Wildcat was not from Seoul. He was from two hours' train ride south, somewhere in between Seoul and Busan, the only two cities in South Korea that anyone not from the country has heard of. He knew of this arcade from the internet, and he'd been there once, but it was several years ago. He was quite confident he could find it, but my translator wound up surreptitiously asking for directions from a few people when Wildcat was out of earshot. Eventually, by some miracle, we arrived.

It was a tiny, dingy space with two windows in the front, off-white walls, and a wooden "trim" about a foot and a half tall, circling the place. I'd say it was about the size of a rich urbanite or regular midwesterner's living room. There were a total of five games represented there. There were four back-to-back Street Fighter III: Third Strike machines, four KOF 98s, about a million of the inexplicably-popular-in-Korea Tekken Tag Tournament and a few brand-new Tekken 5s (which should tell you about the era we're dealing with here), and a bunch of some Gundam cabinet I didn't pay attention to.

In the center, by the one supporting pillar in the room, stood an amateur announcer with a bowl cut and suspenders, calling the fights as he saw them, with a camera mounted in the middle of the room that he would turn around to where the action was. It seemed to be live streaming somewhere.

Bad luck for me though - at the time, my main game was CvS2, which was nowhere to be found. I figured I could give KOF 98 a go, but of the machines that weren't in use, one was completely busted, and the other had a missing D button. I played against a guy with a clearly working set of controls for a bit, then gave up in frustration.

So, Street Fighter III was my only recourse. I never played this game, really, just for a short span of time in college. And I never was any good at it. So I chose Ken, since I used him in CvS2 as my anchor, and remembered how *completely* differently he played, as I got trounced by a guy playing Q.  After a second loss, I reckoned I ought to change up my strategy. It was then that I had an epiphany. During that brief period when I was playing Third Strike, the character I stuck with was Elena, because I liked her character design. And nobody plays Elena, so my opponent shouldn't know what to expect. 

I switched over, and... actually won. Quite handily, I might add. In a palpable rage, my opponent switched over to Akuma, and proceeded to trounce me in spectacular fashion. I only got two more rounds won in the next 10 games, no actual victories. But the novelty of my one win as the only white guy in the place caught the attention of the announcer, who asked me all sorts of questions about where I was from, and whether my translator was my girlfriend (she wasn't, but he kept harping on the point - maybe he had a crush on her and wanted to make triply sure). Wildcat gave me a perfunctory thumbs up. He hadn't played a thing, claiming he liked making fighting games better than playing them.

So ended my illustrious career as a Korean arcade sparring partner. I failed utterly - but that one win... I have to admit I was prouder of that than I was embarrassed by my overwhelming losses.

Bio: Brandon Sheffield is director of Necrosoft Games, and cloistered editor of ZAM. His uncle works at Nintendo and that's how he knows if you keep Super Mario Bros on for 108 hours Sonic will show up. Follow him on Twitter or don't!