Every year I volunteer for EVO Japan when it is in Tokyo. I still play Street Fighter – we’re on version 6 now – I started back when Street Fighter II was released in arcades in 1992 or so! Over the years I’ve always been able to work with the Street Fighter team, which is great, since that is the game that I play and follow. Since I am Japanese – English bilingual (for various values of “bilingual”) in the past few years I’ve been on call to do interpretation troubleshooting work. So I’ll have an earpiece, and pool judges will call out when they need translation help, and I run over and help them out.

I also will do other sorts of coordination, run pools, setup machines, pack things up, or anything else as needed.

This year, there were 7,687 entrants for Street Fighter 6 – officially recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest fighting game bracket ever. That is a massive logistical challenge to run. The tournament is run over the course of three days, and on the first day, we have to run 3,844 first matches – well, there is a good number of players that DQ themselves by not showing up, but still. To get down to the final winner, that is about 15,000 matches over the course of three days.

This year on Friday, I didn’t help with Street Fighter, I was asked to help out with a different game, 2XKO by Riot. That’s a free to play team game with characters from the League of Legends universe. Check it out! I helped the (very small!) team run stream matches for the English and French streams. I got in 21,901 steps on Friday. I was essentially walking from 9am to 6pm from the stream station to a pool, trying to get the matches we wanted on stream, wrangling players, and other miscellaneous troubleshooting.

Generally I think I did a good job, but I know I did wrong by one person in the first pool of the day. I didn’t know that we had head to head setups, and I interrupted him mid game. I feel terrible about that, but otherwise I think I made more positive contributions than negative ones.

On Saturday, I got to the venue at about 8:30am to report for work for Street Fighter. I’ve worked with the team in the past, and was very happy to help out again. This time I had a transceiver that we used for communication, and I spent most of my time at the Command Center, running out to pools when they needed translation or other help. In the afternoon I spent most of my time at the Stream area helping organize and get information the stream runners need. I had a total of 13,090 steps on Saturday, almost half of Friday’s crazy count.

On Saturday we went all the way down to the Top 8 competitors. There were some great matches that never made it on stream – as always at EVO Japan! I didn’t get a chance to watch much of the game, since I was always running around, talking to people to get some information, and coordinating with the Stream runners, but what I did see what was great. I look forward to watching the actual streams over the next week – there is something like 30-40 hours of content I want to watch from EVO Japan, and I’ll just have to slowly get through it.

On the final day, Sunday, I didn’t have any responsibilities, so I had a chance to check out the venue and see some of the stuff I missed over the first two days. I enjoyed the EVO Museum a lot. They have a great selection of art from different games, a very nice collection of figurines, art from JB Styles and Shinkiro, a collection of arcade sticks (mostly drawn from MarkMan‘s collection) and a corner with a Street Fighter 3 setup where you can try to replicate EVO Moment 37.

There are also lots of shops, a free play area, and some studios showing of new games. I waited in line and played some of Marvel Tokon game, which looks amazing, but without a tutorial I could not figure out how to play at all. The game looks great, I really wish I had a playstation to play it on. But I’m not going to buy a playstation just for one game that I am unlikely to play (because I just don’t have the time).

The main thing though, of course, is to see the Top 8 and Grand Finals. Even though I have a much more comfortable setup at home, the feeling of watching with thousands of fans is too much fun to pass up. I really enjoyed the Tekken and Street Fighter Top 8s. Lots of fun! I highly recommend watching with friends and fans.

I didn’t take as many pictures this time; I was just too busy Friday and Saturday running around. I took a few pictures on Sunday, but for the most part was just enjoying watching the games. A few people came up to me to thank me for putting together information about offline Fighting Game events in Tokyo, which was great. I also got to meet up with some old friends and online friends, and I always appreciate it when people stop to say hi.

I know I’m not great at Fighting Games – and I never was – but I certainly enjoy them. I am really glad that I am able to contribute in some small way to the overall community, and hope to continue volunteering. There are always problems every year – this year the Air Conditioning was working great, thankfully – but I know that everyone behind the scenes is working as hard as possible to make the event fun for all the players. I hope to see everyone again next year!