Interview with Gootecks, professional Street Fighter IV Player

The world of professional gaming is still struggling to figure out where it fits in. It doesn’t yet command the respect (or the salaries) professional athletes take in stride, and the recent bankruptcy of several major gaming leagues doesn’t bode well for e-sports.

Gootecks, real name Ryan Gutierrez, has been playing Street Fighter professionally for nearly a decade. Recently, he’s been trying to bring all the game’s bruises and badassery to a wider audience by hosting the live event Street Fighter Bar Fights.

GotGame caught up with Gootecks during a rare lull in his travels to ask him about the future of professional gaming.

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GotGame: As far as playing fighting games competitively goes, well… let’s take basketball, for example. Basketball is always going to be basketball. What’s it like knowing that your avenue of competition is going to change every 4 to 5 years?

Gootecks: That’s what keeps it exciting. The thing about basketball and traditional sports is that they really don’t change at all. All the changes they make are in terms of rules and stuff, and those are few and far between.

If I have to play Street Fighter IV for four or five years, and then Street Fighter V comes out, at that point, I’ll be like, “Alright! I was waiting for this change!” It kind of depends on the length of time between the new games; there was a decade between (Street Fighter III) 3rd Strike and Street Fighter IV, so there was definitely a lot of build up.

If next year we have Street Fighter IV: Championship Edition, and the year after that we have Street Fighter IV: Turbo or whatever, and after that we’ve got Street Fighter V, then that’s awesome!

GG: So, the change is something you embrace?

Goo: Oh, yeah, definitely — it’s exciting. Where the game is going so far, every version has been better than the last, at least to me. 3rd Strike was way better than Super Turbo and Street Fighter IV is better than 3rd Strike.

GG: I saw on your site you have a Street Fighter IV guide for Street Fighter III players. How does that work exactly?

Goo: They’re different (games); that’s why I wrote it. It’s really that different. When I first starting play Street Fighter IV coming from 3rd Strike, I didn’t understand anything about the game.

I didn’t understand why the jumps were so weird. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be jumping. I kept trying to use the focus (attack) as a straight up parry. The combo system was way different. None of the characters really resonated with me. It was so different, I felt like I couldn’t be the only one who was struggling that hard.

And I really don’t think I am. A lot of the 3rd Strike players in the arcade are slowly trying to get on board with Street Fighter IV. But there’s a disconnect between where they are in 3rd Strike and where they are in Street Fighter IV, as opposed to with me: I’m way better at Street Fighter IV than I am in 3rd Strike.

GG: Did you play 3rd Strike professionally?

Goo: Yeah, I did. I played competitively from 2003 until Street Fighter IV came out. I went to Super Battle Opera (SBO), which is pretty much the World Series of fighting games in Japan. I qualified for 3rd Strike with Justin Wong and KOfiend.

GG: I’ve heard the name Justin Wong before. He’s one of the best Chun Li players in the world, right?

Goo: In 3rd Strike, yeah. But in Street Fighter IV, he recently won the GameStop National Finals, so he’s pretty much considered #1 right now.

I competed, but I didn’t make it past Round 2 because I can’t play on an Xbox 360 controller.

GG: Heh, yeah. That was my problem, too. Was it the D-pad?

Goo: Yeah.

GG: Me, too.

Gootecks V.S. Justin Wong

GG: So, as far as fighting games in general, do you consider them on par with sports? Like, not necessarily a “sport,” but the same level of competition, the same level of dedication it takes to play them?

Goo: That’s the funny thing about playing a video game competitively: If you were a pro basketball player, you’d have a schedule and regiment that was very structured as to how you trained and who you were playing against.

Right now, playing any video game competitively, you can kind of be as in to it or not in to it as you want. You’ve got guys who are going to be playing 8 to 10 hours a day, every day, just because, y’know… they live it. Whereas you have other guys who’ll play a couple times a week, and they’re really good, but they have other things in their life that they do: school, work, girlfriends, whatever.

There are definitely a lot of similarities, but most people are not to the point where they’re going to be playing with a strict regimen and training on the regular – it’s very informal.

GG: Was Street Fighter ever sponsored by one of the major gaming leagues?

Goo: There is talk of Major League Gaming (MLG) and World Cyber Games (WCG) picking up Street Fighter IV. For MLG that could happen this year, but for WCG, that’s not going to happen until next year.

None of the (gaming leagues) that died had any part in Street Fighter. The whole pro gaming organization or league or whatever has been completely separate from Street Fighter as long as it’s been around. This is the first opportunity we’ve had to break into the pro circuit.

GG: Okay. So, tell me a bit about Street Fighter Bar Fights. Was that just something you started for fun?

Goo: The goal was to take Street Fighter IV and make it the next WWE or UFC. It’s not for fun. It’s fun, but it’s serious. The idea was to showcase the best players in So Cal playing each other.

What I discovered was that the tournament format is just not valid for breaking into the mainstream. When you watch wrestling, you don’t watch Stone Cold Steve Austin pounding on some dude at WrestleMania. You watch him fight Bret Hart or The Undertaker – huge names. People don’t care to watch a pro pound on some guy who’s only been playing for 6 months. They want to see the big names go at it. That’s what I was trying to bring with Bar Fights.

It wasn’t a tournament — it was exhibitions between the best players. When Barfights: Round II rolls around, we’re going to have a similar format with different players, giving people the chance to watch the best players play each other.

Tournament matches can be very random; even the Top 8 and Finals can be random, depending on who shows up and how the brackets fall into place. You don’t always get to see the best guys go at it. You do if you’re lucky, but even then it’s going to be a 2 out of 3 game set, which is really not enough to determine who the best player is.

GG: When is the next Bar Fights rolling around?

Goo: We’re definitely going to have it before EVO. We’re brainstorming with a couple of venues right now and shooting for early July.

GG: Speaking of EVO and all those other big name events: Do you see Street Fighter getting to the point where people know the best players by name? Or will they always been known as “that guy who plays Chun Li” or “that guy who plays Ryu?”

Goo: It’s hard to say. So much has happened between January and now to me and everyone else who’s been playing Street Fighter IV on a really high level. At this point, it could probably go either way, depending on whether MLG or WCG pick this up and depending on the success of Bar Fights II and III and IV and V.

I think it’s a real possibility for Street Fighter IV to be the next snowboarding or skateboarding or X Games or MMA. I don’t know that you would say Shaun White is famous. He’s famous for what he does, but he’s still not Kobe Bryant famous. But does he need to be? Not necessarily.

Dude’s doing American Express endorsements. He’s got his own video games. That’s pretty good – he’s a household name. But what he does isn’t exactly mainstream.

That’s what everybody needs to keep in mind. We don’t need to be super famous for all of us to have everything we could want from this. The level of fame we’re going to get is going to be more than people every expected, but not as big as a mainstream sport. But it doesn’t really need to be, because at the same time, we’re not really performing in front of millions of people.

GG: Along those lines, Street Fighter Bar Fights is at a live venue. How’s that different from just posting videos on YouTube?

Goo: The difference is 500 people packed into a small place, watching you play Street Fighter and cheering you in. If you felt you can get that on YouTube, than that’s – that’s like the difference between going to see your favorite band when they come to town and sitting at home, listening to their CD.

GG: Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean so much the atmosphere as much as exposure. With the live venues, it seems like it’s easier to get it legitimized, but on the Internet you could reach a larger audience.

Goo: Oh, exposure. We tried really hard, and we kind of succeeded, in terms of doing live streaming at the first Bar Fights. The first few matches got streamed, but then the Wi-Fi signal died. Doing live streaming is something we’re going to be doing in the future.

It’s really something all major tournaments and events like EVO need to be doing.

I want it both ways. I want everybody there to have an amazing time with a bunch of Street Fighter fans. And I want everyone who doesn’t live in the area to be able to watch it live online. The more people we reach, the more people are going to be hyped for Bar Fights II and Bar Fights III.

GG: As far as live streaming goes, do you guys have color commentators and stuff that most other sports have?

Goo: At this point, it’s pretty much a technical hurdle. It’s something we’re going to have to work on for Bar Fights 2. For the first one, we weren’t streaming it live with direct feed. I just set up a camcorder to broadcast the game itself on the TV, as well as record the crowd noise.

If it’s just the game and there’s no crowd noise and you can’t see the crowd in between matches, it’s like watching Street Fighter 4 on YouTube. Having commentary is something I‘d like in the future, but I’m going to have to figure out exactly how to do it. It might require some extra expensive hardware – I’m not really sure what it entails. Might be something we have to save for Bar Fights III.

EdMa faces off against Combofiend at Street Fighter Bar Fights

GG: You mentioned you wanted this to be like the next WWE. Does that include all the ridiculous production values, like people walking in amid fireworks and pyrotechnics?

Goo: To reference SBO in Japan, that’s pretty much how they do it. It’s amazing. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know at what point we’re going to get to that level.

If we take this WWE model and apply it Street Fighter, then there’s definitely a Street-Fighter-IV-flavored version we can use. As long as it’s not corny or cheesy, which hopefully it won’t be if I’m the one doing it. Some of these other entities, they might not have the understanding of Street Fighter IV that I do.

GG: Other entities?

Goo: There’s a fine line between something being hyped and something being lame. In other competitive games, such as Halo, Counter-Strike, you have these e-sports teams that sponsor players to travel and maybe give them a small salary. In exchange, the players wear a jersey with all kinds of logos on it.

In Street Fighter IV, the idea of someone flying you around and paying for your travel expenses is definitely something a lot of players want, but the tradeoff – wearing a jersey – is real a fine line. If you’re showing up to an event with 500 people and some guys are wearing jerseys… I don’t know.

I might be kind of overreacting to the idea of Street Fighter players wearing jerseys, but the fact is, Street Fighter is not a team sport. It’s just not. It’s one-on-one and you don’t wear jerseys. Tiger Woods doesn’t wear jerseys. He might have a Nike logo on his visor, but he’s not wearing a jersey. It’s team Tiger Woods.

In basketball or baseball, you have a team, so you wear a uniform – you’re aligned with a team. Street Fighter is like golf and horse racing and (laughs)… there’s not a whole lot of individual sports. I guess we got NASCAR, but you have a whole bunch of ads.

It’s a fine line. Here’s a perfect example: photographs. During photo shoots of gamers, everyone wants to take photos and tell gamers to look tough. You cannot look tough while you are playing with a joystick. It’s just impossible. Are you going to take a picture with a dude trying to look tough playing a video game? Or are you going take a picture where he looks like he’s having fun?

I’ve had to take pictures. I won at this GameStop tournament. There was a lot of media, a lot of press. After I won, this guy was like “give me a ‘tough guy’ face” and “hold up your fist.”

I felt super lame, but because I’d never done it before, I didn’t have any alternative suggestions. It wasn’t very long after that when I was able to see that it was the polar opposite of what we do. We need to look like regular dudes, just having a good time. That’s the mentality everybody needs when it comes to this stuff.

GG: Going back the SBO in Japan, where people come out akin to WWE wrestlers, how do they act? Do they just walk out? Do they pose?

Goo: Not really. Maybe someone will do a pose. 80 percent of the Japanese players just walk out. They’re very humble – they smile and bow their head or whatever. But the rest come out like wrestlers. They’re running around, they’re jumping up and down – it’s a production.

SBO Players’ Entrance, 2006

In terms of the event itself, they have an announcer, they walk down the aisle. There aren’t pyrotechnics, but there’s an entrance. Dudes walk down, the MC interviews the teams, they talk a little shit or they say good luck, and then they play. They’re up on a stage and there’s a huge cube of screens so everyone in the arena can see it. It’s about the size of a college basketball auditorium.

GG: How big is Street Fighter Bar Fights?

Goo: We had it over here in Pasadena at this bar called Jake’s. They have a little diner on the street-level and underground there are four rooms. Three rooms have 6 to 8 pool tables each, and the fourth room, which is where the matches were held, holds about a hundred people. So, you can kind of gauge the size of it.

It was not tiny. It was a place you’d go to celebrate New Year’s or St. Patrick’s Day or watch the Super Bowl. But we packed it. We had a huge line of people waiting to get in. We were at capacity.

GG: What did the crowd look like? When you go to wrestling, it tends to be a lot of beefed up dudes. Same thing with sports; you can definitely pick out the “real” sports fans.

Goo: The crowd was 85 to 90 percent male, as you might expect. There may have been a few more girls than usual because it was a bar, it was a special event, and it was a weekend. But, yeah, in general, it was mostly dudes.

GG: Do any girls play professionally?

Goo: It’s only a matter of time. I don’t know how they’re going to do against guys who’ve been playing for years, but the prospect of having a ladies’ division gets more and more likely every day. It’s something I’m personally working towards.

It’s exciting and the girl’s market, the women’s crowd, that’s a market that Street Fighter has yet to tap into. I’m not going to say a lot of girls like it, but there’s more who enjoy it than you’d think.

In my mind, when a girl sees another girl in the spotlight, they’re going to want to jump on it. As soon as mainstream girls see all these other girls getting all this fame from playing Street Fighter, they’re going to want to hop on board. And that’s good for everybody.

GG: Oh, sweet. Well, backing up quite a bit: Sometimes when a fighting game is released, there are certain characters who are overpowered. Are there character regulations in professional Street Fighter play?

Goo: Right now there are some people who want to ban Seth, who is the boss character.

GG: What about Gouken?

Goo: Nobody is really pushing Gouken anymore because he’s not that big of a deal. At this point in Japan, you cannot play Seth. In America, at EVO, he’s not banned.

I think he should be banned, but I don’t really care that much one way or the other. A lot of people kind of misconstrue my position. I catch a lot of heat for wanting to ban Seth. Everyone wants to act like I’m anti-Seth.

GG: Is Seth still fair game at Bar Fights?

We had contest, called “Beat A Pro,” 2 out of 3 matches with a $500 prize – Seth and Gouekn were banned. For that, I felt like they should be banned – they were banned in Japan. The other reason was that I didn’t have any of them unlocked on my PS3 or Xbox 360. I could spend a lot of time trying to unlock them, or I could focus on trying to get the event to run smoothly.

Some people were pissed. Mr. Wizard, who runs SRK, was making fun of me banning Seth. Anybody who’s picking up Seth has put maximum of what… 2 months into the game?

The whole Seth thing is so stupid. I wish Capcom would just come out and say Seth is or isn’t meant to be played in tournaments and just solve the whole thing.

GG: Anything else you want to ad?

Goo: Street Fighter IV is changing lives. Jump on the Street Fighter IV bandwagon and drink the Street Fighter IV Kool-Aid.

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To keep up to date on Street Fighter Bar Fights, or to check out Gooteck’s Street Fighter podcast, head over to his homepage!