Kumite in Tennessee: The Revival

Part 3 – April, May – KiT Planning and Hype Tour – Memphis and Knoxville, TN      

            Part 3 is sort of a 3-in-1, basically three different things I want to talk about but aren’t big enough to have their own part. The first mini-part if you will is the planning for KiT. As I said, after Final Round I got the itch to run another tournament in Tennessee and get as many people as I could to come. The first step was getting Charlie on board because no way was I gonna try to run one on my own. I approached him on the subject one day over at his apartment and surprisingly he was up for it. For those of you who don’t know, Charlie was hardcore into WoW and had fallen off the face of the fighting game world completely. No one had seen him in like 2 years. People would randomly say they saw him or talked to him and I wouldn’t believe it. We searched around for a while for a venue before we finally settled on one we thought was big enough and affordable. After we finally get a date and a venue, I decide it’s time to go travel to make sure our tournament is a success. At the time I thought it would be something of a last hurrah for me, so I wanted to make it big. What’s funny to me is I convinced Charlie to go to on every single trip with me. Each time he would say he’s not going, but I would get him to go at the last minute. That’s really one of the most amazing accomplishments of my life.

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Part 2 – March – Final Round 11 – Atlanta, GA

            The biggest and best tournament of the year definitely did not disappoint. First, I somehow convinced Charlie (CodEZ) to go along with me and Cody. Charlie is the godfather of Tennessee Tekken and the scene just didn’t feel right without him. Although he missed most of the tournament (lol) he did get to chill with his WoW friends, and it got him thinking about fighting games again. One thing that did suck about the tournament was that no one from Memphis went except Cortez despite talking for weeks about how they were gonna go. It was a case of Memphis being Memphis as usual, but still it would have been nice for more TN representation to be there, especially Lil Majin who may have placed in or even won the tournament. It’s sad that Memphis has by far the biggest scene for fighting games of any city in Tennessee yet seems to travel the least. Knoxville rolled pretty hard which was cool. I met Mike the Knoxville Smash player who dominated my 1 week Yoshi and Samus.

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Hello my fellow KiTers and everyone else who might be reading this. With the year soon coming to a close, it is time to look back at 2008 and everything that happened in the world of fighting games and tournaments.  Over the next two weeks I will be revisiting my experiences from the past year, the best year in Tennessee fighting game history. Each day there will be another article posted here at www.kitrevival.com and then posted on the Tennessee thread at Tekken Zaibatsu. I will mostly be writing from a Tennessee standpoint, but I will have a lot to say about the other places I went to and also my thoughts on individual players and the community as a whole.  So on to part 1:

Part 1 – March – Super Smash Bros. Brawl – Nintendo Wii

            When I was a Freshman in college (a long ass time ago), we used to play the original Smash Brothers for the N64 quite a bit. We had a hardcore crew of like 7-8 people, and it was the most fun I’d ever had playing a fighting game. How could it get any better than getting together with 3 other friends and using your favorite Nintendo character? It was back in the free for all scrub days and my strategy consisted of jumping as high as I could in the air and then doing Yoshi’s down+B move (the butt bounce). Top tier I know. I later discovered Tekken and the competitive community, so unfortunately I skipped over Melee for the most part. When Brawl came out early this year I was very excited, fighting games had hit a bit of a lull for me – Tekken DR was ok but just an update to Tekken 5 – a game I don’t really like and makes me emo, SC3 no one seemed to like so there was no one to play, and DOA4 was a few years old and literally no one played that game offline and it was pretty much a laughingstock in the competitive fighting game community (still is). How it was an EVO game I have no idea.

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