Las Vegas may be the boxing capital of the world, but for a long weekend every summer, it becomes the mecca of a more vicarious form of combat.
Evo, short for the Evolution Championship Series, is the world’s most prestigious tournament for fighting videogames. Whether you specialize in a long-running series like Street Fighter or newer titles like BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, Evo is the Super Bowl of virtual hand-to-hand brawling. And last August, the most dramatic moments of Evo 2018 played out in a brand-new game.
Dragon Ball FighterZ had only arrived in stores months before, but it immediately found a following among the competitive ranks of fighting-game enthusiasts. Part of the game’s appeal was owing to the beloved anime series it was based on; more was a result of the game’s well-calibrated tag-team action; all of it was palpable in the thrumming Mandalay Bay Events Center when the finals bout took place. More than 2,500 people had registered to try their hand at FighterZ, making it the most popular game of the tournament, and now only two were left standing: veteran pro Goichi “Go1” Kishida and a young prodigy named Dominique McLean.
McLean was only 20, but he was already well known in the fighting game community. Despite his age, he had taken home Evo gold three times, in two different titles. A prolific trash-talker both in person and online, his brio was backed up by his success, though it was also in keeping with tradition: While the other competitive scenes grew out of networked PC games, fighting games have been a staple of arcades of the ’90s, with players battling for supremacy on the same machine with attacks both virtual and psychological.
Less in keeping with tradition in the fighting-game community? McLean, also known as SonicFox, is an openly gay member of the furry scene, one who wears pieces of his vulpine fursuit at competitions. Yet, by the end of 2018, McLean would be named the “esports player of the year” at the annual Game Awards. He would garner incredible goodwill in the community, promoting rising players and pledging $10,000 in prize winnings to his opponent’s father’s cancer treatment.
And he would be the heir apparent to the throne of fighting games, his moniker as synonymous with winning as greats like Daigo, Tokido, and Justin Wong. (Long before Twitch turned Ninja into a superstar, long before esports jumped the fence and made it onto ESPN, Street Fighter savants were the gaming world's one-name celebrities.)
The story of McLean’s 2018 is one of a powerhouse in the fighting game community becoming a figurehead for inclusion and diversity and the rivalry that tested and pushed him to his greatest heights yet. And on it rolls in 2019. This weekend, McLean is in Los Angeles for the finals of the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour—and he's looking to prove, once and for all, that the Fox stands alone.
McLean started young, playing videogames in his hometown of Townsend, Delaware, thanks to his older brother. At the age of 3, he says, he was playing Tekken 3. By 13, he was entering tournaments, playing Mortal Kombat against opponents decades his senior. At 16 he took his first Evo trophy, for the game Injustice: Gods Among Us; he’d pick up two more in the next two years, all while wearing a hat with blue-furred ears. (Though McLean had discovered his SonicFox "fursona" around the age of 10, he didn’t begin wearing its trappings at competitions until he was established on the circuit.)
But those were just the biggest titles at the biggest tournaments. McLean was an omnivore of the genre, learning and besting top players in Skullgirls, Dead or Alive, and more. All the while, he was becoming an icon in his own right. The fighting game world never shed the brashness of its arcade origin, but even in the sea of outsized personalities, McLean's ears and trash talk made him stand out.
To hear him tell it, he became like Dragon Ball protagonist Goku, roaming the countryside looking for competition. “I just wanna fight the top players of almost every community ever,” he says. “Even in a new game I’m just getting into, I always pick out a top player: ‘All right, let’s play.’” And in January 2018, when Dragon Ball FighterZ came out, the would-be Goku got his wish—courtesy of actual Goku.
Fighting games and anime already share a close relationship; the genre has seen numerous titles try to replicate popular anime battles or utilize the art form’s stylish aesthetic. While a number of Dragon Ball games had been released over the years, FighterZ immediately set itself apart. Not only was it developed by one of the best games studios in the genre, Arc System Works, but it shared DNA with a foundational franchise of the competitive fighting game community: the Marvel Vs. Capcom series.
If, as with boxing, you think of each fighting game as its own division, then FighterZ was the melting pot that saw all the divisions collide—and all the weight classes, too. Platform fighters and 3D brawlers, tag-team and classical enthusiasts: They all dove in, creating a talent pool that was nearly unprecedented in its size and diversity. It was too tantalizing for McLean to resist, and he quickly emerged as a top player. But doing that was about more than just natural ability. McClean became a graduate-level student of the game.
For the most part, fighters are no different from any other type of game: You have to move the sticks in the right direction and press the right buttons in a given order to execute the move you want, whether it’s a simple kick or an intricate combination. (While fighting games can be played with traditional PlayStation or Xbox gamepads, competitive players can also opt for personal arcade sticks or other genre-specific machinations.) But each of those moves consists of discrete animations, each of which lasts a certain number of frames—and understanding those frames is the very mathematical core of fighting games’ thrust-and-parry ballet.
Think of a baseball player trying to hit a pitch. What matters is the moment of contact, but that moment is just one small part of a longer, sequence: wind-up, swing, and follow-through. In fighting games, the swing launches a “hitbox,” which will do damage to an opponent if it touches an unguarded portion of their opponent’s avatar, or a “hurtbox.” Knowing a game’s frame data—how many frames it takes for a given move to produce a hitbox, and how many frames of vulnerability you’re left with if an opponent blocks that move—is what separates top-level players from novices.
Like most top players in the field, McLean has memorized those numbers, and can use his knowledge base to suss out gaps in opponents’ defenses, then strike. This isn’t easy; in a game running at 60 frames per second, you have only fractions of a second to respond. Knowing what moves you should execute—or should forego entirely—is just as tricky, and that’s where McLean truly shines. “I don’t see punches and kicks as punches and kicks,” he says. “I need to know, is this attack he did punishable? Does it set up a situation where I can’t really challenge him? Can I challenge him or check him?”
At their highest level, fighting games are a combination of canvas and conduit; the more you internalize a game’s frame data, the more your personal style can shine through the ones and zeros and suffuse the play itself. Watching McLean compete is like watching a mathematician play free jazz: The skill he has comes from a mechanical and intellectual foundation, but his grasp of the game's frame data allows him to riff in ways that are remarkably his own. He excels at throwing long series of attacks, designed to force his opponent into making a mistake. He might be carrying out moves in a predictable cadence—low-low-high, low-low-high—but then he switches and adds in an overhead attack, or jumps behind you while you’re otherwise occupied. It’s brutal to see, and even more so to fight.
As McLean was forging his style and dominating the FighterZ circuit in North America, the man who would become his Evo rival was doing the same in Japan. Eleven years older than McLean, Goichi "Go1" Kishida had long ago achieved fighting-game renown for his rock-solid defense and composure in the face of frenzied attacks. He excelled in Street Fighter and niche gems alike, but in FighterZ, he found a game that rewarded that impermeability; almost immediately after the game’s release, he was being recognized as the best player in the world.
SonicFox’s irresistible attacks seemed destined to collide with Go1’s immovable defense. As with any high-profile showdown, verbal foreplay preceded any actual confrontation. Kishida struck first, celebrating a tournament win in Japan by declaring “you’re next, SonicFox.” McLean replied with his own post-victory threat: After breezing through a tournament called Winter Brawl, he took the microphone to address his nemesis. “Goichi,” he said, “Omae wa mou shindeiru.” You are already dead. A famous line from the anime series Fist of the North Star, it was a fittingly coded shot across the bow.
