Video games are stereotypically cast as the bane of a productive, sociable existence. Yet, this image hardly matches the one seen every Saturday in Stephen Pfister’s Apple Valley home. The room is packed with some 20 odd people, mostly male, of varying age, ethnicity and profession, all chatting pleasantly about game nuances, jobs, girlfriends and the occasional wager on a match’s outcome. In the center of the action, two combatants tap away at specialized joysticks made to mimic those found on the stand-up arcade machines of yesterday. There’s no frantic mashing and swearing but rather a quiet, professional-like respect that passes between them. This is a ranked match, after all, and the winner will have more than his fair share of time to gloat once the round is over.

So goes the unique experience of a MN Street Fighter ranked tournament, the organization’s way of sorting the top-of-the-line from the relative newcomer. Tournaments work off of a ranked bracket system, with players earning points towards their overall scores, posted by Pfister on mnstreetfighter.com. Players compete for the highest cumulative total score over the course of several tournaments, with each different game having its own leaderboard. Games played for ranking are mostly 2D fighting games which include Street Fighter IV, III and II, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, and a few others, with the eponymous and recently released Street Fighter IV being the current main event.

The Street Fighter series is a classic of the genre, known for its Japanese quirks and dedicatedly old-school gameplay. The original Street Fighter is often considered a sort of prequel, released to arcades in 1987. The game featured only two playable characters, the series’ stars Ryu and Ken, and not much else. The worldwide smash hit success of Street Fighter II in 1991 set the series upon its throne as the king of fighting games, innovating the concept of multiple characters with unique move sets, creating a hitherto unknown amount of depth and replay value for the genre. Suddenly, the arcades became a proving ground of Street Fighter superiority, a competitive environment that Pfister says gamers his age (29) are starting to become nostalgic for. A newcomer to the league, Collin Pote, cites the arcade experience as a draw for him. “Arcades aren’t really a big thing anymore hanging out with a bunch of guys that have same mindset, you kind of get that same mindset again,” Pote says.
Nostalgia seems to be a driving force behind the group’s choice of 2D-style fighting games, called as such because of the onscreen characters’ inability to move in a direction other than up, down, back and forward. Once a limitation of gaming’s earliest epoch, the 2D fighter has now become the gaming equivalent of certain forms of French cooking: a Spartan exterior invites the newcomer into a world of unseen depth and complexity, ruled over by die-hards who have decided that the old way was the only way and that they had better get very, very good at it. Pfister speaks of MN Street Fighter as a way for players to hone their skills. “Part of the way to get better [at games like this] is just by practicing. People said that wanted to play tournaments, so I started hosting,” Pfister says. After the initial group of friends who formed the league needed a way to keep track of who had won their tournaments, Pfister got the idea to form a website to keep track of rankings, and MN Street Fighter was born.

Possibly the most interesting thing about MN Street Fighter is the fact that, from a technological standpoint at least, it need not exist. Innovations in gaming have led to the ability for gamers to play against one another via the internet, through services like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, with the abilityto play ranked tournaments without ever having to leave the house. But Pfister insists that there’s more to it than that.

“It’s a little different than the online experience,” he says. “You know you’re going to see the person next weekend, there’s more respect involved.” Indeed, the typical MN Street Fighter tournament chatter is a far cry from the usual semi-literate trash talk screed of Xbox Live. It’s this sense of professionalism and respect that makes MN Street Fighter’s community stand out against the unflattering portrayal of gamers we see regularly. Sure, trash talk is thrown around, but no more than at dad’s bowling league. In fact, MN Street Fighter seems to capture a bit of that atmosphere. It’s wonderfully unpretentious, a small group of gamers from all walks of life getting together for a bit of friendly competition and a chance at the glory of being number one. While the bestselling game titles may still be interactive versions of Micheal Bay flicks, MN Street Fighter keeps the competitive spirit of the arcade alive.