Tom Cannon is one of the three people in charge of the --a series of high-profile tournaments held throughout the year that culminates in a multigame open tournament on a Las Vegas stage.
How did you get started organizing tournaments? Is this your day job?Organizing tournaments has never been my day job. By day I'm a software engineer. I first started running tournaments back in the early 1990s in arcades like Sunnyvale Golfland. This was before even the very first competitive online games, so in a way Street Fighter is the granddaddy of competitive gaming. Many people forget that there are guys playing Street Fighter today who have been hard-core competitive gamers for over 20 years.
When did you realize these tournaments were going to be a big deal?"The moment" has got to be the , which you can find on YouTube. The crowd response from Daigo's incredible comeback was no less than what you see at traditional sporting events. That's when I knew that fighting games could ignite people's passion in the same way that sports do, but the problem was that we didn't have the right game yet. The fighting games that we had back then were too targeted at the hard-core fighting-game fans, and not gamers in general.
That all changed when Capcom released Street Fighter IV, with fantastic 3D graphics and gameplay that was simple enough to appeal to casual gamers but deep enough to hold a competitive edge. Now, nearly every week there is a pretty big Street Fighter IV tournament going on somewhere in the U.S., and most of these events are streamed online with tens of thousands of watchers. Street Fighter IV has become a budding spectator sport.
How does sponsorship work for tournaments and players? Where does the money come from for the SF side?The sponsor pool isn't as big for fighting-game players, but that is changing with Street Fighter IV's popularity boom. Our 2010 stream was watched by over 2.4 million unique viewers. G4 did a piece on Evo 2010 that featured several top players decked out in their sponsor's shirt. Exposure is exposure. Fighting-game players don't need PCs and components to play their game, but these guys are being watched by an awful lot of gamers who do buy those products. That's why you're starting to see traditionally PC teams like Evil Geniuses pick up top fighting-game players.