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.)
