"Dark ages of the fighting game community where nothing came out between 2002-2009"
*me playing Tekken 5/DR and SC2/3 from 2004 through 2008 with 100+ man majors on the regular*
*me playing Tekken 5/DR and SC2/3 from 2004 through 2008 with 100+ man majors on the regular*
At least for 3d games, our problem wasn't numbers it was growth. Tekken for years put up consistent numbers with no real net gain. Either the same core players were still around or turnover was pretty much even.
Tekken 6 was arguably the series opportunity to reboot itself but was overshadowed by releasing just before SF4 in arcades. You can argue the game itself wasn't a great viewer experience either due to its inaugural Evo having 2 Bobs & 2 Laws in top 4 but that's a diff discussion.
So we missed another cycle and had to wait until Tag 2 3-4 years later to try to gain the spotlight again. Now tag 2 had the problem of high level play being a time sink, so TOs either had to schedule 3-4 hour top 8 blocks or only show top 4 which caused probs for its reputation
Tag 2 however was the point where tekken 6 newbies started to get shine and make top16/top 8 runs and even newer players came out. So beside the OGs like Anakin, Fab, Inkog, GM, Naps we started seeing Obscures, Speedkicks and Plings, fresh faces.
So we kind of had a perfect storm of situations here: old and relatively new blood in the tekken scene, a new attempt at a tekken "reboot," and a slowly festering disdain of Capcom stuff with SF5 release (which is a separate discussion entirely). Tekken 7 succeeded where 6 failed
Tekken 7 is a good game and I'm happy that new people are enjoying it but this has been a grind through those supposed dark ages where Capcom wasn't around. Many people have carried this series in the US waiting for this time to come and I'm happy it's here.
Thanks for reading this ramble, I didn't mean to get into some dissertation level shit but hearing the phrase fgc dark ages sets me off something fierce. I'll shut up now.
