The first rule of fight club is: You do not talk about fight club.
For this edition of On:Games, however, I have the opportunity to report on a different kind of underground fighting collective. It’s called Tatakai Tuesday (in Japanese, “tatakai” means “fight”), and unlike the film starring Brad Pitt, participants don’t break out in physical fisticuffs. Instead, every week at the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in Tokyo’s Nakano Ward, the fighting games community squares up with digital fists as they battle one another via video games such as Tekken 8, Street Fighter VI and Guilty Gear Strive.
“This event started around 6½ years ago in early 2018,” says event organizer Jonathan Metoyer. “We had already been running local streams and English mirror streams for fighting game events in Japan. Through work and events, we became connected with the Red Bull team, and when they built this place, we thought that it would be cool to run a regular event in the Red Bull Gaming Sphere.”
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