This story would be megathread material if not for the fact that I could turn it into a discussion topic lol <3 So share your stories if you have any.
Anyway today I found out that on the 29th season of The Amazing Race (special interest: competitive reality TV) which I haven’t seen before because it was after the time I paid attention to that show, had a roadblock challenge where one of the two racers from each of the remaining four pairs had to play a game of Street Fighter 5 against a pro until they won. (Special interest: Street fighter’s competitive scene and fighting games in general)
Few interesting things about this.
- The leg took place in South Korea, which is interesting because South Korea’s fighting game community is MUCH more focused on Tekken. Most top Tekken players are South Korean. Its Japan’s fgc thats more Street Fighter focused, with a lot of top players being Japanese. Like there are very good Japanese Tekken pros and very good South Korean Street Fighter pros, but if you really wanted to like, represent South Korea’s pro gaming culture which would supposedly be the idea, it should be Tekken. But obviously they did Street Fighter V because Capcom sponsored them lol.
- The two noteable pros were called Poongko and Infiltration. Both pretty over the top personalities. Poongko is known for being sponsored by reddit’s (incredibly bigoted and incredibly horny) /r/Kappa community at one point, and for a lot of silly antics. He’s actually pretty likeable. Infiltration has always been really funny but uh… he’s banned from Capcom sponsored events indefinitely because of a domestic violence case and a few N word drops on stream and a think a couple other problematic instances. So its kinda embarrassing now that he was the representative. He did admittedly have a very fun personality and made funny jokes in interviews and stuff. (Also was known for randomly pulling out unexpected low to mid tiers which is always a crowd favorite).
- The roadblock was a terrible idea lmao. Expecting people with no experience to beat professionals, even in a somewhat unstable game like SF5, was absurd. They ended up having to repetedly have the pros adopt random handicaps until the racers could win. AT least thats how it was explained to me, I havent watched this yet (though I Really want to check it out so I can see how it played out).
Interesting stuff for me!
Yeah lol. I think the interesting thing about it is how its a minor example of capitalism overriding the purpose of the show? Because like I said in the post, if you wanted to do what TAR is supposed to do and represent South Korean culture, the fighting game to do that with would whatever version of Tekken was current then because thats what the FGC there is mostly focused on. But like, Capcom clearly paid to get their game in the episode lol. I have to assume. Just interesting to me.