Ultimate Warrior 3V3 Tekken Team Battle was an epic gaming event from PROVEN eSports Group and Grand Kai Gaming. One of its combatants is competitive gamer Keith B!
Following the Tekken 7 action Keith took up the challenge of answering our FT10 Questionnaire. We hope you enjoy THIS INTERVIEW!
How did you come up with your gamertag/gamer name? Share the origin story with us.
When I started competing, I knew I didn’t want anyone to call me by my PSN name because that was something I came up with when I was still in middle school. Since I couldn’t think of anything, I went with the old school first name, last initial to get Keith B. I figured it worked for a lot of great players, so why not?
What was your first experience with gaming and how did it impact you?
My dad and my older brother were playing console and computer games since before I was born, so I’ve played video games for as long as I can remember. I do remember the first time I played a fighting game.
When Street Fighter 2 came out on Super NES, my brother insisted that we go rent it and I remember looking at the box art thinking, “This game looks really bad!”
The US version of vanilla SF2 had hilariously bad box art, but we both got hooked and I’ve played fighting games ever since.
Name what you consider to be the 5 greatest games of all-time. Which of these 5 is your all-time favorite?
If I stick to fighting games. Tekken is my favorite fighting game series. I also love the Soul Calibur series because I played a lot of it with my friends before I became a competitive player.
I think Virtua Fighter is the most important 3D fighting game because it created the 3D genre and innovated so much on the technology side during the arcade era.
Which console release were you so excited about that it made you lose sleep thinking about it?
The one console I actually camped out to buy at launch was the Nintendo Wii. I went to a store that had a lottery for the 10 or so consoles they would get, but I lost the lottery. My friends and I ended up camping outside of a Best Buy all night. I remember some drunk college kids drove past at around 2am and gave us tacos.
Why do you think retro gaming has become such a popular subculture?
Many of us from the generation who grew up on video games are a little older now and sharing our passion with our kids, so I think that contributes to the popularity. The retro aesthetic is also often simple but stylish, and I think that makes it easy to people who don’t play a lot of video games to get into that style of game.
What video game has inspired you the most?
Watching streams of Street Fighter 4 was what really inspired me to want to be a competitor and eventually start going to tournaments when Street Fighter V came out in 2016.
Being a gamer sometimes comes with a negative perception. How do you think that perception can be changed?
The perception has already changed a lot as gaming has become more and more mainstream. I think the biggest shift came over the past decade with the rise of streaming. A lot of young people are drawn in because streamers are such charismatic personalities, and the predominant form of content in that space is gaming.
Streaming is also unique because people who enjoy watching it have the option to try streaming for themselves. That’s shifted the perspective significantly compared to when I was in high school.
Competitive gaming and the [Fighting Game Community] both present their own set of unique biases as well. Competitive video games as spectator events are still weird to a lot of people, but I think that will fade as more and more people get exposed to streaming and the idea of watching people play video games.
The FGC is unique in that bubble, we have our own cultures and our own structure. The FGC in particular is going through growing pains right now. It’s trying to figure out how to become more mainstream and how to increase prize pools while maintaining the grassroots culture that makes the FGC what it is.
I don’t think that the FGC will ever be as big as something like League of Legends, but we’re definitely growing right now so we have no choice but to address that. It’s a difficult task to deal with the negative perception issues that the FGC has without making it feel sterile like other esports are. The fact that the FGC, as compared to other esports, is a more free space where you can be yourself is one of the great things about it.
However, if that freedom devolves into spouting a bunch of racist or sexist or whatever nonsense at events or in stream chats, then we just alienate a whole audience. New people have to feel like they can join in and participate in the fun and not like they’re being targeted, otherwise they simply won’t stick around.
How has gaming built your confidence in other areas of our life?
I really started grinding Tekken 7 while recovering from surgery. During my recovery, I spent a lot of time playing in HaitakeKakashi’s online training sessions and working on improving at the game. Seeing improvements in my gameplay helped me overcome setbacks in my surgical recovery that were outside of my control. In Tekken you always have full control over what you can do to progress, and that’s not always the case in other aspects of life.
Is competitive gaming missing anything that you feel would drastically improve it?
In the case of Tekken, I want to see more people strive to play Tekken at a high level, especially in my local community here in Michigan. Right now, my focus is on playing as well as I can to achieve that.
What do you see as the future of gaming?
I’m going to answer this as what I see as the future of Tekken.
Tekken 7 is probably not going anywhere anytime soon, since we still have another character and other DLC scheduled to come out this year. Due to Tekken 7’s success, there will certainly be a follow up on next generation hardware. Tekken 7 was a fairly low-budget game that was originally developed in 2015, so I expect the next installment to have a much more substantial budget and take full advantage of the unique hardware features available through the RTX graphics cards and next gen consoles.
I personally would love to see a shift from 60 fps to 120 fps for Tekken. I like to play First Person Shooter games casually, and the performance advantages offered from higher frame rates in that genre would be interesting to see applied to Tekken. |THIS.
[By Grand Kai and Mr. Joe Walker]
The FT10 Questionnaire Q&A Interview Series is sponsored by PROVEN ESPORTS GROUP – innovating esports through competitive, casual, and educational gaming. For more visit ProvenEsportsGroup.com.
