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This article was kindly submitted by Woolie “ThirtyHitCheapz” Madden, community organizer, tournament director and color commentator for Montreal Street Fighter.  When I found out recently about their innovative method of building a Street Fighter community in their area without a traditional arcade, I had to know more and that you guys would get some ideas on how to do the same in your area, since that’s one of the questions that I get asked a lot.  Do you think you can use this model as a template for building a community in your own area?  If so, please post in the comments!  Thank you to Woolie for the article, looking forward to seeing what MTLSF does next!

–gootecks

Building a local Street Fighter community from the ashes of fallen arcades is an immensely difficult task. Keeping one alive and organized is an even greater challenge. The payoff, however, becomes immediately apparent when everyone comes together, leveling up, making noise and that electricity in the air can be felt: We do it for the hype.

Still, the way is paved with obstacles and roadblocks that can kill the momentum necessary to keep a Street Fighter movement alive. By far, the largest of these obstacles is the venue issue. We’ve learned from various community success stories like Keystone II and The Box Arena that with a large, generous benefactor, it can happen. But what about when there isn’t a massive donation to get things started?

Up here in Montreal, we’ve seen one console arcade after another come and go, unable to make that transition into a profitable business. We’ve suffered the community crippling effects of instability and downtime periods caused by not having a venue to play at every week. So when it came time for MTLSF (The Montreal Street Fighter community) to find a new home, we had our homework done. What started long ago as small gatherings of 20 in a sports lounge to play Vanilla SF4 had now become a much larger beast that needed it’s own dedicated space. We decided that the most sensible move was to create our own location to play. But not as a business – as a club.

What we realized over time about a console arcade is, in our area at least, if you have a central downtown location, inside of a net café, and perhaps a ton of copies of Halo and Modern Warfare, then you might be able to make a profit. Otherwise, it simply wasn’t going to happen, and no one fighting game community was going to change that in the long run. Even with support from Tekken, Smash Bros, Soul Calibur and BlazBlue communities, the income just wasn’t enough to keep it going. We realized that basically, we had to forget about profit, and instead look at stability and self sustainment as a basis.
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Tagged as: Community Building, Hype Building, MTLSF

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