In the summer of 2004, a “Street Fighter 3” game was going on at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, EVO, the world’s highest-profile fighting game event.
With only blood left, Ken blocked Fengyifan’s 15 attacks with his elbows and knees in the tidal wave of cheers, and completed the ultimate counter-kill. The boiling crowd and the commentator’s “Unbelievable” were captured by the camera forever. recorded, this moment is called Evo
moment #37.
But in fact EVO Moments does not have 1~36
Daigo Umehara, who achieved this magical skill, has become an immortal legend that is talked about by countless fighting players. EVO, which set the stage for it and endowed it with legendary value, also celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.
This multi-event IP, whose full name is the Evolution Championship Series, not only inherits the enthusiastic competitive culture of arcade fighting in the stable operation for many years, but also provides a stage for electronic martial arts fans around the world to realize their dreams.
Behind the legendary events and players, there is a passionate story dedicated to love. The protagonist of the story is based on interest and fueled by passion, quietly changing the entire fighting game industry, benefiting fighting players all over the world.
With the end of this year’s EVO, we will also tell the legend of the founders of EVO, the two brothers Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon, and see how they changed the entire fighting game industry by themselves.
1
Two identical twins, Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon, were born in California in the 1970s.
Due to good family conditions, the two brothers received an Atari 2600 from their parents when they were only five years old. For young children, this rare electronic object brings them a novel experience far beyond ordinary toys.
Whether it is a combat mission (COMBAT) that uses pixels to penetrate enemy tanks, or a blasting comet (asteroids) that prevents meteorites from falling to the earth, the two brothers are deeply addicted to it, and they are more and more interested in this game called “video game”. Magical things generate interest. As they got older, the two brothers began to actively study the logic behind the game in addition to playing the game. Rather than simply playing according to the rules of the game, they hoped to understand how the various functions in the game were realized.
So, they begged their parents for months to get a host with programming ability, and finally got an Atari 800XL and a BASIC programming cassette on Christmas Day 1983. At that time, they compared the basic code in the computer magazine, entered it into the host little by little, and then did some simple debugging according to their own ideas, and made a lot of simple small games.
Because of their talent and hobby, the Cannon brothers were successfully admitted to Stanford University in the early 1990s, majoring in computer science. In the college years, the category of fighting games was very popular with the popularity of “Street Fighter 2”.
Although only a sequel, “Street Fighter 2” sold nearly 50,000 units at the beginning of its release in 1991, and was exported to the world within two years, bringing Capcom $1.5 billion in revenue , accounting for nearly 60% of the global arcade market. Under such a popular sales data, the Cannon brothers who love games are naturally deeply attracted by this “national game” and become “fighting teenagers” who never sleep and fight in the arcade until dawn.
As the two brothers became more and more skilled in Street Fighter skills, the two gradually began to come into contact with some local masters. At that time, arcade halls, bowling alleys, and other small shops with fighting machines in the United States would regularly hold some small events.
On the one hand, you can use the title of “who is the strongest player” to harvest a wave of “take advantage” of a large number of coins, and on the other hand, you can also promote the storefront and attract more newcomers to play. In such a competition atmosphere, different regions, different urban areas, and even different streets have their own “ace players” born.
What kind of folk masters such as California State Returning King, New York Ghost Sorrow, Detroit Shadowless Hand, and the Pharaoh next door, not only do they look down on each other, but also often leave their own challenge posts on the underdeveloped Internet message boards. Then, while disclosing his practice experience, he argued with the “challengers” who came to discuss, and quarreled wildly.
The Cannon Brothers, as avid fans of the game, have also become one of the batch of posters. In order to solve the urgent problem of “who is the strongest player in North America”, they decided to make a big news – don’t you all say that you are the best? Then I will hold a “National Master Competition”. Let’s pull out the mule or the horse first.
So, in order to hold this “Huashan Lunjian”, the Cannon Brothers pulled in two other friends, Joey Cuellar and Seth Killian, four people and the local arcade hall. Cooperation was reached. And by posting online, distributing flyers and calling invitations, they held a fighting game contest – they named this game Battle
By the Bay, which means Battle of the Bay, or B3 for short. They were very satisfied with the name, because it sounded like E3, revealing a foreign atmosphere.
In 1996, the Battle of the Gulf officially started, and the competition items were “Street Fighter 2” and “Teenage Street Fighter 2”. The number of participants was as high as 64, including Alex Valle, who was later famous in the fighting game circle, and James, the famous commentator.
Chen et al. On the day of the competition, gongs, drums and firecrackers were blaring. The audience who came to watch the excitement surrounded the arcade hall. The high popularity and lively atmosphere made the Battle of the Bay the first large-scale fighting game event in the United States.
There were even players from Canada and Kuwait who came to hear the news, adding “cross-border” blood to the game.
With the success of the Battle of the Gulf, the Cannon brothers realized that maybe they could do even bigger than the national competition, so they held larger B4 and B5 events in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
In the B4 competition, the top 5 players of the “Street Fighter 3” project also flew to Japan to have a 5v5 exhibition match between the United States and Japan. When it came to the B5 competition, there were also many Japanese players who flew to the United States to participate. It can be seen that after several years of development, the Battle of the Gulf has already taken the form of an international competition.
Speaking of the Cannon brothers, during the time when the competition was held, the brothers did not waste their studies. After graduating from Stanford, Tony joined Microsoft in 1997, Tom joined VMware in 2000, and both have bright futures. During their work, they used their expertise to create a fighting game forum called Shoryuken.com, which is much more functional than a message board. Players can share information in the forum, discuss technology, or simply chat about gossip between players. There are also old birds who spontaneously make teaching videos and continuous demonstrations, providing a lot of help for novice players.
The competition went smoothly, and the forum atmosphere was in full swing. Just when the Cannon brothers had a double harvest in their interests and careers, they ushered in the first major setback in their lives-the arcade halls in the United States are rapidly disappearing.
2
In fact, as early as the late 1980s, the American arcade industry was already in crisis. Whether it was the aftermath of the Atari crash, or the financial crises such as the “Black Monday” and “Savings and Loans Crisis” in the 1980s and 1990s, they all hit the arcade industry, which requires a lot of liquid assets and is extremely dependent on continuous consumption.
Although the fighting games such as “Street Fighter 2” and “VR Warrior” have achieved a short-term revival, the strength of the blue pill cannot last for long. Even in the most popular era of “Street Fighter 2”, the United States The arcade market is also several billion dollars short of its peak revenue in the 1980s. All game makers know that the era of arcade machines is coming to an end.
And for the founders of Battle for the Bay, the demise of the arcade industry meant that all their previous collaborations with arcade halls came to nothing. More importantly, the fighting gamer community and the arcade culture they love will disappear. In order to inherit the spark of arcade culture, they decided to continue the game. With arcades gone, they needed new venues, new game formats, new game types and players, all from scratch.
In 2002, the Cannon brothers and others worked hard to rent a ballroom at the University of California, Los Angeles, and rented an arcade machine at a high price, intending to hold a new competition here. This competition, as always, is still open to all players. However, the competition system is different from the previous competitions. The process of this competition is that each project will be selected for the top eight first.
Starting from the quarter-finals, the players of each game will take to the main stage, presenting a splendid showdown to the audience through the big screen broadcast. In the past, everyone in the arcade hall watched the game around the machine, but this time the organizer turned the game into a boxing match. This novel and exciting experience has won unanimous praise from the players and the audience.
As you may have guessed, this game is Evolution, or EVO for short.
EVO’s iconic logo
The persistence of the organizers has indeed paid off. As a competition that has no investors, no public relations, and is entirely held out of interest, EVO not only did not die with the arcade after a few sessions, but became more and more vibrant.
Under the thin prize pool that basically comes from player registration fees and spectator tickets, no players get “invitation” and other preferential treatment, so they must tighten their nerves at the “sea election moment” and defeat every opponent who comes to challenge. Under the circumstance that the organizer is fully involved in the project setting and management as part-timers, the Cannon brothers also naturally mingled with the audience who came to watch the game, cheering for the genius who can win the championship for the first time in the auditorium, and for the masters. Every action of ours is a temptation to stand back and focus, and to be amazed by the “Legendary Umehara” who completed the impossible feat.
As a result, the influence of EVO has grown several times within a few years. With the increase of contestants, since 2005, the venue of the competition has been changed to Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps, which has continued to this day.
Today’s EVO is probably the most contested eSports tournament in the world. Its prize pool and attention may be far less than those of professional e-sports leagues, but the ability to continue the arcade culture and make players and players feel passion may already be the original vision of the Cannon Brothers.
However, heroes who are motivated by interest will not be stagnant because of the realization of their dreams. Compared with the later careers of the Cannon brothers, the founding and development of EVO seems less important.
3
In 2006, Tony left Microsoft and Tom joined VMware for the sixth year. At that time, “Street Fighter 2” landed on Microsoft’s new host XBOX360. In order to recall their youth, the two resolutely supported one.
However, they soon discovered that the network latency of the game was too high, and it usually took a second to respond when pressing the button. For fighting games with frame-accurate operations, such online battles are useless.
Due to the 1V1 gameplay of fighting games, manufacturers can only set the game’s networking mode to P2P. In this way, the game’s online battle will be affected by various factors, ranging from mountains and rivers, to the next movie next door. , as long as there is a little disturbance, the smooth Shenglong Fist will become a stuck white fist.
If you even live in California and are less than a few dozen miles away from the Microsoft branch, you will be troubled by the delay and lag, then the network resources are even worse, and players in more remote areas can’t play at all? With this kind of thinking, the Cannon brothers decided to once again embark on a journey to save the fighting players.
Borrowing their knowledge from work, the brothers began to scrutinize technical solutions to network latency. They found that although the existing network connection code is simple and clear in logic, it is almost impossible to achieve a smooth battle experience in a non-LAN environment.
The fighting game runs at 60 frames per second, which means 60 commands from the opponent are received every second. And once there is a packet loss, the game will be stuck when it cannot accept the other party’s command.
It will not run until it is instructed again, depending on how quickly the network recovers. The changing ping also changes the latency of game input, making it impossible for players to grasp or even miss the timing of input commands.
The brothers concluded that if you want to make the networking experience like a stand-alone machine, then you need to solve two problems: one is to keep the local input from being affected by delays, and the other is how to receive the other party’s instructions more efficiently.
Compared with the first one, the second one is an almost unsolvable problem. But they still thought of an alternative – if the opponent cannot receive the command in time due to network problems, predict what he will do. Specifically: make the game repeat the last command the player made.
Based on their knowledge of fighting games, the Cannons knew that all the moves the characters made were essentially a continuous animation. Assuming that the animation of a complete Shenglongquan is 60 frames, it means that from the moment the Shenglongquan is issued, within the next second, this will be an unchangeable fact. If you understand the mechanics of the game, you should know that during the duration of the opponent’s Rising Dragon Fist, whether he receives his orders or not, it will not affect the progress of the game.
And it is this certainty that buys space for network signals. When network fluctuations occur, the code will first give an opponent the previous instructions to let the game run first. So in the player’s cognition, the game is still running smoothly.
In the face of a more complicated situation, the Cannon brothers also made perfect considerations. Under their optimization, a complex network fluctuation will also become quite smooth. Here is an example of a visual point. If in the game, your opponent is moving forward, and the network fluctuates, if this is the 300th frame, the game will continue to execute his 299th frame instruction, that is, it is still going to go ahead.
But maybe, your opponent’s input at this moment is not forward but jump. Assuming that at frame 303, the network returns to normal, the code will return to frame 300 for input detection, and the game will start immediately after getting the correct command. Render the third frame of animation that takes off, and cut off the first two frames of animation to make sure the game is on the correct timeline.
Although the direct switch from forward animation to jump animation will be a bit fragmented, compared to the input lag and sudden pause visible to the naked eye, such dynamic changes in just a few frames are obviously more fluid and comfortable.
This improved network code will continuously correct the game screen according to the prediction-check-re-rendering process. This working mechanism like repeated rewinding is what we now call “rollback code”.
I believe that friends who pay attention to fighting games will often hear this name in recent years. But strictly speaking, the application of rollback code did not start with fighting games. It was used in FPS games as early as the nineties. And it was the Cannon brothers who transformed it and introduced it into fighting games.
The Cannon brothers knew that their “invention” was of great significance and might change the future of fighting games, so they contacted a friend, Seth Killian, one of the founders of EVO, and asked him if he wanted to watch it. A “great invention”. Seth was working as a community manager at Capcom in North America at this time. As a person in the industry, he naturally realized the importance of rolling back the code.
He said to the Cannon brothers, if you guys want to sell it to Capcom, I can help with referrals. The Cannon brothers are thrilled, and as longtime fans, they wish they could contribute to Capcom’s fighting game. But they believe that the current results alone are not convincing enough. They also need to be better prepared.
In order to verify the effect of the rollback code, the Cannon brothers spent nearly a year building a battle platform – GGPO, added the rollback code to it, and made it available for free public download on the forum. Soon, players who have used it were completely shocked by the magical ability of “predicting the future” brought by GGPO, and gave a lot of praise. According to statistics, even the initial version of the rollback code has a “prediction” success rate of nearly 80%. A large number of players who suffer from network instability can finally play online games as smoothly as offline games.
Finally, the Cannon brothers brought GGPO to meet Capcom’s executives. After listening to Tony’s explanation, Capcom happily purchased the commercial copyright of GGPO.
Everything seems to be going well. In the thoughts of the Cannon brothers, with the promotion of the lead brother, the rollback code will soon benefit fighting players around the world. In 2009, the console version of Street Fighter 4 was released. When the Cannon Brothers opened this long-awaited masterpiece and had a glimpse of how the results of their meticulous research benefited the vast number of players, they suddenly discovered that this “blockbuster” that ended the dark age of fighting games, The online battle is actually the same card as “Street Fighter 2” on XBOX.
Perhaps due to the face of “Action Tianzun”, or considering the release cycle, Capcom did not use this new technology in the main new fighting game, which once disappointed the Cannon brothers.
Therefore, the Cannon brothers, who have repeatedly insisted that it is better to seek others than themselves, finally decided to no longer face their love with a sideline and part-time mentality, but to devote themselves to the career of fighting games. They founded a game company to develop Your own fighting game. With his own savings, he established an independent scholarship mechanism for the NYU Game Development Center to reward students who have made unique contributions to the field of game development. At the same time, it provides dedicated help and publicity channels for independent game developers on EVO. And they themselves, also visited everywhere to promote the excellence of the rollback code,
Compared with Japanese game makers, European and American developers are more interested in rolling back code. Whether it is an independent game or a 3A masterpiece, the online experience is regarded as the top priority of the game.
The developers of “Killer Instinct” made a drastic transformation of the game engine in pursuit of a perfect online experience. The developers of “Injustice 2” made the rollback code one of the most important parts of the game, and spent nearly a year optimizing it with nearly ten engineers.
What’s more interesting is that, as the first Capcom to have a rollback code, although this technology was used in “Street Fighter 5” released in 2016, it was widely criticized by players for its lack of optimization. Just last year, in Capcom’s CPT competition, the well-known player PUNK also gave Capcom a public complaint.
Now, with the epidemic raging around the world, players have higher and higher requirements for the quality of online games. The importance of rolling back the code has finally been paid attention to by developers all over the world, and even Japanese manufacturers have finally come back. New fighting games such as “Guilty Gear: Struggle”, “The King of Fighters 15”, and “DNF Showdown” have also added this feature in line with the times. Just finished EVO
In 2022, “Samurai Soul Akatsuki” and “Dragon Ball Fighter Z” also promised to support rollback in future updates.
After 15 years from its birth to the present, the day when rollback codes become standard in fighting games has finally arrived.
In fact, for the Cannon brothers, whether it is to start EVO as an ordinary player, or to become a professional developer to make games. It’s just an externalization of their pursuit of loving things. They themselves do not expect to gain fame and money through some kind of “merit”, but on the way to pursue their hobbies, they accomplish these seemingly industry-changing “feats” by the way.
Tom once said: “I have been a player from beginning to end, and through fighting games, I have met many special people, made lifelong friends, and learned to face adversity and break through. But the art of what I do Don’t rely on anyone’s support, if I need a tool, I’ll create it myself.”
And I think, perhaps it is precisely in this way that we can drive ourselves with love and motivate ourselves with actions, so that the Cannon brothers can firm up their expectations and hopes in the face of countless setbacks and difficulties, so as to achieve changes for the benefit of the world.
This article is reprinted from: https://www.yystv.cn/p/9998
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