Go inside the minds of the FGC’s greatest with Fly Nation’s street interviews

For the past few years and with increased ambition during the COVID-19 pandemic the FGC has taken to creating personal brands, producing content and being appealing to watch on streams and edited videos. Which is why I was delighted when I was informed of a series of street interviews with members of our community. In this series of in-person interviews you can watch names including Sabin, Yipes, Brian_F, and Koustics talk about where they are in the scene currently and anecdotes from the past.

There’s a very mixed bag of interview questions across all of the videos. You can find a lot of commentary from top players about the current state of competitive fighting games, while also hear what they have to say about growing the scene and the social aspect of it all. Street Fighter V players would find the interview with Brian_F very interesting, particularly this section on ranking the power levels of regions:

I was also very pleasantly surprised to see SNK community member Aroo interviewed on a decidedly humble background talking about the importance of rollback netcode post-Guilty Gear Strive:

Behind the camera

These interviews are a project of Fly Nation TV, a mixed media YouTube channel that has been recording and publishing the interviews throughout 2021. DiNyc3st is the man behind the camera and has been a long time participant in the community himself. I asked him about the idea behind these interviews:

Shiburizu: Where did you get the idea to start doing street interviews for FGC members?

DiNyc3st: I’m a huge fan of Battle Rap. And there’s a media outsource that travels to events and do live interviews before, during and post events. So during early days of the pandemic I started watching more, and more media footage since I didn’t really have anything to do since I got laid off. So I made a promised that as soon as offline locals started to reoccur that I would start doing the same just so people can get an insight on some of the player’s thought process in our scene. Luckily I already had video equipment since I work in the media industry prior so why not do it? I do plan on continuing with more interviews starting this month as last month was very busy, personal-wise.

One thing was immediately clear to me when I looked into these videos: These interviews are not intended to be glamorous. They are decidedly off the cuff, honest and continuous streams of consciousness from people who have already accomplished a lot within the fighting game community. That is an excellent point of distinction from the current landscape of content production and I highly recommend watching them. Check out the full playlist on Fly Nation TV’s YouTube channel.