As you probably already know, our recent Capcom Digital Day event
was a media event. Meaning, the invites were extended only to gaming
press and media folks, as opposed to the general public. What you
probably didn’t know was that we actually extended a few “community”
invites to the Capcom community: Loyal Capcom community fans who
happened to be located around the San Francisco area.

I followed two of them, Tony and Alex, around for most of the event,
getting their informal impressions on what they saw and taking pictures
of the whole thing. At the end of which held a special surprise for them!

Alex is your normal average Street
Fighter fanatic, except for one thing: He was actually contracted to do
a few music tracks on the upcoming SSFIITHDR. Because of this, getting
to see SSFIITHDR was especially satisfying to him (He hadn’t actually
seen it even though he did some tracks for it), and the bulk of his
visit was spent on the SF Kiosks. He’s no fluke too, and handed out
plenty of butt-kicking to all challengers. As a gamer, he was no fluke
as well, as he set the record for the lowest time in the Bionic
Commando Rearmed Challenge Room challenge that we had laid down to
everyone present, besting all the gaming “professionals” (To bad his
score didn’t count, as he set the record on his second, unofficial, go
around).

Intrepid web programmer by day, closet gamer by night, Tony was
another community member we invited who was also a Street Fighter
fanatic. So much so, he was especially stoked that he got to meet Seth.
A well rounded gamer, Tony tried his hand at all the playable titles on
the floor, after which he assured me he would definitely be buying a
few of them given how awesome they were, with SSFIITHDR and BCR at top
of his purchase list.

After the event ended, came the special surprise we had for them.

Although it wasn’t on the itinerary, as the event winded down, I
escorted them to the elevator and snuck them upstairs. They thought I
was going to silence them permanently and then dump their body where it
wouldn’t be found since they had just seen all these then-secretive
announcements.

I was actually taking them to a conference room called Street Fighter. Inside of which held two arcade cabinets, which housed Street Fighter IV.

The two of them got about 30 minutes of alone time with Street
Fighter IV. GDC notwithstanding, I think Tony and Alex are among the
first in the “general public” to have gotten to play Street Fighter IV.
Up until the event, they had only seen screenshots, which they both
noted don’t do the game justice. The game has to be seen in motion,
with your own eyes, to be believed.

It was interesting to note that the first characters chosen was Ken
and Guile, even though they did eventually ran through the gamut of
characters, including Abel and Crimson Viper (Both of which they
thought was very cool).

In the end, I had to rip their bloody hands away from the controls.
For the record, Alex whooped on Tony pretty badly, no matter what
characters were chosen. In fact, Alex had to lose on purpose so that he
can check out some of the other characters.

So… the moral of this story? Keep an eye out on our community sites
(blog, forums) for news of the next event, because you never know when
we’ll be extending more invites. Perhaps we’ll even be willing to fly
some of you out here too…