What's the fighting game you remember the most from the arcades of your youth? Street Fighter II? Tekken? Mortal Kombat? If you're from Latin America, there's an excellent chance that the first game that jumps to mind wasn't any of those, and the game that defined your formative arcade experience was actually SNK's The King of Fighters.
"I would play every day after school," said Jose Ramon Navarrete, who grew up in Jiquilpan, about two hours south of Guadalajara in Mexico. "Sometimes I would skip school to play [King of Fighters]."
Today, at 32, Navarrete is better known as "kofROMANCE," a professional King of Fighters player who regularly appears at competitions like EVO. He now lives in Las Vegas, where EVO is held, and often hosts players from out of the country at his house during competitions. "We had Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico represented in the house, so we could share a lot of stories from back in the day," he said. What binds these players from so many countries together, he said, was King of Fighters.
It's well understood in the fighting game community that King of Fighters is a particular passion for many players from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Posts on larger fighting game forums like Shoryuken over the years have told many anecdotal accounts of the scene, and speculation as to why the franchise has proliferated in the region. According to the players, tournament organizers, and media personalities who spoke to Kotaku for this story, King Of Fighters has a curious ubiquity that has become part of the cultural identity for Latin American gamers.
Fighting game tournaments for KOF around the United States frequently have Latin American representation. The greater the size of the tournament, the higher likelihood of spotting players who traveled from Mexico, Chile, or Brazil. Fire up online emulation matchmaking software like Fightcade, and the location flags next to the majority of players are from these regions, too.
But why?
Getting to the bottom of fact versus assumed internet wisdom can be challenging, especially for something ingrained in genre circles since the early days of Street Fighter II's success. Taking to Twitter to find some answers, my mentions and inbox were flooded with responses. Dozens of players and tournament organizers from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and more wanted to tell their stories. And nearly all of them told me the same things, with only incremental details shifting from one source to the next.
Largely, it boils down to the one thing it always does: money.
