12-year-old video game prodigy preps for international Street Fighter tournament

One of the best Street Fighter IV players on the planet is a 12-year-old who lives in Lompoc. Noah Solis, who isn’t in middle school yet, will travel to Las Vegas this summer for an international tournament with thousands of dollars in prize money on the line. He plays for Empire Arcadia, celebrated by the Guinness Book of World Records as the winningest e-sports team ever.

When he plays with his friends, however, Street Fighter IV is not an option. “We play team games,” Solis said. “If I play Street Fighter [with them] they get mad and stuff.”

click to enlarge 12-year-old video game prodigy preps for international Street Fighter tournament
PHOTO COURTESY OF NOAH SOLIS
GAME KING: Noah Solis, 12, (front left) appeared on popular humor website CollegeHumor to demonstrate his skill at Blizzard Entertainment’s digital card game 'Hearthstone.' He won, but the game he really excels at is 'Street Fighter.'

Street Fighter, for the uninitiated, is the signature video game series of the fighting genre. Two people control digital avatars and fight in lightning-quick rounds. The design is colorful and cartoonish, with settings and characters painted in the broad brush of stereotype. By 2014, 35 million units had shipped to homes, and more than $1 billion had been made on the sale of arcade cabinets.

Street Fighter II, the 1987 breakaway game of the series, was so popular that Portland-based game designer Toby Alden credits it with laying the foundation for the genre.

Street Fighter II kind of set the standard for fighting games. It established the formula. It got really big, and it got really technical, too,” he said. The game thrived because it balanced empowering accessibility with a daunting technical depth. Street Fighter IV, published more than two decades later, emulates that balance convincingly.

And Solis, who started showing preternatural skill at a very young age, can play it better than most. He made his bones in Lompoc, entering 30-player tournaments as a first grader.

He was apprehensive heading into that first tournament, he admitted.

“I was [nervous],” he said. “And now I’m just used to it.”

He won, and he kept winning, repeatedly routing opponents who were many times his weight, age, and size on the even playing field of a virtual fight. Those wins propelled Solis to EVO, the Evolution Championship Series, the longest-lived fighting game tournament in the world. It started as a rumble between 40 Street Fighter II aficionados in 1996. Last year, the prize pot for Street Fighter IV at EVO was almost $30,000, with some 2,000 players throwing their controllers in the ring.

Solis placed in the top 50. He’s returning this July to try again. In the meantime, he’s practicing for about two hours a day. Noah plays and competes with his specialized gamepads—rectangular plastic squares about the size of a textbook. They’re specific for Street Fighter, with carefully arranged buttons and retro joysticks topped by fat, globular handles. A talented player can move avatars faster using a gamepad than with a generic controller, eeking out additional microseconds of reaction time.

Competitive Street Fighter is a game won and lost in tiny, fleeting moments. Contemporary fighting games run at about 60 frames per second, compressing a series of static images to create the illusion of movement. Character animations are measured in individual frames; discrete moves such as attacks, blocks, counters and combos have precise temporal value.

To play as well as Solis, you need to memorize the number of frames associated with certain moves and characters and use those values to time your play down to the microsecond. If you can count frames and play precisely, you can interrupt combinations or cancel certain animations entirely.

Alden, the game designer from Portland, compared this kind of high-level play to engaging in a rapid-fire conversation.

“The fights kind of take on narratives that you only really get the language of once you understand how the fight works at a high level,” he said. “One of the functions that games serve is that they act as languages for non-verbal communication. There are always intricacies and subtleties that other players can take advantage of.”

Solis taught himself to count frames by watching videos on YouTube and practicing a ton. Street Fighter, he insisted, is not just a game of lightning reflexes that plays out in the spaces between digital frames. It’s a game of strategy, as well, that requires a still mind and careful approach.

“You want to wait for them to make a mistake,” he said. “A lot of people who play the game, they lose their temper.”

Solis has a kind of mantra he repeats while talking about gameplay: “Patience.”

For now, that patience seems to be serving him well. His life as a 12-year-old doesn’t seem to be upended by the travel, pressure, and stakes of his skill. He hangs out with friends and sends a shout-out to his teacher Ms. Campos. Online, he frequents a handful of sub-Reddits and occasionally broadcasts from his Twitch Channel.

Solis was also on CollegeHumor, where he travelled to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles and summarily whooped a man three times his age at Hearthstone, a fast-paced digital card game.

“The people were nice,” he said. After a pause, he added: “I’m really good at that game, too.”

 

Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at [email protected].

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