Game Changer

Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling and red LED lights illuminate the walls as two of the state’s best video game players sit on a stage, controllers in hand, their eyes fixed on a large monitor, backs turned to a raucous audience. Camera operators within the vast ballroom of Houston’s Royal Sonesta hotel focus on two players: Au’Juan Porter, 27, who is known by his gaming handle, Trojan, and Joe Olveda, 25, aka JoeCrush. The gamers’ facial expressions are broadcast onto a movie theater-sized screen, and to thousands of viewers on the popular gaming livestream service Twitch. The Texas Showdown, established in 2001, is the oldest and largest video game competition in the state. Over three days in the spring, the event draws more than 1,500 competitors and spectators from every corner of Texas as well as top gamers from across the country.

The Texas Showdown is a byproduct of the state’s robust video game industry, which crystallized almost 50 years ago when a University of Texas at Austin student created the role-playing epic Ultima I. Since then, competitive video game play has ascended from enthusiasts playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-out!! on Nintendo in their bedrooms to an international professional sport—crossing generations in the process. Many famous gamers live in Texas, such as Austin’s Ali Hassan, a Forbes magazine “30 Under 30” member whose YouTube channel SypherPK has more than 10 million subscribers. Some of the world’s biggest tournaments have occurred here, too, like the Fortnite Global Championship. The competition, which took place last September at the 14,000-seat Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, offered more than $2 million in prize money to players of the third-person shooter battle royale.

The Texas Showdown, despite its professional sheen, remains an event organized by and for the tight-knit Fighting Games Community—the worldwide group of people who are deeply passionate about games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken. Anyone—even you!—can pay the $15 entry fee to compete in a Texas Showdown game. But beware: The open bracket system sometimes pits tournament rookies against their gaming idols in the opening rounds, leading to some early knockouts.

In fighting games, two opponents control digitized characters who engage in hand-to-hand combat. Tekken 8 is the most popular game at the Texas Showdown, with 312 entrants. The fighting occurs in a 3D world, where players can sidestep to evade or gain an advantage over their opponents. The characters also use all sorts of magic. One of the characters is a cuddly looking but aggressive brown bear that slaps its opponent with a limp fish. However, with the right button combination, the bear’s fishy weapon transforms into a missile attack.

Trojan and JoeCrush are duking it out in the Tekken 8 finals. In the front row of the packed crowd is a spectator costumed as Buc-ee the beaver. A boy wearing the helmet of the Marvel character War Machine stands at the edge of the audience, peering through glowing purple eyes. Behind a wooden bar, a man in a black bow tie mixes video game-inspired cocktails. Freshly iced coolers of complimentary Red Bull abet a nervous energy.

Trojan is lightly built and wears custom pink Nikes. He plays with the character Lili, a flippant teen with blond bangs and an acrobatic fighting style. “She’s a baddie, I’m a baddie. We do our own thing,” Trojan says. He flirts with the camera and the crowd, playfully posing and mouthing whatever after losing a match.

JoeCrush, who’s from San Antonio, carries mementos with him from international trips to compete in Tekken tournaments. Prior to the finals, he’d taken a headdress from Saudi Arabia out of his backpack and rubbed it between his fingers. When I ask him how he’s spent his downtime between the 10 total matches he’s played in the Tekken 8 tournament, he answers, “Chilling, playing some video games.”

Over the past five years or so, JoeCrush has earned $51,038 in tournament winnings, according to Liquipedia, a wiki site for fighting games. The winner of the Tekken 8 tournament at the Texas Showdown will receive more than $1,500 from the prize pot, a purse that grows with the number of players who enter.

Javier Moreno, the director and co-founder of the Texas Showdown, explains that because fighting games don’t require fancy PCs or high-end equipment to play competitively, they remain broadly accessible to an economically diverse range of people. He motions toward the sea of faces in the crowd and says, “I mean, Houston’s a diverse city, but this feels special.” At the Texas Showdown, regardless of what you look like or where you come from, it’s your skill on the platform that determines your success.

On Friday, the opening night of the Texas Showdown, I watched an Ultra Street Fighter IV tournament that exemplified Moreno’s point. This specific competition was billed as a memorial tournament in honor of a participant named Michael Begum, who died in March 2024 and used the handle BrolyLegs. He was born with a rare condition called arthrogryposis, which affected his muscle and joint growth. Growing up in Brownsville, BrolyLegs used a custom-built electric wheelchair, and he was dependent on a full-time caregiver, a job usually performed by his younger brother, Johnny.

Using his face to operate a video game controller, BrolyLegs emerged as one of the best Street Fighter players in the world.

The history of Texas-based video game development begins with Richard Garriott, the son of astronaut Owen Garriott. While attending UT in 1981, Garriott created the fantasy game Ultima I. Before that, some of the video game industry’s biggest advancements occurred in Dallas-Fort Worth, where the state’s tech industry first blossomed in the 1950s. A high point came in 1993, when a collective of developers from Mesquite released Doom for the DOS platform, introducing ground-breaking 3D graphics that allowed users to travel throughout digital worlds.

Today, the Texas Film Commission offers incentives for video games developed in the state, helping Texas maintain one of the most dynamic gaming scenes in the country. According to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry advocacy group, video game production in Texas accounts for more than $6.5 billion of total economic output and nearly 30,000 jobs. This ranks Texas third in the nation, behind California and Washington state.

Scores of millennials grew up playing video games with ties to Texas-based developers, including Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Tomb Raider, and Call of Duty. Twenty years ago, competing online was nascent—to challenge a human, you had to meet up somewhere. Today, “offline” tournaments like the Texas Showdown serve as an opportunity for the gaming community to connect in real life.

“The true test is always playing in person,” Moreno says. “You can’t hide behind a screen, behind the concept of a person. You can be intimidated by your competitor’s energy, or you can feed off it.”

Begum first competed at the Texas Showdown in 2007. He’d learned to operate a video game controller after receiving a Nintendo console for his second birthday. By using his left cheek to move the joystick and pressing the buttons with his lower lip and tongue, Begum could compete. Between 2013 and 2017, he was the world’s top-ranked Street Fighter IV player, who used the character Chun-Li, a female Interpol agent and martial arts master.

“Because he couldn’t reach all the buttons, he played with a limited tool set,” says Javier Castañeda, a competitor in the BrolyLegs memorial tournament. Castañeda became friends with Begum while they were both studying business at the University of Texas at Brownsville. By utilizing Street Fighter’s award-winning accessibility features, Begum customized his Xbox 360 controller to make Chun-Li perform advanced combo moves with the push of a single button. “It was like Chun-Li, by some miracle, was designed for him,” Castañeda says.

In Begum’s 2014 memoir, My Life Beyond the Floor, he explained his nickname, Broly, “was how I saw myself mentally,” as the antihero from the cartoon Dragon Ball Z, who “was physically built and brought terror to those he faced on the battlefield.” A friend added “legs” as a joke when signing Begum up for one of his first tournaments. Known for his self-deprecating humor, Begum kept the moniker.

Castañeda recalls how for years he and Begum pushed each other as they traveled to tournaments around the state and across the U.S. “Holding each other accountable for little mistakes, it made us so good,” he says. When Johnny couldn’t travel, Castañeda would often help Begum eat meals, bathe, and use the bathroom.

“I never complain,” Begum once said on the gaming podcast Best of V, after his van had broken down again, leaving him and Castañeda stranded. “As long as I’m able to play on solid ground, I’m going to compete.”

Castañeda now plays Street Fighter IV to wind down after putting his young daughter to bed. But while driving from San Antonio to the first annual BrolyLegs memorial tournament, he says, “I believed I could win.”

It is nearly midnight by the time the grand finals start, pitting Castañeda, a pro-am skateboarder, against Jose Campos, a top-ranked gamer from Mexico. The small but engaged crowd understands the stakes—one of Broly’s best friends versus an outsider. In their best-of-five match, Castañeda, who plays with the character Blanka, quickly wins the first two fights by launching a flurry of “Blanka balls” and depleting the health meter of Campos’ character, Seth, the game’s principal antagonist. Campos counters with Seth’s trademark “Sonic Boom” attack.

After more than four total hours of tournament play, Castañeda finally begins to fatigue. “Somebody get these guys a Red Bull,” the livestream commentator chirps. Campos takes the next three matches and wins the tournament. Earlier in his life, Castañeda says, after “a loss like that, I would have been so crushed.” But he has perspective now, with a burgeoning career as a software designer.

The awards ceremony featured Begum’s brother, Johnny. His long brown hair falls across his shoulders, and his eyes water as he holds up a thick bundle of old badges from the Texas Showdown dating back more than a decade. The badges once hung on a wall in his brother’s room. By happenstance, the BrolyLegs memorial tournament takes place on Begum’s birthday—he would have been 36.

When Johnny gets to Castañeda, he says, “I have something special for you; I know Broly would want you to have it.” Johnny hands Castañeda a skateboard that one of Begum’s fans had given to him. Castañeda turns the skate deck toward the crowd. On the bottom side is a hand-painted portrait of Chun-Li.

In 2001, Moreno was a self-described “broke college student” at the University of Houston when he organized the first Texas Showdown. He partnered with Chris Chou, who was an employee at the university’s Games Room, a student center with a bowling alley, table tennis, and arcade games. For the inaugural Texas Showdown, Chou secured access for 100 or so people to take over the Games Room. More than two decades later, Chou still serves as the Texas Showdown’s tournament organizer.

Moreno says that with each new update to a popular fighting game, some people leave the community and others take their place. In 2009, the viability of online play brought exponential growth. Attendance at the Texas Showdown went from hundreds to thousands. Within the hierarchy of fighting games tournaments, the competition transformed into a “major,” a national-level designation, placing it above the many regional and local competitions held throughout the state. Over the last decade, the Texas Showdown has intermittently served as a stop on international gaming circuits like the Capcom Pro Tour, a series with a $1 million grand prize.

In 2024, the Texas Showdown was positioned as the first major fighting games tournament following a long-awaited update to Tekken. Event commentator I’munique Hill, 25, says that in the recently released version in the Tekken series, Tekken 8, the gameplay is more focused on offense. The gamer on the attack is supplied with more momentum, disrupting the playing field.

Tekken’s lore, a story that unfolds with each new release, has also excited longtime fans. Hill, who grew up playing the game with her family in Houston, says her favorite character is Jun Kazama, a wildlife conservationist with psychic abilities. “She’s very pure, very dedicated to bringing light into the situation,” Hill says. When Kazama returned to Tekken 8 after she was presumed dead for 20 years, Hill “cried like a baby.”

Though commentating remains a side hustle for Hill, she says it’s allowed her to explore the U.S. and helped her forge close friendships. In 2022, she applied to an exclusive monthlong program called the XO Academy, designed to develop female commentators and competitors in the predominantly male Fighting Games Community. Through the academy, Hill received one-on-one mentorship and an opportunity to commentate at the world’s biggest fighting games tournament, EVO (Evolution Championship Series), held annually in Las Vegas.

Despite efforts to eradicate sexism from the gaming community, Hill says it’s still common to come across a dated, 1950s mentality toward women. When sexism and abuse occur, “if we do speak out, we’re not taken seriously,” Hill says. “It’s the saddest part about the Fighting Games Community.” She feels proud, as a Black woman, to call the Tekken 8 finals at the Texas Showdown and to close out the event.

Up on the stage for the grand finals, Trojan is hyping the crowd when JoeCrush catches him off guard by quickly starting the next game. JoeCrush plays with the character Jack-8, a monstrous, robotic fighter with a super-long reach. On the big screen, we watch Jack-8 grab Lili and toss her like a chew toy, then deliver a series of damaging punches midair. After vanquishing Trojan, JoeCrush stands and turns toward the crowd, thumping his chest in victory.

As Trojan walks off the stage, supporters swarm him. He got into playing Tekken through his dad, and on his X account, he promotes the “locals” he organizes in Dallas-Fort Worth. He welcomes anyone with an interest in fighting games to compete and socialize once a week or so.

Building a strong community seems even more important to Trojan than winning. “I get to express myself in an environment where people support me,” he says. “They want to try and understand, to see the game the way I do.” For him, the Texas Showdown is more than just a video game tournament; it’s a journey of self empowerment. “The mental battles you run into playing the game translate to real life. If you don’t believe in yourself in here, you’re never going to believe in yourself at home.” Then he turns toward the crowd, smiles, and snaps a selfie with a fan.