The Manila Cup attracts huge crowds and some of the best Street Fighter players in the world, all drawn to the country’s unique take on competitive gaming

The room smells faintly of beer, dried sweat, Red Bull and several variants of Axe body spray. The air conditioning is no match for the humidity of the Philippines, and people waft their faces furiously with freebie cardboard fans from one of the event’s sponsors. Strewn across a beanbag in front of the stage is Hiroyuki “Eita” Nagata. One of the biggest stars in the Street Fighter pro-gaming scene, Nagata made it to the top eight of EVO 2016, the giant Las Vegas fighting game tournament. Yet, here he is, napping among fans.

This is the Manila Cup, the most important fighting game tournament in the Philippines – and things work a little differently here.

One thing is for sure, however – everyone in the room is taking things seriously. The Philippines may be a small nation in terms of the global games industry, but it has a sizeable fighting game community, and now in its second year the Manila Cup is an ambitious event. From September 10 to 11, the capital hosted tournaments for a range of the latest fighting games such as Mortal Kombat XL, BlazBlue Chronophantasma Extend, and Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator. But the Philippines is Street Fighter V country, with almost 200 people signed up for that tournament alone. The Manila Cup is part of the global Capcom Pro Tour; winners get points that determine placement, and may lead to an appearance at the Capcom Cup in December. That’s why the heavy hitters of the FGC are here – Ricki Ortiz, Justin Wong, and Kenneth “K-Brad” Bradley from Evil Geniuses, PandaTV’s Xijie “Dark Jiewa” Zeng, and Red Bull’s Masato “Bonchan” Takahashi, to name but a few.

Unlike in other eSports, there are no invitation-only events or qualifiers. You sign up for the games you want, get divided into pools, and, like your gaming avatars, fight your way to the top. The tournament follows a double elimination format; lose your first game and you get sent to the losers bracket. Lose again and you’re out. Given the format, there is a good possibility of slaying some giants, but a bigger one of getting slain yourself. Not that many mind; my friend Boni tells me, “It would be an honour to get bodied by Justin Wong.”

I’m here as my friends Tzi and Billy have signed up for the Street Fighter V tournament, which has a P150,000 (£2,400) grand prize. A paltry sum compared to tournaments like EVO, where prize money goes up to $100,000 (£75,000), but still big money in a country where the minimum wage is barely $10 per day. I’m a lowly button masher, a class of people for whom I understand there is a special circle of hell. This is my first fighting game tournament, and I’m here solely for moral support.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From the left: Manila Cup competitors Justin Wong and Ricki Ortiz, Tala Wong, and YouTube personality Mike Ross. Photograph: Emile Garcia

Today’s arena is the clubhouse of a posh neighbourhood – a gated community where everyone needs a gate pass to enter.

Next to us in the registration queue are some of the members of Evil Geniuses (EG), one of the original and most popular pro-gaming teams. Ortiz and Wong are legends, along with YouTube personality Mike Ross. A friend eggs me on to ask for a photo with the pros while they’re not busy. I relent. While English is my first language, it disintegrates in the presence of these greats. There are so many things I want to say to them – you’re amazing, I love your show, you’re my favorite Chun-Li player – but I settle for a photo.

A kid, no more than 18 or 19 comes over to EG, fight stick, notebook and a scouring pad in hand. The latter he hands to Ross, who looks confused. The kid explains, using hand gestures, that it’s a scrubber – “scrub” being gamer parlance for a bad player. It’s a gag gift, a product of the Filipino fondness for wordplay. Ross laughs.

Giddy with excitement, the kid asks Wong and Ortiz to sign his fight stick and notebook. It’s probably one of the best days of his life, and it’s doubtful he would be alone in feeling that. We’re a small country in Southeast Asia; we don’t expect the giants of the fighting game world to descend onto the Philippines en masse. Yet, here they are today, within picture-taking, autograph-signing reach.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The event starts an hour late, as most events do in the Philippines. Photograph: Emile Garcia

The event starts an hour late, as most events do in the Philippines. Everything here runs on “Filipino time”, a reflection of the laid-back, easygoing nature of the people. But there is a frenetic energy in the air as the pools for the different games begin, with two rows of monitors and PS4s on either side of the room. Select Street Fighter V games, usually ones where the foreign pros are playing, take place on the modest stage, streamed worldwide on Team Spooky’s Twitch channel.

Tzi’s pool starts first. His Ryu gets demolished by a Cammy player, sending him to the loser’s bracket, which he doesn’t recover from. “It’s my fault,” he admits afterwards. “Too much Overwatch”. Billy fares a bit better, losing his first two matches with Nash, but scraping out of the loser’s bracket with Ken. He gets one more match before he’s eliminated. “At least someone went home because of me,” he says with pride.

My friends have no illusions that they’re going to beat beasts like Ryota “Kazunoko” Inoue or K-Brad. While Billy, like many other local players, joined to test his skill level against the best local and global players, Tzi wanted to reawaken the long dormant competitive gamer in him. Losing is a humbling experience, but neither are despondent – they’re only more determined to prepare for next year. Their parts over, we settle among the throng to watch the Top 32 in action.

Chants are integral to the Filipino crowd experience, and there is pride in getting a chant going. When Wong’s Karin uses her super, the whole crowd does her distinctive heiress laugh along with her, amusing the commentators. “It [Manila] doesn’t get hype, it stays hype!” commentator Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez says on the Twitch stream. The crowd, as if to prove Gutierrez’s point, does a round of the “Ole” chant for local player Ron “Limfiltration” Lim.

The local geek community is notorious for their in-jokes – a mix of 90s pop culture references, internet memes and current events. The infamous “Tapusin!” [Finish him] chant from “Gost Payter”, a parody of the Yu Yu Hakusho anime so central to many a Filipino childhood, starts up for Don “Don” Gim, the only Filipino to make it to the Top eight of the Manila Cup. The chant reverberates throughout the venue, so loud that Gutierrez removes his noise-cancelling headset to try and figure out what we’re all shouting. In a nutshell, this is the Filipino FGC – snarky, irreverent, raucous and undeniably passionate.

The fact that a Filipino player has made it to the Top eight of the Manila Cup is big. Filipinos are known for beauty pageants, music and a foul-mouthed president; fighting game players, not so much. There are so few of us competing globally that Filipino-American pro players like Ryan “FilipinoChamp” Ramirez and Gerald “Filipinoman” Herrera have made being Filipino part of their gamer identities.

On the Twitch stream, Gutierrez, half of the eponymous “Excellent Adventures of Gootecks and Mike Ross”, mentions that someone asked him what Filipino players needed to do to compete with the Justin Wongs of the world. Play more and travel, Gutierrez responds.

His answer reveals a fundamental problem when it comes to developing world class pro-gaming teams in the Philippines – a lack of funding and sponsorship. The Philippines is a developing country, and carries all the baggage of being classified as one. Corporate sponsorship isn’t feasible; the goal of sponsoring professional gamers is global recognition, ie making sure that Twitch viewers in different continents can see your brand. Very few Filipino brands have global reach, and even then, they’re not tech or energy drink brands, the typical sponsors for pro-gamers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Street Fighter V is the key draw in the Manila Cup

Without steady financial backing, it’s nearly impossible for a Filipino pro-gamer to pay for travel expenses to and from major tournaments in the United States and Japan. On top of that, Filipinos, unlike many of their Western counterparts, have to worry about visas. Getting a visa, especially to the United States, is no mean feat for the average Filipino, as embassy officials worry that we’ll become illegal aliens, adding another barrier to the Philippines’ pro-gaming dreams. We can’t compete with the pros if we don’t have the luxury to practice like the pros, and we can’t do that if we’re not getting backed like the pros.

One by one, the big names bow out on Day Two. The journey ends for Bonchan and K-Brad at the Top 16; Li Wei “Oil King” Lin with his memorable floral shorts, Ortiz, and Eita make it to the Top eight before they’re eliminated. In the end, it’s USA v Taiwan, Wong versus Bruce “Gamerbee” Hsiang. When Wong, the most popular foreign player in the Philippines, hits Hsiang’s Necalli with the EX version of Karin’s Ressenha special attack, it’s over. The crowd erupts into deafening cries of “Justin Wong!” and “USA! USA! USA!”

Typically stony-faced during his matches, Wong stands up and pops a fist in the air before shaking Hsiang’s hand. The childhood hero of so many, one of the men responsible for creating the pro-gamer dream and living it, raises his gold trophy above his head. It’s raw, electric, utter chaos, and he’s immediately swarmed by fans begging him to sign their fight sticks or pose with them for selfies. Everyone wants selfies with the pros.

It’s close to 9 pm when I finally get home. It’s an understatement to say it’s been a long and exhausting couple of days. Before I collapse for the night, I go on YouTube to look for tutorial videos. This tournament has helped me make up my mind about who I want to main: Dhalsim. I saw two players at Manila Cup using this classic SF2 character and on finding that his move-set is close to Seth’s (very slippery), he appealed greatly to me. He also reminds me of Zenyatta, my main character in Overwatch. But after 48 hours of continual Street Fighter, that’s a story – and a game – for another day.