Turin is ready to become capital of fighting video games. Over the weekend, enthusiasts and professionals from every continent will disembark under the Mole. Some will come from France, Germany, England and Spain, but there are also those who have mobilized from much further away and will even leave from Korea, Japan and Pakistan. A journey thousands of kilometers long to participate in «Only the best»an international fighting video game tournament.
In its sixth edition, the event after Naples stops in Turin in collaboration with Game Paradise Esports, new brand by Gianmatteo Gaudioso. The competition was born from an idea of Fabrizio Tavassi, an organizer for over twenty years but first and foremost a lifelong professional player. «I started when I was nine – he says –, video games are a passion that I have always had».
«Only the best» is part of the global circuit of «Tekken World Tour», which takes its name from the main video game of the weekend. But there will also be room for challenges «Street fighter», «Guilty gear strive» And «Granblue fantasy versus: rising».
The competition will be hosted by the Royal hotel in Corso Regina Margherita, ready to be transformed into a games room for three days. And the attention to detail will be obsessive, as required by a very high level competition on which the staff has been working for eight months now. The technical standards are therefore high and require – among other things – that all monitors are the same and twenty-four inches wide.. We leave on Friday with a day dedicated to warming up, then the competition will come alive on Saturday and Sunday with the group stage and finals.
There will be more than three hundred players competing, with particular attention on Arslan «Ash» Siddique. Pakistani citizen, twenty-nine years old in August, he has been lining up international successes since 2010 and is universally recognized as one of the best Tekken players of all time. «In just a few years he has won a series of very complicated tournaments – explains Tavassi -. Winning once is one thing, doing it so many times in a row is really difficult.”
There are up for grabs prizes ranging up to three thousand euros, but what drives enthusiasts to participate is above all the spirit of aggregation. «Ours is a game that comes from the arcade tradition, once upon a time you met another person in front of the machine and played against each other. Today we inherit this legacy”, he says Simone Turkeyrulomember of «Tekken Turin», community that gathers to play and will be present at the Royal. Where the matches will be broadcast on a big screen for the paying public: you can book online, but you can show up at the hotel and pay (10 euros per entry) also on site.
«In the city we do many activities and as a recreational organization we meet a couple of times a week, there are always at least twenty of us – he explains -. Video games are often associated with kids who have nothing to do, but here we also have family men and workers. Meeting to play together brings us much closer to sports than other online activities, in those cases there is no one in front of you and it’s sad, it doesn’t even feel like you’re facing a real person.”
