The first thing I noticed was the light. Harsh neon washed across CONCEPT01, the sort of lighting you expect at a rave. Japanese arcade cabinets glowed around the room. People held beers and watched their friends fight on the big screen. Whenever Ghost Rider dropped a literal car on an opponent, the crowd roared.
This was CONCEPT01 in Koramangala, a grungy Bengaluru venue more accustomed to hard-techno gigs than esports brackets. On Saturday, Aug. 8, it hosted The Versus Experience: Marvel Tōkon Edition, a launch celebration for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, the four-on-four fighting game made by Arc System Works in collaboration with PlayStation Studios and Marvel Games. The game had arrived on PS5 and PC just two days earlier.
The whole thing felt like a house party run by people who took fighting games seriously. The DJ kept the room moving, and cosplayers drifted between matches. The organisers stayed on the floor, talking and jiving with the community. It was easy to forget that a bracket was running.
I played Marvel Tōkon for a few rounds. Being a little old, and horrible at anything that is not a MOBA, I soon decided that watching suited me better. That was easy here. I could move from a cabinet to the big screen, follow a matchup for a while and end up talking to the person who had just played it.
One of my favourite parts of this event was seeing a player arrive in a meticulously crafted Spider-Man Noir costume and committed completely to the bit. He picked only Spider-Man-adjacent characters for his four-person team: Spider-Man, Peni Parker, Carnage and Deadpool to battle against his opponent, while crowd got behind the Spidey act.
The main television feed cut out a few times. Nobody seemed especially bothered. People joked until the picture returned, then the match carried on. The glitches gave the room more of that indie feel.
I had not felt this sense of community at a gaming event since the DreamHacks in Hyderabad and Mumbai. Those events also gave me the sense that I had stumbled into a scene while it was still figuring itself out. People were just there to have a good time, and immerse themselves with actually playing video games.
Many of India’s larger esports events now look alike: towering LED walls and sponsor backdrops inside cavernous halls. I understand why. Major tournaments need dependable broadcasts and enough room for a large crowd. After a while, though, one stage starts to resemble the next.
This was different.
The room was the point
Versus was small enough that nothing felt far away. It reminded me of The Summit, the tournament series that put top players on couches and let commentary loosen up around them. CONCEPT01 had some of that same proximity on a more local scale.
The casters sat with the audience. The players were only a few feet away, close enough for us to hear the arcade buttons beneath the music and watch a face change after a bad round. A cheer from the crowd landed right beside them.
Daijoubu planned for that closeness. “We don’t do generic esports,” said Adhithya Mahesh, the company’s founder, director and head of marketing. Daijoubu builds themed events around fighting games and other communities that, in Adhithya’s view, have plenty of players and very little representation.
“We didn’t want to do a LAN parlour party, because that happens all the time,” Adhithya said. “There’s nothing special about it.” He wanted somebody facing an intimidating fighting game for the first time to look around and think it was a cool thing to join.
He put the larger idea this way: “If we can create a foster space where culture can be cultivated, everything else will take care of itself.” Putting machines in a venue was the easy part. Daijoubu wanted to give people a reason to gather around them.
Fighting games can be rough on beginners. A good opponent can punish a missed input before a new player has worked out what went wrong. In a formal tournament, that can make the controller feel like a test. At Versus, people simply walked up to the arcade machines and started playing.
Nitin Rao, Daijoubu’s tournament director and community manager, has no patience for the idea that button-mashing puts someone outside the scene. “Anyone who comes in mashing buttons, that’s what we did when we were kids,” he said. “That’s how we got into the thing. We had fun.”
Rao has spent more than a decade organising esports tournaments and founded India’s Super Smash Bros. community. Daijoubu bought arcade machines partly to bring back an arcade culture that older players grew up with and many younger ones missed, he said. At CONCEPT01, the effect was simple. Two players stood shoulder to shoulder, their hands visible, while everyone nearby had a reason to hover and watch.
The regulars clearly knew one another, yet newcomers did not need an introduction. People walked up and played. Some of the cosplayers entered matches in costume. This was a close-knit scene that still made room for strangers.
Players will cross cities for an event that interests them, Rao said, “not just for the prize money, but just for the sense of community” and the chance to spend time together. Adhithya said Versus had reached the point where “people travel for Versus events.”
Those travelling players shared the venue with cosplayers and artists. Adhithya counted three or four communities in the room, with music running through all of them.
“We wanted it to be a cultural hotspot of sorts,” he said.
Versus has often appeared as what Rao calls a “festival within a festival,” handling the gaming side of anime and music gatherings. A standard gaming event tends to draw the same gaming crowd, he said. Working inside other festivals gives different groups a chance to meet. At CONCEPT01, that mix had the venue to itself.
The DJ made sense in that context. Several people on the Daijoubu team came through indie music, Rao said, and the group’s posters are commissioned from artists or made by artists on the team. They want the work to appear “as less corporate as possible.”
Rao thinks audiences recognise the usual esports formula when they see it. “Everyone just sees the usual nonsense, and they kind of get put off by it,” he said. The cabinets, cosplay and music occupied the same floor. They felt like parts of the same event.
Adhithya estimates that India’s fighting-game community now has about 10,000 to 15,000 people. With regular events, he believes that number could reach into the lakhs. In five years, he wants the country to have something closer to the fighting-game ecosystems in Japan and the United States.
“There is more to esports than mobile games and Valorant,” Adhithya said. He quickly called those games “great.” His complaint is with how little room remains for competitive communities outside India’s biggest titles. The eventual goal is “an Evo equivalent of India,” he said, referring to the fighting-game world’s marquee tournament.
An Indian Evo would be far larger than CONCEPT01. It would also be harder to keep the casters beside the crowd and the organisers on the floor. Those details are easy to dismiss at a small launch party, but they explain much of what worked here.
On this night, everything still shared one room. The cosplay contest happened near the tournament. The DJ played through the gaps, and people moved freely between the cabinets and the big screen. When the feed failed, the crowd filled the pause.
By the end, I remembered the Spider-Man Noir player more clearly than any result. I remembered the cheer for Ghost Rider’s car, the casters sitting with everyone else and the strangers who walked up to a cabinet and played.
I have missed the feeling of showing up alone and never feeling stranded. India’s fighting-game community is quietly building a following, and this was an unusually easy way into it. Versus was technically a launch party. I left wondering when the next one was.
