If you're new to the fighting game scene, you might only know Mike Ross as a commentator and content creator. That's what he's been doing since his return to the fighting game community in the 2020s. He's been featured on a number of official Capcom Pro Tour broadcasts, including the 2023 CPT Singapore Premier. Along with Street Fighter pro and Evo champion Xian, he created the organization Versus Vortex, sponsoring a number of professional players and creating content on the organization's YouTube channel. But there is much, much more to the story of Mike Ross.
As a young child, Ross broke his leg skateboarding, trying to imitate Tony Hawk's moves. The injury put him in a full-body cast for months, and his parents got him a Nintendo Entertainment System to make sure he had something to keep him occupied while he recovered. His parents noticed that he didn't just like games, he seemed to have a real knack for them. Even though he would go on to show some skills in sports like baseball, his love for games persisted after recovery. At 8 years old, he was already entering gaming tournaments at his local Blockbuster.
"I remember him playing against teenagers -- 16, 17-year-old kids. Michael wound up beating all of them," his father Marcus said in Focus, a documentary about Mike's training for Evo 2010. "It was fun to watch him beat up on people that age."
Ross kept playing. As soon as the bell would ring after school, Mike would make his way to the local donut shop or Video '94 and hit the cabinets there. These were small arcades, but he fell in love with X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and stuck with it as newer games came out.
"It wasn't until Marvel 2 dropped that someone at Video' 94 said, 'Man, you should go to GolfLand, you're not bad,'" Ross said in an interview with Chris Tatarian on his YouTube channel. GolfLand was, at the time, one of the biggest arcades in the country, and the center of the Southern California FGC. "The rest was history," Ross said. "It was going from a room, that feeling of playing with 3-4 people, and then you go somewhere else and you find there's almost 100 people in this room that all share the same intensity and passion that you do. It's an instant hook."
Marvel 2 became Ross's game pretty much immediately after its 2000 release and put as many hours into the game as he could, fighting any opponent willing to go up against him. He kept at it even while in college. He studied at Cal-State Los Angeles and soon graduated with a degree in Communications under Television and Film. But in 2008, when Street Fighter IV released, Ross saw an opportunity. It was time to try and push to become a professional.
Ross was dedicated. He would get to Super Arcade, a now-defunct arcade in Azusa, California, as soon as it opened in order to lab out as many characters as possible. Ross was a Honda player in Street Fighter II: Super Turbo and kept with the sumo wrestler in Street Fighter IV. "It clicked instantly," Ross told Chris Tatarian. "Being a kid when SFII came out, I always thought it was a cool concept. As a kid, I saw he had a move called 'Hundred Hands' and I thought, 'Wouldn't you want to use that move? It's so strong! It's 100 hands!'" That grind paid off almost immediately. Ross's breakout tournament came in 2009, when he took second place in the GameStop SFIV National Tournament. Over 100,000 players participated in this tournament, held across GameStop's over 2,000 national locations, with only 16 players qualifying for the finals in San Francisco. Ross not only qualified for the finals, earning a free trip to Evo, but made it all the way to the finals, finally falling to the one and only Justin Wong.
In 2010, Ross attended Evo. His training partner, Peter "Combofiend" Rosas, knew something special was about to happen. Ross recalls, "I remember talking to him on the drive to Vegas and he said, 'Dude, this is your year, you're going to get top eight easy, there's nobody on your level right now.'"
It was prescient. Ross went off at Evo 2010, taking his Honda all the way to 4th place. His only losses were to international players: Infiltration and Daigo. He even defeated GamerBee, who also broke out at Evo 2010 and would go on to be known as the best Adon in the world for the rest of Street Fighter IV's lifespan.
Ross found ways to combine his love and talent for Street Fighter with videography, another love of his and his main focus during his studies. He used those skills to supplement his income from tournament winnings, working as a freelance videographer for weddings, music videos, and more. He helped start CrossCounterTV with Gootecks, one of the first fighting-game focused YouTube channels, as well as the Excellent Adventures of Gootecks and Mike Ross, which started as him and Gootecks simply recording some matches they played online but eventually grew into more.
Ross kept competing into the 2010s, but his focus was most squarely on content creation. He created a documentary about his Evo 2010 run, Focus, a near-feature length film detailing his practice leading up to the event and the history that led to him choosing to pursue gaming professionally. Over the next half-decade, CrossCounterTV would grow significantly, to the point where Ross was getting surprised by people coming up to him at events to praise the channel. "When somebody came up to me the first time, I thought they were joking," Ross told USGamer in 2020. "I took it as an insult, almost, when they said, 'Yeah, I'm a fan of your show.'"
CrossCounter became big enough to attract attention from major players in the fighting game space, including Capcom itself. Ross would parlay his success into a role with Twitch in 2014. Inspired by UFC broadcasts on ESPN, Ross pitched a talk show built around Street Fighter called Capcom Pro Talk, which became a swift success. Within a year, the stream was reaching over 10,000 concurrent viewers.
So where was Ross during the Street Fighter V era? The simple answer is that he didn't like the game. But there was way more to it. Ross had already clashed with Capcom after trash talking Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on a stream that Capcom thought was supposed to be, essentially, a commercial. Street Fighter V, he realized, was going to put him into a similar position where he couldn't be honest about his opinions. "[Gootecks] and myself helped push the scene and give it as much exposure as we could," Ross told USGamer. "I'm not going to lead people down a path of hell just so that I gain or profit."
Ross was successful enough at this point that he easily could have made a pivot to another fighting game. He even had the opportunity. "That's what made me look in the mirror and [ask] 'What is it that they want?' They just need a puppet that is doing well to keep selling you their bullshit." And so in 2017, he left, in a way that we rarely see in the online era.
“I went without a phone," Ross told USGamer. "I went without any human contact for basically over a year, outside of people who would see me physically in the flesh. That was it." He quit his job at Twitch and stopped appearing on CrossCounterTV.
But he only left the online FGC. Ross's love for fighting games runs deep, and he couldn't leave that part of his life behind entirely. In 2018, he decided to pick up Guilty Gear Xrd, and he fell in love with its intricacy and difficulty. “I didn’t think it was possible to leave the FGC unless you just don’t play anything. You just don’t play the games, you don’t follow it. I consider people part of it," Ross told Chris Tatarian. "I said, ‘I just want to play the game and enjoy the game. I want to find a game that I love.’ I tried Xrd, and I love it. I didn’t realize it’s probably the best fighting game ever. It’s absurd.”
Ross stuck to small tournaments without a stream, limiting his presence to the offline FGC. In 2019, he slowly started making his return, entering brackets under the tag "Waxl." He played some exhibition matches, guested on a CrossCounterTV episode, and showed that he still had the juice as a competitor. At Canada Cup 2019, Ross finished 7th in Tekken 7, but most impressively, he showed the fruits of that Xrd grind, taking the crown.
"I needed to remind people I'm actually nice at games," Ross told USGamer.
Ross wasn't convinced that he would ever return to a role like the one he held in the scene in the mid-2010s. The interest was there. But, as Ross told USGamer, "There's no—at this point—company, corporation or network that would want somebody like me. So I don't know how possible that is."
After everything he'd been through in the 2010s, Ross probably thought Capcom was at the very bottom of that list. But a lot changed between the release of Street Fighter V and Street Fighter 6, both at Capcom and for Ross himself. "I know, money is the root of all evil or whatever," Ross told USGamer. "but there's people that are making like 250 grand for winning tournaments. You know, like, dream, dude; you're paying your family's bills from this. That is living the dream, in my opinion." That, by the way, was in 2020, before Street Fighter players were literally playing for a million bucks.
Ross doesn't see himself as somebody who will ever be winning that million. "The hunger to compete – I wish I still had it," He told Chris Tatarian. "One thing I love, though, is to watch that hunger in others." That inspired him to create Versus Vortex with Xian in 2023, sponsoring a team in Street Fighter League as well as making a space for himself and Xian to make content. Also in 2023, something that would have been unthinkable a few years prior came to pass: Ross appeared on a Capcom Pro Tour stream as a featured commentator at the CPT Singapore Premier.
No matter where his life and career have gone, one thing has been constant: Mike Ross loves fighting games. Few people who had made it to the position Ross achieved in the mid-2010s would have been willing to give it up for principles. But he did, and in the process, he found a way to stay engaged in the scene without feeling like he was selling his soul. Regardless of where things go from here, Ross's story is inspiring, and shows there is truly always a home for you in the FGC.
See more of Mike Ross' FGC journey in Evo Legends Powered by Qiddiya Gaming on EvoFGC
