A community can only be viewed as the sum of all of its parts, though the River City Rushdown does an incredible job of showing the heart and passion baked directly into the San Antonio FGC.

Dating back to the days of San Antonio’s legacy Ultra Arcade, the River City series is actually newer than you might expect for such a dedicated staple of the local fighting game community. According to the current tournament organizer Eric “Judas” Dehoyos, the modern iteration of the event didn’t really pick up steam until around 2016 in the Street Fighter V era.

Texas’ FGC scene runs deep across so many different locations and eras of fighting games, but San Antonio’s premier monthly event started in response to a lack of consistent larger tournaments to pair with weeklies. When Judas took over TO duties for the now-named San Antonio FGC group, he mostly hosted weekly events at Ultra Arcade after it opened in 2014.

Jump forward to 2016 and Judas introduced River City Ranbats to add some spice.

Instead of being just another weekly event, Ranbats occasionally turned the usual format into a six to eight-week points-based league where the top performers at the end got a bigger payout. Tournament fees were pooled each week to add to the pot at the end and one of the main goals was to establish a reason for players to keep coming back every week to compete.

After a brief period of homelessness following Ultra Arcade’s closure, the River City team was contacted by another local venue in 2017—Otaku Cafe.

With that move, the once staple-weekly tournaments moved to being monthlies hosted in the new venue. Not long after that, the Ranbats name was retooled to keep the theme based on the city’s historic river walk, but mark the start of a new era with River City Rushdown running on the last Saturday of every month.

Now, more than seven years later, River City Rushdown is stronger than ever, typically breaking 100 unique entrants almost every month with a rotating cabinet of new and classic games on the docket based entirely on what the local community is playing each month.

“I would say we focus heavily on just the community aspect of it. We want to make sure that our gamers here are taken care of, you know? We really focus on the consistency of the event and the quality of it over anything else,” Judas said. “We're not going for crazy growth. It's just been very natural. We want to make sure that people have a consistent spot on the last Saturday of the month to enjoy whatever the biggest fighting games are currently and just like have fun. We are building a great community that cares about each other.”

It isn’t just River City Rushdown that has grown either, it is the entire community surrounding it.

Otaku Cafe hosts weekly tournaments across the board for various other games like Super Smash Bros. Melee and Ultimate, along with generally operating a large arcade players can stop in and use at any time. But there is also a Free Console Night every Wednesday where FGC players can use the cafe’s setups or bring their own to run sets with whoever shows up.

“As a community, we want the FGC here in San Antonio to be like one of those third places you hear about,” Judas said. “It’s just an easy, free hobby space area where you can come after work or if you're off that day, just play some games for free, not even worry about the financials of it, and just have a good time with the people that also enjoy your hobby, right?”

At that weekly event, San Antonio is seeing a resurgence in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, which the community as a whole supports because everyone wants to see the games other people care about thrive.

And, if an older game like 3rd Strike starts picking up steam, the TOs notice and take a mental tally. If people are consistently coming out to support their game, they want to reward those players by giving it a spotlight in Rushdown or its smaller counterparts, River City Runback or Reversal.

As Dadmin notes, every single game that makes an appearance at a weekly is a “checkmark towards the games that are going to be at Rushdown.” Take the upcoming Rushdown for April for instance. It will feature Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, while also running 3rd Strike and Guilty Gear Xrd brackets.

Runbacks are a little less frequent than Rushdowns, but that is by design. The TOs use them as ways to celebrate smaller games by pairing a bigger draw title like Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8 with a game that might be a bit more niche but still has players showing up when they do run on Fridays.

But the impact of River City events is felt beyond just the local community, especially when it comes to Rushdown. Judas notes that they frequently get players coming in from across Texas to compete at their events, and they just as often push their own community to support tournaments in other cities where they are able to.

That includes skipping a Rushdown in March and urging players from San Antonio to travel to Texas Showdown so the Texas FGC can collectively support one of its largest and longest-running tournaments.

Because not every city has the ability to host larger events as frequently as the SA FGC can, the team always hopes that someone can look to Rushdown as a grassroots option that they can attend and be welcomed at with open arms. From Ryan “Dadmin” Hacker’s silly little affirmations on every event announcement to learning returning players’ names, the River City runs on community.

“I go through, do the seating, and document all the folks that come [to our events.] I want to make sure I know names because I want to call my bracket efficiently but also know everyone on site,” Dadmin said. “One of the greatest things is when I just know who a person is and don’t need to look at the laptop. I can just yell across the setups and tell someone they need to sit and play, then the next time they come in I’m like ‘Hey man, what’s up?’ They’re just completely taken aback. I know we have created these relationships we have with our community and other communities that do take the time to come here. It’s huge for us.”

And that community all starts with an initial level of intrigue, regardless of the reason you choose to attend a local and step out of the online bubble some modern fighting games help create.

Because San Antonio FGC has such a deep history with locals, Judas and his crew don’t need to worry about attendance dipping and they praise how much the last 10 years of fighting game development, especially during the COVID era, pushed games forward from a technical standpoint that has helped the scene grow. But now everyone has to make sure their offline experience is worth leaving the house for.

“The push to make games rollback was great because it’s so important to improving the quality of a game’s online and it makes people a lot more willing to run sets online when they can’t make it out to locals,” Judas said. “But I would say the curse is that some rollback is so good now that it’s hard to get people out of their homes into locals, but locals are still fucking great. You don't have to just play online all day. [We want to] make it worth it so people feel welcomed when they come offline.”

That welcoming feeling could be anything from a friendly hello to the TOs having the right controller converters to make sure anyone who comes to compete can play the way they want to. Anything to make sure everyone knows that they can sit down and run some sets.

“You're only going to get better every single time you sit down, and you're only going to get better if you ask for next. I think that every single time somebody comes out, it's going to get that much easier to sit down,” Dadmin said. “Sitting down at a cab at a station is a completely different skill from sitting at home online in your comfort. It's a lot more fun and you're going to get a lot from it. You're always going to get a lot more from coming and hanging out. There are so many folks that you wouldn't get to meet. 
There are a bunch of games that you wouldn't get to play. You wouldn't even know. It's a lot better experience to come and hang out with folks and get those games in.”

Everyone has a different story, but it all starts with giving your local a shot. For Judas, it was being dragged out to his local by friends in the Street Fighter IV days, while Dadmin went to a local for the first time in 2019 and jumped into running brackets when he decided to go back the next week.

“I had to be dragged into my first local because I didn’t really care to go. But here I am 12 or 13 years later and I’ve made some of my best and longest friends I’ve ever had because I started playing Street Fighter offline in a dingy, dark arcade with my scrubby Blanca once a week,” Judas said. “It’s just community building with people that have the same hobbies as you. It’s a good feeling knowing you can play a video game and make friendships out of it.”