Let’s face it - if you’ve ever organized a tournament, you know the hardest part of the process, most of the time, is finding the space. There’s a few places that are reliable places to go - college game rooms, esports cafes, gaming bars - but no establishment has such an interlinked history with fighting game spaces quite like the card game shop. The Minnesota FGC has known that well - for years, the main local in the Twin Cities, Run The Mix, has been run out of a local card game shop called Gamezenter. In December, however, RTM had an announcement regarding the future of the event’s space - Run The Mix was moving out of Gamezenter and into its own dedicated space in the area. The Run The Mix Gaming Lounge, as it’s called, opened in January, and with it, a bevy of exciting prospects for the future of the MNFGC. I sat down with the man behind the move, RTM Pete, to talk with him about the logistics, motivations, and aspirations behind the move.

Run The Mix, at its core, is a community space. In Pete’s words: “[RTM is] fighting game players playing fighting game players. The org is a bunch of fighting game players working to foster the community and make the events that we want to go to. I wanted to build a community to play the games I enjoy. It’s this hobby project that started as a single-digit attendee weekly when I started helping in 2021 that I just threw time and energy into seeing what it would turn into.” Its history runs deep in the Midwestern FGC - founded in 2018 as a Dragon Ball weekly by a player named Lucky, reborn in 2021 in the leadup for the release of Guilty Gear Strive. RTM that year launched with a pizza party - the door fee got you pizza, and the pizza paid for the room.

Despite his status as a community leader for Minnesota, Pete’s background with fighting games is one that’s relatively recent, too: “I only started playing FGs in like 2019, so running a local was daunting. But Lucky and some other community members (shoutout to Shogun17) helped me figure things out. That was important, because in Fall 2021 Lucky stepped away to go back to school and become a dad - so I started running the show solo.”

Photos from Midwest Mixfest, Minnesota’s flagship event

From conception, from that very first pizza party - RTM’s bottom line has always been $5 venue fee. In a truly Arizona Iced Tea-esque sense, Pete’s found keeping the threshold for as many years as he could critical to the overall scene.

“$5 has been this line in the sand forever. I know this scene doesn’t have a lot of money, and I know that when we do something like a Mixfest it prices some people out. RTM is supposed to be a social place where anyone and everyone can come and hang out and not worry about the world outside while they press buttons and vibe. $5 door forced us to lose money sometimes (usually) and forced us to work crazy hard, but it let more people participate. In late 2024, we found out that we were going to be forced to raise our prices…and now we were going to have to charge our community double to attend. So I decided to talk to different communities and see if we couldn’t all unify to create our own, stable, awesome venue built around our needs and for our scenes. It loses money hand over fist, but it’s ours.”

Pete, at the end of the day, wanted to create a space of his own, accommodating for all the needs of the space. The venue can sustain more power than it could possibly use. The venue has enough storage for a closet of boxy CRTs for Super Smash Bros. Melee events and merch leftover from regionals. It’s a truly awe inspiring space dedicated to offline gaming in Minnesota, helping grow and cultivate a vast variety of gaming scenes in the region.

The new RTM lounge space

In our interview, Pete specifically mentioned how critical a space for offline events was in an era of online gaming; when pressed on offline’s importance, Pete gave a simple yet elegant response:

“Online sucks.”

“It’s so impersonal. At RTM, I consider so many of the attendees my friends. The word “community” means so much more when everyone is in the same room together week after week. I’ve helped some of these guys get jobs. People show up with baked goods, one of the Tekken guys celebrated their birthdays with a cake, it’s just an awesome community - you can’t get that online.”

But running a space like this doesn’t come without its challenges, and Pete’s very upfront with what the pain points are with this space. RTM’s finally had to raise its venue fee from $5 to $10 with the opening of the new space, and Pete’s been working to make that increased cost provide value to the attendees.

“We’re trying to be that third space and foster that awesome community. Hosting bigger events to give people things to look forward to as they grind, but really, it’s just about keeping that great social experience. We have some little “esports” touches - the space with the mural and the big screen and the nice projector with the big fancy commentary set up. But the weekly runs for over five hours - we encourage people to eat dinner there and hang with their friends. People show up to play card or board games. And, of course, there are ton of setups for fighting games to lab and grind.”

“Fighting games are an awesome hobby. They’re easy to become obsessed with. We just put them in an awesome space and people show up.”

You can follow Run The Mix on X at @RunTheMixMN. RTM runs every Wednesday in Minneapolis - the link to the event can be found here. You can catch the stream each Wednesday night at twitch.tv/runthemix.