The fighting game community is so incredibly lucky that Michael "IFC Yipes" Mendoza's PC broke one night in 2003. It might be hard to imagine given that he's become perhaps the most recognizable voice in the FGC, but the Yipes of 2003 wasn't a fighting game player. He lived for first person shooters, fiending Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty. Thankfully that fateful busted PC forced Yipes to take a break from his shooters, leading him to try something new: fighting games at the local arcade.
"I was never a fighting game person. I was into first person shooters. I used to play UT ‘99, stuff like that. I was real good in those games," Yipes said in a 2009 interview. "I just took a break from that and tried something new. Marvel was always a game I liked. I saw it in the arcade and put in a few quarters and played Wolverine, stuff like that."
Yipes played a bunch of fighting games, but one game immediately grabbed him and wouldn't let go. "I used to lose sleep on Marvel 2. I wouldn’t even sleep for like a day and a half," Yipes told theScore. With his intense focus, it wasn't long before he could beat everybody at his local arcade.
"The first time I played serious competition in fighting games was in a spot called Casa De Moda. I was cooking everybody," Yipes said in an interview with Justin Wong in 2023."Then here comes Dieminion and I’m like, ‘Damn, this guy is patient.’ I played him in Marvel 2, I played him in Alpha 3, those were the main machines that were there. He told me, ‘Hey man, you’re pretty good. You shouldn’t waste your talent here.’ He took me to Chinatown Fair, and the rest is history."
At that point, Chinatown Fair was both the competitive and cultural center of the East Coast FGC. Yipes didn't just encounter stronger players there. "That’s literally where I met all of my closest friends and it changed my life forever," he told theScore.
Two years later, Yipes would attend his first Evolution Championship Series. The trip to Las Vegas was his first time taking a plane anywhere other than to visit his family in the Dominican Republic. For him, excitement over the competition took a back seat to excitement over the novelty of Vegas. “I was just excited to be out of my neighborhood. I was so used to being in my neighborhood and seeing the same things every day, seeing the same pieces of bricks everywhere. It was different for me. That’s what I was focused on," Yipes told Ryan Hart in a 2022 interview.
Yipes was sent to losers early in the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 bracket. Whether his focus was elsewhere or he just got outplayed, he figured it out pretty quickly. Yipes went on a massive losers run, including a 2-0 win over Justin Wong, not stopping until he finally bowed out at second place. Not only did it earn him $400 — Yipes told Ryan Hart, “I called my mom and told her I got 2nd place. I was like, ‘Ma! I just got like $400!’" — it woke him up to exactly what this fighting game thing could be for him.
“At the time, I wasn’t really taking the competitiveness seriously. Obviously, I was striving to be good and better and prove to myself that I was good, but that’s the thing – I wasn’t trying to prove it to anybody else," Yipes told Ryan Hart. "I’m a young buck coming up. The mentality was, ‘I’m putting in all this work, let’s see if it takes me anywhere.’ I never had that pressure of proving it to anybody but myself. So when I went to Evo, I literally went there because it was Las Vegas. I was 18 and I was like, ‘Man!"
20 years after that first Evolution, Yipes has spent more time on its main stage as a commentator than a player. There are probably a lot of people who hear him on the mic and don't know the truth: he was an absolute monster on the sticks, and that first Evolution was just the start of the career of one of the best Marvel players to ever do it.
Over the next five years, Yipes would reach Top 8 in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 at Evo four times. That "IFC" in his name? It's not a sponsor or a crew or a clan or anything like that. It stands for "In Full Control," and that was Yipes in Marvel 2. In 2007, he reached the peak. With not one but two wins over Justin Wong, the reigning and then 4-time MvC2 champion, Yipes became an Evolution champion himself. Over a decade later, in 2020, Justin Wong would tell theScore that he considered Yipes his single greatest competition in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, high praise from the man with the most Evolution championships to his name.
Yipes would continue to compete in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. While he wouldn't ever reach the peaks he reached in the previous edition of the game, he would still go on some incredible runs. The most notable of these would be Capcom Cup 13, an event in which the eight players qualified via fan votes. While there were some who didn't think Yipes's tournament results warranted him his spot, he more than shut them up. Yipes double eliminated Filipino Champ and sent Nemo to losers in a tense Game 5 set on his way to an incredible second place finish.
Competing was never the only way Yipes engaged with fighting games, though. Even in his early arcade days, he found himself drawn towards the microphone. "I was always doing it at Chinatown Fair," Yipes said about commentary in an interview with Justin Wong. "I guess through that, it kind of gave me an edge on how to project myself in terms of how to talk. On top of that, I wrote music a lot. I used to spit a lot of bars."
Yipes really developed his commentary style beginning with the tournaments held at Battlefield Arcadia in 2009. That's where he met Lee Chung, his commentary partner to this day on the Can Opener tournament series that Yipes hosts on his Twitch and YouTube channels. "One time I grabbed the microphone and he grabbed the microphone. I didn’t even have to tell him, he just knew what was up. He just started talking shit," Yipes told Jwong. "At that point, that’s when things started getting fun for me. I was like, ‘This is actually cool.'"
Since then, Yipes's unique combination of high energy, quick wits, and top-level fighting game experience has made him one of the most sought after casters in the fighting game community. He has become one of the regular casters for major Street Fighter tournaments, and has also graced the mic at major tournaments for DragonBall FighterZ and Guilty Gear -STRIVE-. “My ultimate passion is to bring more people into the FGC," Yipes told Jwong. "I took it upon myself to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be funny and stuff naturally, but now I’ll have to be a little more analytical and explain what’s happening on the screen.’”
That's a big part of what makes Yipes's commentary so magical. It doesn't matter what level of fighting game player you are or how long you've been in this community. Whether you're brand new or have been around for decades, there's something there for you. His energy and lyricism brings you into the match, and his deep knowledge of these games and their history makes you want to keep watching, week in and week out.
Yipes has also put in work to keep his original scene, Marvel, alive and well. In 2018 and 2019, he hosted revival tournaments for the Marvel games, broadcasting on Twitch from the late Jose Miguel "BlueJ" Martinez's basement, who unfortunately passed from COVID in 2020. Battle of the Strongest 2 was an invitational featuring 10 of the biggest names from the old Marvel vs. Capcom scene, pitting legends of the game against each other for the first time in years. It helped revitalize interest in the Marvel series, not just from people who played and loved it back in the day but also new players who were experiencing the magic it brought to people for the first time through Yipes's stream.
Whatever role he's playing, Yipes's priority is that the FGC continues to thrive. "No matter how I'm seen in the FGC, whether it's a competitor or commentator, as long as I'm helping with growing the scene in a positive and energetic vibe." Nobody can deny his success on that front. If we're being honest, Yipes could probably commentate paint drying and make it compelling. We're just lucky he found fighting games.
See more of Yipes in Evo Legends Powered by Qiddiya Gaming on EvoFGC
