The Past and Future of Press Button Win

Every once in a while, it’s nice to take a few steps back and take a broad view of things. I did a look back at the Think, Don’t Mash! series once it concluded, but this will be a much more macro-level look at my video-making past, present, and future. Let’s talk about that entire journey and where it seems to be headed.

My First Video

Back in June 2010, I was living in Japan, and the current home version of the game was Super Street Fighter IV. In the best of circumstances, I might be decent at fighting games, but back in 2010, I was pretty terrible at them.  I didn’t play SFIV too seriously, but I’d play with a friend here and there, and sometimes we’d take turns playing against random people online. One of these times, we happened to join a room with Sako, one of the most legendary Japanese fighting game players of all time. I lost the first match (pretty horribly), but through some kind of miracle (and because Blanka is a super scrubby character), I managed to win game two.  Sako immediately kicked us out of his room, and we sat there in disbelief. I needed to prove to people that this was a thing that happened. We set up a shitty digital camera on a GorillaPod and shot an offscreen video of the match replay, which was the first video I ever uploaded to YouTube:

I thought it’d be fun to have a jokey title, so (perhaps unwisely) I went with “Sako? More like sucko! America redeemed.” It turns out that sarcasm doesn’t really come across well on the internet and I was immediately bombarded with people defending the skills and honor of Japan with some very unkind words to say to me. People’s overwhelming hatred of Blanka probably didn’t help my case a whole lot. Oh well.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Guilty Gear Xrd

A couple of years passed, and I’d become obsessed with Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and I only got more into the game when Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 dropped in late 2011. I liked SFIV, but I fell in love with Marvel 3. It was a game made for lab monsters, and I’d hunt around on YouTube and the Shoryuken.com (SRK) forums looking for new tech for my team (Doom/Dante/Strider). In mid-2013, I struck gold⁠—I found a video clip of a crazy Doom/Dante combo extension that looked like it provided a huge damage boost. The problem was that the footage of the combo extension was low quality, and it was impossible to tell how much damage the extension actually added to the end of the combo. After some testing, I realized the extension meant that you could basically kill any character in the game off of any starter. I threw together a quick video about the extension:

[embed]https://youtu.be/fJ3VE8GRja0[/embed]

This video was the first in a number of (very Doom-focused) Marvel 3 videos I put out on my Zissou YouTube channel. I was also very fortunate that at that time, SRK was a popular site for fighting game players, and they were happy to post my videos. This meant that instead of trying to scrape together a few hundred views, I could reliably get thousands. I also started playing Guilty Gear Xrd when it launched in arcades in 2014. I wanted to branch out to a new game since I was worried about the future of Marvel 3. I also figured I could get a head start—I could read Japanese well enough to get info from places like the Japanese wiki and top Japanese players’ Twitter accounts, and I had access to the arcade version of the game. This set me up to put out a bunch of Faust-focused Xrd tutorial videos over the next couple years.

The Marvel 3 and Xrd videos were pretty technical tutorial videos which were inherently going to appeal to a very narrow audience: Faust players in Xrd and Doctor Doom players in Marvel 3 (to be fair, there were a lot of Doom players). 

A New Direction

I eventually moved back to the U.S. not long after Street Fighter V came out, and I went all-in on making SFV videos for a hot minute. I tried some different types of videos, but I was really surprised/happy with how well one particular video was received: Street Fighter V - Defense and Dealing with Problematic Moves. Rather than a super technical/specific tutorial video, it was a broader video aiming to help players learn how to think and problem solve defensive situations in fighting games. It seemed obvious to me that I should keep going in that direction, and I thought it made sense to do that on a fresh channel— it was a pretty big departure from what I’d done in the past. Also, I’d used a lot of copywritten music on the Zissou channel, and I wanted to distance myself from that in case it ever caused any problems. I called the new channel Press Button Win.

Random Aside—The T-Shirt Business is Rough

I’d actually registered the pressbuttonwin.com domain name well before the new channel launch. I thought it’d be fun to design and sell t-shirts with fighting game-inspired designs. I put a short promo for the shirts on some videos on my Zissou channel. I was pretty regularly getting thousands of views per video at the time, so I figured if even 0.1% of my viewers grabbed a shirt, I could sell a few and help offset the costs of video capture equipment, editing software, and other stuff I needed for video production. Long story short: the t-shirt thing bombed completely. I did manage to sell a decent number of them in person when I had a booth at KVO one year, but online sales were basically nonexistent. I could talk more about what happened here, but I’ll save that for another post. Needless to say, I now have a lifetime supply of goofy t-shirts.

I mean, I thought they were cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The t-shirt business (quickly) came and went, but I liked the name Press Button Win, so that became my new, more broadly focused YouTube channel.

The Path of Press Button Win

I really like the idea of teaching players how to learn, and I also wanted to convince people that with the right approach, anybody could learn and be at least decent at fighting games. I hunkered down and got most of the first four Think, Don’t Mash! videos finished before starting to release them so I could keep up a steady release schedule.  I got up through Part 7 of that series, and I felt like I’d pretty much said everything I wanted to say on the topic. I’d always wanted to make what I thought could be the definitive videos on a few intimidating fighting game concepts: frame data and hit boxes, so I went to work on those. Alongside those, I also made videos that leaned more in the video essay direction, like Reacting in Fighting Games and Customization in Fighting Games. The essays were the most fun to work on, and I think they resonated with more  people, which got me to the most recent video on the channel: Fighting Games—Punching Above Their Weight. I think this video essay approach is the direction I’ll continue to push (at least for the near future). 

I Can’t Believe You Read This

If you made it to the end of this post, congratulations! This is some self-indulgent nonsense, so I can’t imagine it to be that interesting for too many people, but it’s my blog and nobody can stop me. In my follow-up to this post (which will hopefully actually be interesting) I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about content creation along the way.