Capcom is always looking to hire talented videogame folk. And it just so happens, Seth Killian is one of our newest talented videogame folk. Because he has such an interesting background and now usurps everyone in the company with his amazing Street Fighter skillz (yes, that’s skillZ), I just knew I had to ask him a bevy of questions and share the answers with the Capcom Community. Enjoy!

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Scarlett: So Mr. Seth Killian, tell us about yourself. What brings you to our sunny west coast with complete lack of seasonal change?

Seth: I came to wrangle the Capcom community and chew bubblegum. I still have plenty of bubblegum, because they sell it at some nearby stores, but Ive decided to wrangle community anyway. As for no seasonal change—everyone from colder places will tell you lies about how beautiful the fall is, etc., etc. What they don’t mention is that fall usually lasts about 2 weeks, which is then followed by months and months of sunless sleet, snowstorms, and biting wind.

SC: Where did you hail from before this and what were you up to?

SK: I have a varied and shadowy background. I taught at university for a few years (in the philosophy and physics departments), worked in a “think tank,” and then spent some happy days in publishing working on books about wildly unpopular topics like gender relations from 1872-1874 in agrarian Bavaria. In a more Capcom-related vein, Ive been working for years on the EVO Championship Series, which is a fan-run fighting game championships thats grown to become the largest event of its kind in the world attracting thousands of players from across the globe.

SC: You speak fluent German? How the heck did you get into translating bad movies?

SK: Fluent would be pushing itmostly I can swear and come up with witty one-liners for German-speaking bad guys. I got mixed up in their b-film biz when an ex-girlfriend (who I stayed friends with) went back to Austria. One of her friends was an actor in some really bad slasher movies (think German knock-offs of Italian horror films from the 70s), and they needed someone to translate them into English. I had helped the girlfriend with translating some of her professional papers into English and so she recommended me. I worked cheap and fast.

SC: And what role do you fill here at Capcom? What are the jobs responsibilities?

SK: I’m the point man on community-related everything here. This means I’m putting together events, transforming the website, and keeping my ear to the ground to see what our fans are saying. Their concerns don’t end with me either; we report to the designers and they actually make changes as a result (lots of the recent changes to Lost Planet are a direct result of player feedback from the multiplayer demo). I think people will be shocked to discover this but it’s true; we really are listening. This doesn’t mean you can demand dinosaurs in space that are secretly pirates with extendable robotic arms and they’ll show up in the next Devil May Cry. It’s an evolving relationship; when people make intelligent requests, we explain them to the developers, and they come to respect the community voice and acknowledge that kind of input. If we make unreasonable or silly requests, they tend to ignore us.

SC: What are your plans for the community? What can we expect?

SK: Big things, lots of changes. I view my role here as an in-house advocate for players and their concerns. As a part of that, I really want to make our website into the #1 destination for any Capcom fan. Giveaways, lively forums, the freshest news, contests, and a showcase for the best of the Capcom multiverse (including what Capcom itself does as well as the amazing work of our fans). There’s lots of good stuff coming up, like the Lost Planet launch party.

SC: I hear that we should never accept any Color of Money bets from you playing Street Fighter because you will hand us our butts on a platter. Tell us about your Street Fighter history.

SK: Me and Street Fighter go way back. Ive been addicted since the first time I saw Street Fighter 2 as a wee lad. I also have a nasty competitive streak so when tons of people started kicking my butt, it came as an unpleasant shock. Losing just wouldnt do, so I quietly kept at it and refined my game. I had some initial success at tournaments and sought out the best people I could find to play against, until I started to win on the national and international level. Incidentally I’m a pretty big fan of a lot of other Capcom franchises as well, particularly Resident Evil and Mega Man. Lost Planet is also turning out to be crazy fun, enough to get me back into console shooters, which I gave up a while back.

SC: Where and what was the largest tournament youve ever hosted?

SK: The EVO tournaments that we host are the largest fighting tournaments in the world. There are multiple qualifiers across cities in the US, but weve held the finals in Las Vegas for a few years now and it looks like it might be our permanent home. Fun town.

SC: Any good SF Tourney stories to tell?

SK: I have lots of stories. My favorites are from back in the hustling daysI was a fresh-faced kid and the internet was a wild and wooly place. Images were rare and video was practically nonexistent, so you could set up cross-country matches without anyone really knowing who you were or how good you might be. Everyone took it really seriously, so sometimes being an out-of-towner who just won a bunch of money off the locals meant you had to make a polite and speedy escape. Details might be unseemly now that I’m all growed up, but most of the stories end with me whispering under my breath “Go outside and start the car!”

SC: Who was the toughest opponent youve ever faced and why?

SK: If I’m wearing my pretentious Ryu hat, I would say that my toughest opponent is myself and all my stupid mistakes. If I were just going to answer the question, I’d say Daigo Umehara. Hes one of the most famous Street Fighter players in the world, plays at or near the top on almost every title, and is feared for an almost psychic ability to predict his opponents next move and respond with a shoryuken (this is such a big thing that psychically predicting these moves is actually called an Ume-shoryu by competitive players). I went the distance with him at the last tournament but choked part of the way through a re-dizzy combo and he came back to kill me. I admire the purity of his play—every motion he makes is designed to kill you as efficiently as possible.

SC: Which is your favorite Street Fighter game?

SK: My favorite is Super Street Fighter 2 X: Grandmaster Challenge. Its the last installment of the original SF2 series. Its refined and brutal at the same timein the hands of a master every single character is extremely deadly and can annihilate you before you even realize whats happening. Against top-level competition youre constantly in danger, and I love that feeling.

SC: Whos your favorite character to play in that game and why?

SK: My favorite characters shift over time. Lately Im loving E. Honda, and have had some good success playing him in tournaments. He isnt ranked very highly due to disadvantages against most characters that have a projectile, but he has a nice mix of offensive threats and rock-solid defense. Ive been most successful playing Chun Li and Balrog (the boxer).
 
 
The following are photos that Seth was kind enough to share with us about the trials and tribulations of running a Street Fighter Tournament.
 
 

Set-up during at a regional event. Set-up mostly involves sweating, moving a lot of surprisingly heavy stuff, unknotting vicious snarls of mysterious cable, then sweating some more.
 
 

Me in a truck at 2:30am the night before a big East coast event. Our monitor distributor had a problem and substituted (without our approval) our usual units for a bunch of flat screens, which unfortunately had some slight input lag (you hit a button and the punch shows up on the screen a fraction of a second laterirritating!). Cant run a serious tournament with laggy monitors, so after back-up plans A and B failed, we were forced to the dreaded back-up Plan C: drive to the nearest 24-hour Wal-Mart (turned out to be 70 miles away) and buy 30 new televisions in the middle of the night. Here we are looking sexy part way through loading them in our truck.
 
 

Heres another me playing in a tourney pic. Shows off my famous cross-handed style. To answer the most common questions in advance: 1) yes, I really do play like that. 2) No, I am not left-handed. 3) yes, I am a partly retarded.
 
 

What happens when the days gaming events are over at a big tournament? Why, we go back to our hotel rooms and go right on playing some friendly money matches, of course!

 
 

Heres Seth Officially Officiating the Lost Planet Tournment at the Capcom Launch Party

 
 

Seth and Chris call for the next round in the Lost Planet Multiplayer Tourney