Something curious happened during the latest stop on Capcom’s Pro Tour for Street Fighter 4. In the frenzied excitement of the tournament, the wrong version of the game was used.
At this weekend’s NorCal Regionals, competing players Ricky Ortiz and Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis noticed some odd discrepancies while playing their tournament match, things that were no longer present in the current version of Ultra Street Fighter 4. Embarrassingly, tournament organizers discovered that a prior version of the game was booted up, and four matches between the top 16 finishing players had already been played.
Capcom staff swept in and made a tough decision, declaring that each of those four matches would have to be replayed with the results wiped clean. This created a difficult situation for the winning players in particular, as it was difficult to argue that the difference in versions was all the difference between their winning or not. But the decision had been made, and the games were replayed.
Only one of the four matches saw a different result the second time around. Du “Nuckledu” Dang managed to sweep Ryota “Kazunoko” Inoue after losing to him in their original match by a margin of two games to one. It was hardly a fair result for Inoue, but there was little recourse at the time.
Tournament organizer John Choi took to social media Monday to explain the situation. Because a Smash Bros. tournament was being held at the same event, this required an Xbox to be plugged back in following the conclusion of the Smash final. The Xbox had an Ultra Street Fighter 4 disc inside, which is what created the problem.
While the digital version of the game was up-to-date, the disc version was not, and the Xbox console defaulted to the disc version when the game was booted up for the resumption of the Street Fighter 4 tournament.
Choi took responsibility for the error and sought to make it right by offering to pay for Inoue, who resides in Japan and had his win over Dang erased by the oversight, to attend another Capcom Pro Tour event in California. Inoue would finish tied for seventh in the event, while Dang went on to place third behind champion Daigo Umehara and runner-up Bruce “Gamerbee” Hsiang.
The finals appearance was an important one for both Umehara and Hsiang. For all of his fame, Umehara is no longer the dominant force he once was in Street Fighter, with players like Yosuke Momochi and Kun Xian Ho consistently battling it out at the top. But Umehara is still among the world’s best and a threat to win any tournament he enters, as he ably demonstrated here.
For Hsiang, it’s further proof that the slump he suffered not long ago is just a memory now. Hsiang’s play at South by Southwest put fans and players on notice that he was again a competitor to be feared, and his run at NorCal Regionals cements that fact.
