As one of the most celebrated and storied competitive fighting game players of all time, Justin Wong’s resume is filled with matches for the history books. That said, he recently sat down with EvoFGC to talk in depth about five particular bouts that he feels truly shaped his career.
While you might expect at least one of these would come Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the game that launched him into the public eye and that he won Evo 7 times in, he actually doesn’t bring up a single MvC2 match. Instead he starts with his most famous loss: Evo Moment 37.
As Wong explains it, he was venturing out into Street Fighter territory so as not to be known only as a “Marvel scrub” in the eyes of the wider community.
His basic fighting game abilities and intuitions translated well into Street Fighter 3, but he wound up on the wrong end of BST|Daigo Umehara at the moment he turned into “The Beast.”
It’s extremely interesting to hear about Moment 37 through Justin Wong’s perspective. He explains what was going through his own head (and what he thought was going through Daigo’s) in the seconds leading up to the famous parry.
In the end, the reason Justin included this Third Strike loss amid the matches that made him is in large part because of how impactful it ultimately was for the FGC, bringing the genre of gaming into the view of countless gamers who may not have otherwise appreciated it.
Justin also details his experiences playing Mike Ross in the very early days of Street Fighter 4, facing off with two of his fellow Marvel gods at Evo 2013 and 2015, and his Marvel vs. Capcom 3 SBO encounter from 2012 with Kubo.