Fighting game community’s passion isn’t paying the bills

At 15 years old, Hoa “Anakin” Luu and his dad made the nearly 700-mile journey from his hometown of Atlanta to the sun-bleached southern tip of Miami for Guard Your Grill, a Tekken tournament with a $1,000 payout for first place. That same year the two made an almost equally long trek heading the opposite direction on America’s sunbelt from Atlanta to Houston.

He spent his formative years balancing high school, a job loading trucks for UPS, and Tekken. Competitions for Bandai Namco’s premier 3D fighting game brought him all over the Southeastern U.S. When his parents weren’t able to drive him from tournament to tournament, he dipped into his savings. As he continued to improve and entered college, he was succeeding and occasionally even winning, but only making a small amount of money with this part-time commitment.