This Thanksgiving I want to give the bulk of my thanks to one company for helping me answer a question that has been bothering me for over 15 years. The company? Capcom. The question? Put simply, do I really have preternatural Street Fighter skills?

I still remember the first time I saw a SF2 arcade machine. It was at Walley World Six Flags Magic Mountain in the Spring of 1991, and the first character I chose was Dhalsim. The inspired lovechild of Iyengar and Reed Richards got me hooked and my freshman year of high school was a non-stop deluge of fierces, roundhouses, and quarters. There was no practice mode, no free play, and no internet to turn to for tips and tricks. Becoming a BAMF in a fighting game back then took nonstop on-the-job training. And I trained well – so well, in fact, that I soon ran out of people willing to sacrifice their money for my amusement. Even when the home version arrived my friends soon tired of me whupping on them. Being able to defeat them with my eyes closed probably didn’t help. The thought of being a big fish in a small pond never occurred to me. All I knew was that I had a gift and no one could prove me wrong.* Would that natural talent hold up if I ever faced real competition?