Street Fighter IV Launch Party

Last week was the launch of Capcom's Street Fighter IV, which has shipped 2 million units world wide. The week before that, on Feb 12th, we had our luanch party for the title at the Geffen at the Museum of Contemporary Art near Little Tokyo in Los Angeles.

I arrived Wednesday a little bit after noon and headed to the museum. The cab ride from the museum was pretty expensive. Upon arrival, I run into the head of creative services at Capcom and proceeded into the museum. I get there and help my co-worker Darin set up products (t-shirts, hats, peripherals, trinkets, etc.) in display cases. I even got to handle props from the new Street Fighter movie starring Kristin Kreuk.

Afterwards I helped with the setting up of kiosks with XBox 360s and PlayStation 3s. There were many kiosks set up where guests could play. We finished most of the set up by 8 pm and all went out to dinner at some not-so-great bar/lunge/restaurant type deal.

The next day, day of the launch event, we finished what needed to be done until the start of the party. People have been camping in line since 9 am that morning. By the time the launch party was about to start, we were briefed on our roles for the duration of the event.

The creative services intern, another co-worker and I were scheduled to do crowd control. The party was supposed to start at 8 pm but the line got so long that we decided to let people in an hour earlier. An hour and a half later, the venue was at capacity. The Los Angeles fire marshall came out and stated that we were at capacity and couldn't let anymore people in. At this point, the line reached the street and began to wrap around the building.

At peak, there were probably about 4,0000 people at the event with half of them outside. By 10:30, we managed to get the rest of the guests inside and I and the other staff finally got inside. It was a pretty huge event.

There were many celebrities at the event. Besides some of the cast members from the Street Fighter movie quite a handful of stars came out. Supposedly Steven Spieldberg came to the event but I don't know if that was true or not. Some other stars included Zarchary Levi and Joshua Gomez of NBC's TV show, Chuck. LeVar Burton of Star Trek: the Next Generation and Reading Rainbow fame came out to join in the festivities and even Jason Kyson Lee who plays Ando in Heroes came out.

It was quite an event. Aside from the stars, we had Supreme Soul of season 2 of America's Best Dance crew perform a Street Fighter themed routine. DJ Q-Bert was also out there spinning on the 1's and 2's.

Personally, being in public relations, I could care less for the stars. I wasn't star struck like one of my buddies. All I cared about was meeting people from gaming press. As my boss says, "Celebrities won't do much for you."

Here are some of the pictures from the launch party:

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