Hard Read Cafe is a Discord server that I joined in 2019, and it changed my life. Back then it was a server for obscure indie fighting game "HYPERFIGHT", which I've mentioned many times on this website. It was a server dedicated to the biggest tournament series for that game, the Hyperfight Clockout Series. But after everyone was sort of tired of "HYPERFIGHT", instead of simply archiving the server, we repurposed it. We turned it into a general purpose server, not for any particular games, but rather for that community. Because many of us were really close friends at this point, and it only made sense to keep things together. However there was still some sort of desire for some unified event that all brought us together. Something like how the Clockout Series did all those years ago, even though it was maybe only a year or two since then. For a brief period, I was the one to make that possible of all people. See, in the early days of "HYPERFIGHT", I was one of the most prolific Tournament Organizers below Esvee. But I often was a bit immature and annoying, oftentimes doing more to harm the Hyperfight community than to help it. To be fair I still am immature and annoying sometimes, but I like to think I've at least gotten better. At the very least I was able to redeem myself enough to host a Tekken tournament for the server. Now, I don't exactly remember why I spesfically wanted a Tekken tournament, this isn't like later where the game was random. But whatever it was that lead me to make it, enough people liked the idea that we had enough people for a tournament. That tournament was one of the most fun things we had ever done in the server. No one there really knew how to play Tekken, but it's such a good game to pick up and play that everyone had a good time. It was so much fun that we decided to do it again, but now the games would be randomized. That lead to the Hard Read Cafe Random Tournament Series, which is what this page is about. The series is currently on hiatus, so there's no updates on it right now, but who knows. Maybe when you check back next, a whole 10 more tournaments have been played. But for now, this is all just a retrospective.
Good ol' Tekken Tag Tournament 1, the one that started it all. It was just a great and very fun tournament, there were a lot of technical issues, I hadn't quite figured out how to optimize Parsec for these events yet, but still, it was a fun time had by all. This one got an edited video made of it!
The first episode to show off the Hard Read Cafe Wheel Of Games, something that would become a staple to the series. Unfortunately that wheel decided that we would play Guilty Gear: The Missing Link, and this is the first time where things went wrong. The biggest technical issue is that the controls were messed up for only the first half of the tournament, leading to some players simply not having time to relearn controls after they were later fixed. A slightly bigger issue was that the game itself was not very good, the grand finals were settled by a random instant kill.