Ryan Hart: Esports champion on why gaming can be 'like a musical instrument'

Ryan Hart - King of Fighters Champion 1997.ryanjosephhart.com

Ryan Hart - King of Fighters Champion 1997. He is one of the godfathers of esports.

Ryan Hart is a five-time Guinness World Record holder and multiple world champion who has spent more than two decades competing in combat tournaments around the world.

The 44-year-old speaks of "destroying" opponents, leaving them "mentally broken" with defeats that can "haunt for weeks, months, even years".

But Hart's battles are not physical - he is a champion in fight-based video games.

And while he happily admits he wouldn't fancy his chances inside the Octagon with an MMA champion, he would certainly back himself with a controller in hand.

"It's about being cunning, sly, using skulduggery," he says.

"Hand-to-hand combat isn't different, apart from the physical training. The matches are 90% cerebral.

"It's like a musical instrument. You might have a tune in your head, but if your hands don't know how to utilise the strings on a guitar - how to combine the snare drum and bass drum on a drumkit - it doesn't matter.

"You might have the knowledge, but if you can't translate that, it won't work. The MMA champion, they'll fall short because they don't have the physical know-how on the controller to utilise the moves to get out the strategy that they want to deliver."

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Hart - Tekken 3 World Champion in 1999

Speaking to 5 Live's Winners Enclosure, Hart said things can get pretty heated in gaming battles.

"Just like in boxing or UFC, you have serious rivalries," he said. "People don't like each other. Some of the beefs are really serious."

Hart's love for video games blossomed during the 1990s, when he played Street Fighter. Gaming gave him solace during some turbulent formative years - and helped him to "weather the storm".

"I grew up without a dad," he says. "I was alone a lot of the time. I found myself in all kinds of difficult situations."

Hart won his first major tournament - the King of Fighters UK Championship - in 1996. He successfully defended the title a year later, but around that time he also had a period of homelessness.

"Juggling those two lives was very, very challenging," he says. "It was a very, very dark place I was entering into - a life of solitude, very difficult to manage."

Hart kept working, and in 1998 travelled to Japan to play in a competitive gaming competition. He won his first World Championship in Japan in 1998 and went on to win his second World Championship for Tekken 3 in 1999.

"I'd never had a passport in my life," he says. "I was on a plane going to Tokyo, 18 years of age. I didn't speak a word of Japanese.

"It was just such a surreal experience. It was crazy. On day one, there were 12 reporters outside waiting to interview me. I had no idea about this following I had."

Though overseas success was not instant, Hart did win the King of Fighters 1998 World Championship in Japan.

Indeed, between 1995 and 2018 he racked up an incredible number of titles.

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Hart is a multi-game World Champion.

He holds five Guinness World Records, including most consecutive opponents on Street Fighter V, most tournament wins for different fighting games and most countries tournaments have been won in. He has numerous national, European and world titles, and is a two-time winner of the Evolution Championship Series - an esports event that focuses exclusively on fighting games.

Hart played professionally and received sponsorship during the nineties, but in 2009 he joined his first esports team - Low Land Lions.

These days, he is Twitch partner, commentator, pro player and Creative Production Editor at ESL - the world's largest esports organisation in a sector expected to be worth $1.9bn (£1.4bn) by 2025.

That wasn't always the case, of course.

"Back in the 90s/noughties, it wasn't established as a full-time career," he says.

"You used to get laughed out of the room if you said you got paid to play video games."