Fight Club

1. The first rule of Sephiroth’s fight club is, you do not talk about fight club.
2. The second rule of Sephiroth’s fight club is, you do NOT talk about fight club.
3. The third rule of Sephiroth’s fight club is, no shoes, no shirts, girls are an exception with shirts.
4. The fourth rule of Sephiroth’s fight club, if your opponent gives up, or taps out, then the fight is over.
5. The fifth rule of Sephiroth’s fight club, no weapons, rings, or gloves.
6. The sixth rule of Sephiroth’s fight club, only two people to a fight, unless he says otherwise.
7. The seventh rule of Sephiroth’s fight club, if this is your first night, then you gotta fight! 

Before there were thread ratings, before there was ever a Battle Arena, there was Sephiroth’s Fight Club. 

During the summer of 2001, Safer Sephiroth created a sparring-based role-playing game loosely based on the popular novel/film, Fight Club.  Members such as Fish, RicoTranzrig, Flash, Foredaddy, Raiha, The Great White Frying Pan Man, Warlock,Cecil and Ajeh all gathered to have fun spamming.  If anything, the thread today provides a glimpse of many of OtakuBoards’ future staff members when they were younger and new to the site.

Unfortunately, the original Fight Club thread (which had amassed 31 pages of spam) was lost when OtakuBoards Version 2 went down.  However, Sephiroth resurrected Fight Club on August 14, 2001–immediately after OtakuBoards Version 3 launched.  The style of posting presented in Fight Club (which was still characteristically Version 2-style posting), demonstrates the drastically different sensibilities of OtakuBoards at the time, compared to future evolutions of the site.  Posts were very short, comical and conversational.  Even the initial post created by Sephiroth is there purely for the purpose of getting the thread started–there was no deep narrative or important plot to speak of. 

Although the recreated version of Sephiroth’s Fight Club was not as successful as it was during Version 2, it still managed to acrue 143 replies.  Because the thread was meant to pick up where the deleted Version 2 Fight Club left off, one could consider these 143 replies a part of the original thread, thus  making it one of the largest threads ever created in the Games/Stories forum.

On February 4, 2002, Sephiroth created a sequel to Fight Club, called “Fight Club Returns!”  Many of the old participants returned in some capacity, along with some new faces,  such as Cruizr and Chaos.  A gradual change in posting style was becoming apparent in this thread, as evident by Chaos’s roleplays.  Although the roleplays were not very good in the sense that he completely dominated his opponents, they were an attempt a true narrative.  Also, the changing sensibilities of the forum were apparent when the thread only accumulated 119 replies.  Fight Club had become an inside joke among older members and new members, who were becoming more accustomed to traditional RPGs did not know how to approach an oldschool OtakuBoards RPG, like Fight Club.

 Notable Trivia:

On August 21, 2001, Charles (then Crazy White Boy) created a parody of Fight Club, called “Fight Like A Girl Club.”  It was not received very well.

Categories: History, RPGs