As part of the 20th anniversary of EVO Moment 37 and the 25th anniversary of the latest version of Street Fighter 3, organizers at EVO 2024 thought it’d be a nice idea to hold one more open tournament to celebrate the legacy of one of the cornerstones of the Fighting Game Community (FGC). While the love for Third Strike runs deep, no one expected to run 1,101 competitors deep. Almost double the count that participated in the EVO Japan 2024 tournament earlier this year and just 200 players short of Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s runback last year.

While Marvel vs. Capcom 3 might hold a special place in the North American FGC’s heart, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike is so deeply ingrained in the mythos of fighting games that you cannot imagine the community or their battlegrounds without it. It was that game, those players on that day, in that moment that would change the trajectory of competitive gaming forever. It all comes back to EVO Moment 37. It all comes back to Sunday, August 1, 2004.

In the clip above, you can see Daigo Umehara (Ken) parry Justin Wong’s (Chun-Li) Super before making an unbelievable comeback with a full combo and a Super of his own. To parry Chin-Li’s Houyoku-sen Super perfectly, since any hit could’ve knocked him out, Daigo had to make 15 almost frame perfect (fighting games run at 60 frames per second) inputs. Not only did he pull that off under tournament pressure, he jumped to parry the last hit, which is significantly harder still to build enough resources to finish his opponent off.

The Daigo Parry isn’t just a brilliant play, it is the potential of fighting games as both a competitive medium and a spectator sport siphoned into a one-minute clip. Even if you don’t know anything about fighting games, you only have to watch two players competing at the highest level in the final round and see the impossible made possible in front of a roaring crowd to understand why people dedicate their lives to these games.

Only Street Fighter 3 Third Strike could’ve set the stage for it. At the time it was the perfect intersection between accessibility and depth, offering players ways to express themselves in front of a large audience that only Street Fighter, the patriarch of fighting games, could conjure.

Even 20 years after EVO Moment 37, 25 years after the release of Street Fighter 3, its latest EVO outing was just as exciting as the mythical tournaments of the days of old. Despite having received no balance patch, fixes, or new characters for over two decades, players are still pushing the software to its limit.

This year, Japanese pro player, Hayao, who’s as colorful a character as those within the world of Street Fighter, managed to win the hearts of thousands of spectators thanks to his antics and his brilliant performance as Hugo in a match against FrankieBFG’s Ken. In a feat of utter brilliance, Hayao not only managed to parry FrankieBFG’s airborne Super which required almost frame perfect inputs. After, he used Hugo’s dropkick, widely regarded as one of the most useless moves in the game, to avoid another onslaught Super before winning the match.

Moments like this and Daigo Parry, show fighting game enthusiasts old and new what is possible. They keep these games and their communities alive long after they leave the shelves or the arcades and inspire a new crop of world warriors to soar to even greater heights. Street Fighter 3 Third Strike set the table for all of this and, if this latest tournament is anything to go by, we’re not done with it yet.

For more ramblings on fighting games, make sure to check out our coverage of EVO such as our interview with Tekken’s director Harada or our preview of Dragon Ball Sparking Zero.