The Young Bucks talked to the media after AEW’s Fyter Fest and talked about the marriage of gaming and wrestling and why the two genres blend so well. The Bucks said they feel like it’s the same fan base, and the ’90s generation that grew up on video games is making up a good portion of the wrestling community.
Nick: That’s a good question. I feel like it’s the same fans. Maybe it’s because we are like superheroes in real life? I don’t know.
Matt: It’s the same age demographic, most of us like the same things, most of us are ‘90s kids at this point now. We all grew up liking the same things. It seems like gaming and wrestling just go hand in hand.
Nick: For example, the Hadoken tonight—that was one of the biggest reactions of our match, so people knew it. Everyone knew it.
The brothers said their Street Fighter tribute at Fyter Fest came up almost immediately, noting they both loved Street Fighter II, but Kenny Omega is a massive fighting game fan. The pair also joked about Kenny’s seamstress not having his original ‘Akuma’ gear delivered in time, and that receiving it by Monday (after the event) would mean he’ll never get to use it.
Matt: As soon as we found out we were doing this [Fyter Fest] we were thinking ‘what can we do?’ We had to have some kind of video game influenced thing, and I think I came up with it in the group chat, right?
Nick: Yeah, you did.
Matt: We’re big Street Fighter fans.
Nick: Well, Kenny is a massive Street Fighter fan…
Matt: Kenny is the biggest, I kinda dropped off after ‘II’… Nick’s a [fan of the second game] too, I bought him the arcade for his birthday. We’re big Ryu and Ken and Guile fans. You have the blonde hair [motions to Nick] so you’re Ken. We got the costumes from Denise Cutler, Brandon Cutler’s wife. I didn’t see them until today.
The Bucks also talked about what they did after Double Or Nothing, joking that they played Street Fighter II Turbo Edition, but said they reviewed the show and went through a lot of production issues. They wanted to see what went well and what didn’t, and Matt noted how they’re learning about production on the job with AEW.
Matt: Street Fighter II Turbo Edition… [laughs]
Nick: No, we watched the whole show back to see what we didn’t do good and what we did do good.
Matt: You watched it back about three times?
Nick: Yeah, I watched it back three times, and then we tried to learn from the mistakes that we made and we went from there.
What did you implement this time?
Matt: Some of the timing cues were different, some of the in-between transitions, boring stuff like that.
Nick: Backstage things that no one’s entertained by.
Matt: When to shoot pre-tapes and how to shoot them, stuff like that. We’re just learning all of that basic, elementary stuff. I didn’t know anything about lighting until a couple of months ago.
Nick: Just time cues after time cues. It’s so boring. You guys don’t care about it.