Community Lore: The pro fighting game player who ran a League of Legends team

Not all well known community figures got to be well known through high performance and inspiration. Sometimes a single event can cement your place as a legend within the community. In the fighting game community, that person is Marn.

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Who is Martin “Marn” Phan

Want more #SFV and #MvCi? Tune in to the #SCR2017 after party stream! Marn vs. Smug on right now! Live stream: https://t.co/VhuVFzpTWa #FGC pic.twitter.com/z6ful4Uh6c

— HiRiskFGC (@HiRiskFGC) September 25, 2017

Marn is a Vietnamese-American player who played for the professional team Empire Arcadia starting in 2002, the same year that the legendary American fighting game player Justin Wong joined the roster. Although Marn would never achieve the same degree of success as Wong, the proximity and apparent friendship between the two would keep Marn at the center of many competitive circles for quite some time.

Marn was also known for being a variety player as well. While many players prefered to stick to a single game or series, Marn showed he was capable of playing many different types of fighting games, something which certainly helped him extend his reach.

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Marn runs a fighting game tournament

@MarnORZ Why did you kill guilty gear Marn #kappa

— Isaac Ruiz (@isaacruiz4) August 11, 2012

Because so many fighting game tournaments are small they tend to end up being community run, organized by people who just want to see a game played. One way to at least ensure that a tournament would be run well and generate attention would be to put a prominent community member in charge of it.

This is what happened for a fighting game called Guilty Gear XX Λ Core Plus R (don’t ask). Despite the odd name, Guilty Gear had a reputation in the wider fighting game community. The game was tough, unforgiving, and expected its players to be held to a higher standard of skill. As a result, many Guilty Gear tournaments were small due to the game’s inaccessible gameplay, but at the highest level games would have an unparalleled level of depth.

The story goes that Marn entered the tournament which he ran. Because he was in charge of organizing the event, he was responsible for creating the player pools in order to streamline the tournament. Marn, seeing an opportunity to take advantage of this power, allegedly placed the best players into just a few pools, while placing himself into a pool with little competition.

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A rigged tournament gets run

If Marn never rigged the bracket GGXXACPR would have had 4 times the numbers of DBFZ this year at evo

— AnBi (@GFAnBi) July 31, 2018

For most of the players, this kind of activity would have gone unnoticed, but enough people familiar with the Guilty Gear fighting game scene noticed that Marn, a decent player but nowhere near good enough to win against the best players, was performing exceptionally well at a notoriously hard fighting game.

This prompted some to review the brackets, during which they noticed that something was wrong. What followed varies a little by which version of the story you hear, but ultimately the tournament was cancelled and entry fees were refunded and the game was later dropped from multiple bigger tournaments, including EVO.

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Marn continues despite reputation

Guilty Gear’s eventually downfall as a fighting game was largely blamed on Marn, even if there might have been other factors to consider. However, the small size of the game meant that Marn suffered little actual backlash. He was still allowed to participate in tournaments, although he wasn’t usually given organizer privileges again.

But Marn was never known to stick to a single game, and eventually he even branched out to a new game which was sweeping the world, League of Legends.

In 2012, Marn started up his own professional League of Legends team, a team which few expected to see perform well.

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Marn moves to League of Legends, Team MRN qualifies for Season 2’s NA LCS

Team MRN ended up drawing much attention for having a very abnormal playstyle, often making calls that more refined teams wouldn’t and somehow coming out ahead in the confusion.

This, and the fact that Team MRN always seemed to be the underdogs made every win into a story to tell. Although they ultimately did lose, they were still able to take games against Cloud 9 and CLG, the latter of which featured Doublelift as its AD Carry who, at the time, was believed to be the best in that role.

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Marn’s legacy in the fighting game cemented with the release of a small indie fighting game

It seems wherever Marn goes there’s something crazy that happens, although this last one has to do with his involvement in the indie meme-fighting game called Divekick. This game released during a period of fighting game history where a “divekick” was a tool common to many high tier characters across multiple fighting games. This move simply allowed players to alter their jump arc on a whim. Although this sounds small, it had a big impact.

A group of enterprising members of the fighting game community decided to make a tribute game to this period of Fighting Game history, appropriately titled Divekick. It would go on to feature many parodies and tributes to many of the best divekickers across all fighting games, and would model some of them off the players.

One of these characters would go on to become Mr. N, titled as “The Bracket Rigging Scum” as a play on Marn’s reputation. Although the game is more of a communal in-joke, its presence and arrival onto the fighting game scene at such a critical time encapsulated Marn’s legacy as part of the fighting game community.