The man has won more fighting-game tournaments than you even knew existed. His English-language Wikipedia entry is longer than the one for current Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan. He’s got an endorsement deal with Mad Catz. Videos of the infamous Street Fighter III 3rd Strike “Ken super parry” he pulled off at a 2004 tournament have garned over a million hits on YouTube. He is Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, and he is quite simply the most famous fighting-game player in the world. What’s his secret?

“I don’t know if you’d really call this a secret, but back when I was a kid, I always wanted to find something I could really dedicate myself to,” Umehara told Famitsu magazine in an interview published last week. “I didn’t like schoolwork and wasn’t really into sports, but once I started playing games, it wasn’t long before I realized I was addicted. What school and sports are to some people, games were to me, I figured. The thing is, people don’t give much credit to games — they tell you to stop playing them and study more and so on. I was sort of rebelling against that; I figured I’d put my heart and soul into gaming the way that other people do with studying or sports.”

The way Daigo sees it, mastering video games requires the same sort of indomitable spirit that drives the best professional sports athletes. “A lot of people give up too quickly with video games,” he lamented. “They say to themselves ’I should stop caring so much about wins and losses’ or ’I guess I just suck,’ and they let themselves throw it in. I don’t like that. When I pick up a game, I’m afraid of leaving anything on the table. I don’t think ’maybe I can’t win this’; I think ’I’ve got to win, no matter what.’”

Umehara wasn’t born a fighting-game genius, though. “When I started playing fighters in grade school, I started by practicing with every character until I could do all of their special moves,” Umehara said. “Once I learned the basic combo sets, that was enough to win matches with my friends, but not to hold my own at the arcades. It’s not like my opponents were better at inputting commands than I was, either, and sometimes these same opponents would lose spectacularly against other people. That’s when I realized that technical skill isn’t the only thing that can make a difference in fighting games. There was something else, and trying to figure out what was too hard for me as a kid. So I pored over every game magazine I could get, searching for some kind of new tip or hint. If got even one new thing from a mag, I was like ’I am so happy I bought this.’”

It wasn’t long before Daigo realized that fighting games are partly physical, partly psychological. “I first started actively thinking about the issue around the time I was into Darkstalkers, about age 14,” he said. “I thought at first that it’d be best to wait for my opponent to make a mistake, but naturally, that means you can’t beat someone who performs flawlessly. So I started pondering over how to beat opponents like that. Having a good fighting-game strategy is vital if you want to win, of course, but being able to observe people is just as important — figuring out what kind of style they’re bringing with them. Ideally, both players are bringing their best skills to the game, but in real life, everyone has little quirks. For example, every time a brand-new fighter comes out, people tend to look for some ’one true’ strategy and try to win just with that one approach. They wind up depending on it too much, and they forget how vital observing your opponent is. You always have to strike a balance in your mind.”

Daigo won his first fighting-game tournament in 1997 and kept at it for nearly a decade before suddenly retiring from the sport in 2007. “I’d devoted pretty much the entirety of my youth to fighting games,” he explained, “and there was this hazy thought nagging in my mind about whether gaming was really the best thing for me. It got really bad in my mid-twenties, and at one point I quit playing fighters. For the next couple years, until Street Fighter IV came out, I’d play fighters for fun but never seriously get into them. The experience made me think that I could live without fighters and not be worse off for it.”

What enticed him to return, then? “My friends got me back into fighters with SFIV, and that made me remember that I had all of these skills at my disposal still,” Umehara recalled. “I also realized, for the first time, that I become something special when I play fighters — and only when I play fighters. The moment I realized that, the nagging in my mind disappeared; I realized that I couldn’t possibly do anything else with my life.”

Now Daigo’s back in business, coming off a victory at the 2009 Evolution Championship Series’ SFIV tournament. He doesn’t regret the hiatus, though. “During the years I was away from fighting games, I started to look at myself more impartially, to keep my eyes on the big picture,” he said. “It made me realize that fighting games aren’t just about the players — there’s the developers, the media, the event promoters, all kinds of people that make the games what they are. That’s what allows me to feel like I’m someone special in this field. I really owed all of them a major debt, and when I thought about how I should repay it, I realized that I needed to get more players into the genre, to show how much fun this is to more people. That’s why I’m getting more active with the media now. Partly, I want people to look at me and say ’Man, look how much cred he’s getting now that he’s turned pro; I wish I could be like that.’ The more players we can get, and the more developers we can get enthused for the genre, the better it’ll be for fighting games.”

The way Daigo puts it, there’s nothing he’d like better than for someone else to follow in his footsteps. “Games get a lot more negative attention than sports or studying,” he said. “Lots of people actively try to keep you away from them. If you really like gaming, though, then I think you need to keep going with it, even if it means having to convince your friends or family that it’s worth it. If you keep worrying about what people think, then it’ll feel terrible if you wind up failing at the end, right? But if you take pride in it and go all-out, then even if you fail, you’ll have fun along the way and there’s still something you’ll get from it in the end.”