The Opponent

 

The Big, Huge Mystery Games Tournament Side Event at the DC Riichi Mahjong Open 2026

Following the conclusion of the mystery games tournament I held at MAGFest in January, I was asked by the staff member who oversaw it to run another for an event they were also helping to organize the following March, the DC Riichi Mahjong Open 2026 tournament in Arlington, VA, next to Washington, DC. I was not planning on attending the mahjong tournament proper, but I took the opportunity to get the most out of my mystery tournament setup away from home with a guaranteed audience, even if it had to be at my own expense.

The mystery tournament took place at 8:30 PM EDT on Saturday, March 28, the first of the two days of the mahjong tournament. The mahjong tournament reached its player cap of 160 players. Of those, 11 signed up for my tournament, but only 8 had checked in. One player had to drop out in the middle of the bracket. As a result, the event was much closer in scale to the tournaments I run at my local venue, but with an entirely new audience.

Note that although this post is written as a companion to the previous Big, Huge Mystery Games Tournament report, this tournament was not advertised under that title. Several audience members and passersby inquired about my setup between and during matches, as well as before the tournament, as I had established it four hours before the scheduled start time.

Format

The format for this tournament largely followed the same as the MAGFest event, with some experimental changes. As with last time, the start of the bracket seeded the wheel with 16 games of varying notoriety but genuine reputable quality, but after the first round, I started to populate the wheel with black NFC cards that are completely featureless. These cards contain the games I normally reserve for loser's finals, the most challenging to control and/or considerably most jank or poor in game feel or other perceived quality. While I know what games are on the black cards, I have no knowledge of which cards contain which games as I shuffle the deck and start replacing numbered cards with the black cards starting in round 2, when I decide the players are getting too comfortable, or if I decide for another reason to disrupt the pace of the tournament. For loser's finals, the roulette is entirely filled with black cards, because the two players who get that far are losers and need to be treated as such.

Card roulette wheel, completely populated with plain black cards.

The small number of players allowed me to run the entire tournament as double elimination. However, due to me misreading the bracket structure, I inadvertently held off on using the boss cards for grand finals rather than winner's finals.

For spectators, a small projector was furnished by event staff and aimed at the wall next to the players. Despite the keystone, it was adequate for the audience. I had actually brought my own cheap projector for this event, but the projector they provided was much better than mine despite also being cheap, as it had superior viewing range and a built-in tripod.

Games List

DOA2 Hardcore for PlayStation 2. Fighting Vipers for PlayStation 2. WWF WrestleMania the Arcade Game. Ultra Fight da Kyanta 2. A!, Taisen Shiyo, commonly known as AzuFight, a doujin fighting game for PC. Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S for 3DO. Despite the similar title, it is not to be confused with Sailor Moon S for SNES. Boxing for Atari 2600. Note the audience members getting into the action. Shadow: War of Succession for 3DO. The match has ended, with Viper despondent as he waits for Erika to finish him off. Gun Fight, an arcade game from 1975. The roulette contains two black cards among the standard numbered cards. KemoFre Fight 2nd, a doujin fighting game for PC. Smash Remix, a mod for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 64. Sailor Moon SuperS - Various Emotion for Saturn.

39 games were played over two hours, and no players opted to repeat any games. Games marked with an asterisk * were stored in black cards.

  • Sailor Moon S (Tournament Edition hack)
  • Soul Calibur (Dreamcast)
  • DOA2 Hardcore (PS2, Japan version)
  • Karnov's Revenge Revolution
  • Fighting Layer
  • Super Street Fighter II Turbo (New Legacy hack)
  • Fighting Vipers (PS2)
  • Breakers Revenge
  • WWF WrestleMania (Arcade)
  • Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars
  • Ultra Fight da Kyanta 2
  • AzuFight
  • Dragon Ball Z 2 Super Battle
  • Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S (3DO)*
  • Battle Monsters*
  • Tekken Tag Tournament (PS2)
  • Sailor Moon SuperS - Various Emotion*
  • Ultimate Fighting Championship
  • Boxing (Atari 2600)
  • Tekken 4
  • Shadow: War of Succession*
  • Gun Fight
  • The Outfoxies

Winner's Finals Games

  • Ring of Destruction
  • Tao Taido*
  • Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike ("The Karate Tournament" custom ruleset, see the aside in the previous tournament report)

Loser's Finals Games

Grand Finals Games

Reset Games

  • Mortal Kombat (1992)
  • Umineko Golden Fantasia
  • Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2
  • 1 on 1 Government
  • Chaos Code: New Sign of Catastrophe

I took the intervening two months between this tournament and the last to expand the pool of games. I have worked out a method to play 3DO games using the Phoenix emulator, crafting the batch files that launch them to copy premade configuration files for each game into the expected location before launching the emulator, then using NirCmd to press the hotkeys that will activate fullscreen mode and load the save state. (The Opera core for RetroArch has compatibility issues that Phoenix has solved. Phoenix also has support for Atari Jaguar games, but I have not explored it yet.) Save states can be loaded before starting emulation normally, which will also bypass the need to load the BIOS normally as well. The two 3DO games I was hoping would come up the most, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S (not related to the SNES game with a similar title aside from the subject matter) and Shadow: War of Succession, did get played. I must, however, express my disgust that the Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S players decided to make it a Sailor Chibimoon mirror match.

Also as a result of the black cards poisoning the well throughout the bracket, we somehow got all three Sailor Moon fighting games I had available, in reverse order of quality. Another fortuitous coincidence that I didn't plan for.

Loser's finals ran to game 5. For grand finals, I once again gave the players, starting with the loser's finalist, carte blanche over all games on numbered cards that were yet to be played, the boss cards, and the unplayed black cards. I started to encourage them to try their luck with the black cards in the hopes of evening the playing field. As a result, grand finals resulted in a reset, which also ran to game 5. This was close to the ideal result I had been hoping for regarding the end of the bracket, maximum carnage with the largest number of games played possible.

Other Remarks

My favorite photo in the above gallery is of Atari 2600 Boxing, with several members of the audience shadow-boxing to the action on screen.

Last year, I bought a pair of 8BitDo wired controllers to allow running games that cannot be comfortably played with arcade controls. I prepared several games to be played with these controls for the MAGFest tournament, but none got selected. This year, two such games were played: ChuChu Rocket and Smash Remix, both in grand finals. Introducing two more controllers to the PC causes issues with some emulators regarding controller order, particularly with Flycast, which is already inconsistent with controllers that share the same vendor ID. It is especially important for my use case that controller order is not changed for any reason, due to the IMB2, the double-wide, marble-patterned two-player arcade construction of my design that I use for the majority of games, and the unexpected reversal potentially causing incorrect match results to be reported. Flycast reversed the player order for the Dreamcast games in spite of testing I did earlier that day, so I will likely need to use the Flycast core within RetroArch for these events in the future, as RetroArch has proven more reliable in preserving controller order after some adjustments and upgrades I made after the MAGFest tournament. This snafu with controller order was the only issue with the software this tournament, and it did not require me to abort or replace any games.

Three games got particularly strong reactions from the crowd: 1 on 1 Government, Zoku Sonohigurashi vs. Touhou Universe 2, and KemoFre Fight 2nd. 1 on 1 Government is a perennial favorite of mystery events, an obscure arcade sports game that I have come to describe as "This is totally a fighting game, just trust me". Before the game is done, any doubt within the crowd is completely evaporated. One person who had played it exactly once before at a previous showing of my setup, but was not playing in this tournament, likened it to "a basketball game with Tekken controls", even though it uses buttons appropriate for basketball and not Tekken. Still, I'm still of the belief that it started development as a fighting game before pivoting to basketball, even though this is less likely for its PS1 prequel, 1 on 1 and its updated version, Simple 1500 Series Vol. 30: THE Basket: 1 on 1 Plus. Government is so popular in my area that it was requested for free play shortly before the tournament began, and a complete match was played before then. For some reason, Dr. T is a very popular character here, and in nearly every tournament match to date including this one, someone chooses him.

Zoku Sonohigurashi vs. Touhou Universe 2 character select screen. Much of the audience taking pictures and/or video of the Zoku Sonohigurashi vs. Touhou Universe 2 character select screen.

The two Fighter Maker 2000 games Zoku Sonohigurashi vs. Touhou Universe 2 and KemoFre Fight 2nd both resonated greatly with the mahjong-playing audience, as there is an apparently near 100% overlap of interest between riichi mahjong and the subjects of these games. When both games came up, nearly everyone in the audience started taking photos and videos of what they were seeing. The two photos above were taken within seconds of each other. I even instructed them to take pictures of the instruction monitors showing the titles of these games so that they may research them after the event. However, playing them comes with the complication of Japanese locales, and neither game has any fan patches to simplify changing the locale for these games, unlike more popular FM2K-based games like Dong Dong Never Die. I can only hope that anyone so curious about playing these strange titles for themselves will find the resources they need to both download and play them.

Unfortunately, despite one KemoFre Fight 2nd player choosing Toki, they were not able to execute the fun Toki (Fist of the North Star) Easter egg.

Conclusion

The champion of the mystery tournament, holding up the trophy. The final game of the tournament was Chaos Code: New Sign of Catastrophe.

This event took place late in the evening, after five complete rounds of competitive riichi mahjong in the ballroom across the hall where I was holding my own event. I drove 200 miles from Virginia Beach to Alexandria solely to run this tournament at the request of the staff member who generously provided commentary for The Big, Huge Mystery Games Tournament 2, without any plans of playing any mahjong myself. The crowd reactions to strange competitive video games in the periphery of the popular fighting games and the great interest the organizers had in my mystery games setup were the primary motivations for running this event at my own expense. I would like to spread this setup as far as I can do so, but the primary obstacle is the size of the IMB2. I built it wide enough for two players to sit a comfortable distance from each other, with enough palm space for any player. Even though it can be carried by a single person, it is by no means transportable by air without tremendous cost. The two control PCBs within run GP2040-CE, and any attempts to minimize the controls for better travel will need to retain them. The secondary obstacle is the cost of travel.

With all of this said, if you're within reasonble distance from Virginia Beach, VA and you're interested in catering me to run this tournament at your own event, contact me at the e-mail address at the bottom of this page. Be prepared to answer questions on the size and operating hours of the venue, the availability of displays, tables, and projectors, and how many players you expect will register.