Alex Valle (left) and Peter Rosas show off their tickets after winning the Super Battle Opera qualifer at Dejin Arcade. (photo by Kara Leung)

In the weeks leading up to EVO, we’ll be running a series of interviews with the players to watch in the Street Fighter 4 tournament.  In our first interview, frequent Shoryuken.com blogger Adam “Keits” Heart catches up with Street Fighter legend Alex Valle.

(transcript of audio interview follows…)

Adam:   Alright, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I have here Alex Valle, Street Fighter Legend out of southern California, to talk with us about the Evolution tournament and how he feels he’s going to do this year. So, say hi to everyone Alex.

Alex:  Hey, what’s going on everyone?

Adam:  OK, coming through loud and clear. So, tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? How old are you? When were you born? Where were you born?

Alex:  My name is Alex Valle. I was born in Lima, Peru. I came down the States when I was about 4 years old. I’ve been playing Street Fighter since 1991. I’ve been around, man, since arcade live in the 90’s really boomed, around Champion Edition. From then on man, the rest is history: playing games, winning tournaments, winning left and right up till now.

Adam:  For anyone who’s been around for a while, you’re pretty much a household name in the community. Everyone know’s who you are by reputation and by name, but I think a lot of these younger guys might not know you. You’re not as what I call “YouTube Popular” as Daigo or Justin Wong. So tell us a bit about what you’ve accomplished in the Street Fighter community over the years

Alex:  Well, one of the very first internet gathering based tournaments was called B3: Battle By the Bay, which was organized by the EVO founders Tom and Tony Cannon. They posted on the alt.games.sf2 newsgroups back in the day; I think that’s right. I wasn’t very internet savvy at that time, though. All that stuff to me was like word of mouth. So you had a tournament that was advertised on the internet, which was unheard of. Usually tournaments were advertised by word of mouth or little flyers or what not.

This was about the time I met Mike Watson: maybe a year and a half before that tournament. He basically bred me, and took me in the right direction in top-level play. Right when I played Watson the very first time, he just destroyed everything that I had. Everything that I thought that I accomplished was like nothing; I just lost.

See the rest of the interview after the jump…

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