Shaq Fu and the Strange Afterlives of Bad Games
If you were really struggling with an unfair boss fight or a devious puzzle in your favorite game in the mid-2000s, there was only one destination to assuage your woes: GameFAQs. In that pre-YouTube era, unless you had hundreds of dollars to burn on subscriptions to all of your favorite gaming magazines, you would probably end up Ctrl+F-ing your way through one of that site’s surprisingly thorough text guides in order to surmount a particularly tough part of any game. Outside of these FAQs themselves—frequently asked questions, for the uninitiated—there are also message boards for each game, repositories of bizarre tangents, rampant fanboyism, and, very occasionally, legitimate discussion of the game itself.
While these boards might seem laughably basic in this age of social media—Sony, for example, shut down the official PlayStation forums at the end of February—they were one of the major conduits of gaming culture in their day. Outside of the more popular games, there were boards that were notorious for trolling, off-topic discussion, and general unpleasantness, from Current Events to the infamous Life, the Universe, and Everything (better-known as LUE). But there was one that outdid them all: the board for the Sega Genesis fighting game Shaq Fu, home to a bizarre band of posters known as the SFA.
If you’re only vaguely familiar with the name Shaq Fu, you’re not alone. It’s a strange artifact of a different era of gaming, when publishers would latch themselves like barnacles onto existing beacons of pop culture in hopes of catching the public’s fickle attention. This usually came in the form of licensed spin-offs to popular family films like Toy Story and The Lion King, or glorified advertisements masquerading as games like the McDonald’s platformer M.C. Kids or 7 Up’s Cool Spot. In the case of a handful of console entries from the ’90s, however, the chosen cultural touchstone was that of a powerhouse celebrity, divorced from any institution other than their status as a brand unto themselves. But while hardly anyone remembers Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City or Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style, Shaq Fu has inspired what we might call a polarized response over the years.
Depending on who you ask, the so-called Shaq Fu Army (or, later, Shaq Fu Alliance) that inhabited that GameFAQs board was a cult, a troll group, or simply a loose gang of internet friends with too much time on their hands. When I first joined GameFAQs in 2004, I would often see other forum-goers mention the “organization” as a scourge on the site, or the Shaq Fu board as a rat’s nest of toxicity. While they did earn their trollish reputation in their early years—specifically by “invading” other boards on GameFAQs by posting spam and obscenities in the hopes of disrupting these communities—for the most part, the SFA that I witnessed was little more than a community-wide joke shared between a few immature internet misfits.
To understand the SFA’s popularity, it’s worth examining the internet of the early-to-mid 2000s. Today, it’s relatively trivial to shove all your friends into a groupchat on your preferred social media site or standalone app like Telegram or GroupMe. Back then, however, it was somewhat harder to herd all your friends into the same IRC channel, or coordinate a time for everyone to hop on instant messaging clients like AIM. So, there was a strange logic to hopping onto a deserted message board for a retro game nobody cared about and claiming it as your “own.” These so-called “secret boards” of GameFAQs became de facto online social clubs for like-minded games enthusiasts, of which the SFA is the most notorious example.
A former member who goes by the handle “Coldspy” describes the SFA as a “rebel faction” on GameFAQs, one that received frequent warnings and outright bans from the moderators of the site. Coldspy first discovered the group after purchasing a bundle of Genesis games from eBay that included several copies of Shaq Fu. While surfing the web to try to figure out how to perform some of the game’s special moves, he stumbled on the SFA and joined almost immediately.
“In the early 2000s, there was no Reddit, and GameFAQs was very influential, lots of internet parlance came from it,” he explained. “While there were some social boards like LUE, there weren’t groups like the SFA. We were committed: the board was active, we put SFA in our signatures, we invaded boards before they banned us… We got modded a lot.”
The “organization” delighted in coining its own bizarre mythology and slang, vaulting Shaquille O’Neal himself to the status of a deity, and cursing the late Kobe Bryant as their ultimate nemesis. (To be clear, Bryant does not appear in Shaq Fu; the game’s release predates his NBA career.) Anyone who questioned the undying excellence of the game were called “kees” and “fistinites,” unfortunate thralls of the evil Bryant. But while there was certainly a strain of irony to the whole performance, Coldspy recalls that the SFA’s most devoted members actually did play the game quite a lot, and resented the harsh treatment that critics and casual players had hoisted upon it.
“For many, it was ironic, but most of us played the game,” he said. “Also, Shaq was the biggest sports star in the world back then, so I’m sure plenty [of members] were fans of his… We weren’t trying to make fun of the game through intemperate praise. The group and the game went hand-and-hand, even if the game wasn’t a 10/10, it spawned the SFA, which we all enjoyed. It was like Rocky Horror [Picture Show]: The movie isn’t great and fans of it don’t just watch it on a Tuesday night. But it spawned a whole culture, and you can’t separate the movie from the midnight showings and dressing up.”
Funnily enough, you don’t have to look very far to find exaggerated opinions of Shaq Fu that tilt in the opposite direction. In the early 2000s, Saad Saadi spent many hours browsing games stores like Funcoland with his friends, digging for whatever weird gaming exotica they could find. While they never quite found the rare treasures they were hoping for, they did run into a lot of dirt-cheap Shaq Fu cartridges. After quickly determining that the game was terrible, the bored pals soon took it upon themselves to snatch up as many copies of the game as they could find, under the pretense of “liberating” their local games stores of their awful scourge, at $1.50 a pop. The joke became so elaborate that Saadi eventually decided to buy the “shaqfu.com” domain in the fall of 2002 to exhibit their adventures, complete with a mission statement that explained the logic behind their mock crusade. (It still exists today, in all its Flash-era internet glory.)
“You prevent other generations from feeling the corruption of this game and its evil,” a portion of it reads. “Purchasing many copies of the game shifts the demand schedule, consequently raising the price. Even though it costs you more money, it reduces the incentive for a non-liberator to buy the game; a worthwhile sacrifice.” (According to Saadi, the price of the Shaq Fu carts eventually rose to $5.55, leading the friends to conclude that their efforts had created some false demand.)
Despite the site’s obvious age, Saadi still updates it on occasion. When a gaming studio launched a $450,000 Indiegogo campaign to craft a follow-up to Shaq Fu, Saadi and friends scribed a satirical “Declaration of Opposition,” calling the concept of a sequel “an affront to human dignity.” Over the years, Saadi and his friends have received dozens of copies of Shaq Fu through the mail, and the site still pulls in traffic from Reddit and elsewhere. Yet despite the fact that O’Neal has rolled the name Shaq Fu into his mammoth brand, no one has contacted Saadi to attempt to buy the domain name. “There was one guy who tried to offer me $100 for it a long time ago,” Saadi recalled, laughing. “I said, ‘No way!’ The mission is much more important than that.”
Today, due to GameFAQs’ continual purging of old posts, digital evidence of the SFA’s existence is scant, to say the least. Some former SFA members still post on the Shaq Fu board every now and then, and I personally recall a standalone site for the group existing at one point, but I couldn’t find any evidence of it in the Web Archive. (A SFA-themed fangame created by one member also exists, filled to the brim with shock images and other obscenities, but it’s best left buried.) After the SFA broke apart due to internal feuding, some members who congregated on the GameFAQs message boards for famously terrible games like Superman 64 and Drake of the 99 Dragons all moved to an external forum dedicated to the worship of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, where I met many internet friends that I still talk to today. The administrator of that forum—a good friend of mine—once told me that he specifically patterned his site after the SFA.
In a sense, it shouldn’t surprise us that even bad games can inspire subcultures out of whole cloth. After all, who doesn’t love to experiment with a bit of performative nonconformity every now and then? Still, for me, the ultimate irony of Shaq Fu is that the game isn’t even really that bad. It’s a stiff, muddled fighting game from the era of Mortal Kombat clones, but compared to true clunkers like Superman 64, it comes off as almost competent. At least the absolute worst games eventually garner some level of infamy, which is an unpleasant sort of immortality. Truly mediocre works slide down into the slough of history, alone and forgotten—unless they star a famous NBA player, of course.
