Jay “IdolismJ” Gary Interview

As part of our ThanksGAMING event for the end of the year, I want to take time to elevate and appreciate the people in gaming I admire or inspire me – whether they are content creators, journalists, or developers. 

Jay Gary is a writer, YouTuber, and former fighting game commentator who I have followed for a while on several social media sites, and I’ve loved the work he has done across a variety of subjects. From his articles on supercombo.gg to his detailed video essays on the RPGs of yesteryear, Jay’s work is always insightful, taking you places you may not expect at first glance.

Thankfully, Jay was gracious enough to chat with me about his content, passions, and other aspects of his life.

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To kick things off, I wanted to give Jay the opportunity to introduce himself in his own words for anyone who wasn’t aware of what he did already.

“Hello! My name is Jay “IdolismJ” Gary! What you know me for depends on where you’re coming from. I’ve been a person of interest in the fighting game community for a long time, I’ve been running a YouTube channel for video game essays for the past couple years, and there’s even a chance you know me because my belly went quintuple-platinum on Twitter back in 2020. I get around.”

Twitter is where I first came across Jay on social media, no doubt. Before it became a Nazi hellsite, I spent an inordinate amount of time there reading up on games and sports. Twitter was where I first started interacting with the fighting game community, specifically — a community in which Jay himself was relatively well-known. 

If you follow competitive games for any amount of time, you’ll notice that many of its prominent members are a part of teams and organizations. Often these organizations are represented on stream or online using three to four letters, such as “NRG” or “FaZe”. All of Jay’s socials indicated that he was a part of one such organization, YASE, that I had not personally heard of.

So, what is 「ＹＡＳＥ」, exactly?

“「ＹＡＳＥ」 is a surprisingly long story. Back around 2010 or so, the concept of fighting game teams really took off. This was spearheaded by established eSports orgs like Evil Geniuses adopting their own fighting game roster and community-first teams like the infamous Empire Arcadia. Soon everyone was forming teams and, more importantly, putting their team code in their usernames. A group of my friends and I decided to start YASE as a parody to the burgeoning team landscape, it stood for ‘Yall Aint Shit Ennyways’. But something curious happened; YASE outlasted almost every other team because we were a collective of chill people (who were still halfway decent at these games) and everyone else were these profit models that realized the FGC had no money in it. There are still some teams left out there in the world, Kick Punch Block and Play All Games come to mind, but YASE has stuck together probably the longest of any FGC team.”

But something curious happened; YASE outlasted almost every other team because we were a collective of chill people (who were still halfway decent at these games) and everyone else were these profit models that realized the FGC had no money in it.

His point about their longevity rings like pointed criticism of the FGC professional space. While fighting game teams have existed for decades, professional teams like Echo Fox and Tempo Storm made big waves by signing major players in the mid 2010s. The influx of new teams and signed players was impossible to ignore; nearly every player in a major tournament would be sporting their organization’s name on clothing, in their registered name, or both. 

When the pandemic hit, many of these organizations collapsed as the money dried up and travel became more difficult. Despite the pandemic and surrounding FCG team landscape, YASE remained. What was the secret to that longevity? Were they dedicated to performance in tournaments, or was there something more to it?

“...we did take it somewhat seriously,” Jay told me. “We designed a house brand for our group, we sold merch (rather successfully for a scrappy group of friends!), we donated to charities or helped sponsor costs for players,” he continued, “we [even] had people ask if they could apply to join because it wasn’t always obvious this was a bit of a joke. We did expand the team a couple times, but eventually we stopped because YASE stopped being a team and became more of a family. The other members of YASE have been some of the closest people in my life, they’ve come to my wedding and I’ve gone to theirs. We don’t operate like we used to, we’re all a bit older and out of the game to keep up with the merchandising and whatnot, but we are all still around and remembered fondly.”

Despite the professional scene contracting, and YASE itself winding down its tournament play, Jay wasn't content to let his time in fighting games end there. Since the pandemic, he has continued to be involved in other ways, such as writing articles for supercombo.gg all the way back to 2022. 

“One day I made a twitter thread delving into some research I was doing at the time, finding some very curious links between obscure publishing parties and the strange fighting games they had a hand on. The thread was warmly received and a mutual of mine tagged Shib, the current owner of SuperCombo, saying this is exactly the type of stuff that should be written for the site. I was already chummy with Shib so we both agreed that I should join the team and retool the thread into a proper article. Since then, SuperCombo has been a place that has allowed me to write on fighting game topics and research dives whenever a topic sparks my fancy.”

Image Credit: Jay "IdolismJ" Gary, from the video "The Final Fantasy Legend (AKA SaGa 1) is Cryptic, Innovative, And Purely Okay IMO"

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This opportunity was about more than just writing articles for SuperCombo. Sometimes, new opportunities arise in places where you don’t expect.

“What might not be as obvious is that this opened the door for me to start writing for events,” he told me. “Shib also is one of the higher ups for Vortex Gallery, an organization that runs the side tournaments at some of the bigger events of the year. I wrote the guide for one of their years at EVO and also was hired by Combo Breaker to write their event guide for a couple years. Writing was always something I enjoyed when I was younger, but my life took me down other paths as I grew up, so I’m very grateful that I got to reconnect with that part of my creativity and I feel halfway kosher calling myself a writer these days.”

The more you speak to Jay, the more obvious it becomes that he has a deep love and appreciation for fighting games and the communities that surround them. While this love manifests in many ways through his writing, past organizing, and commentating, I was interested in where that love first bloomed.

“Well, I’m of a certain age where the answer is almost always ‘Street Fighter 2 happened’. I think the first time I saw the game was playing it on the SNES at my neighbors house and I fell in love immediately. But what took it into overdrive was being the child of a hockey family. I would be taken to hockey arenas all over Metro-Detroit because both of my parents played and almost all of them would have little arcade sections. Further still, almost all of them had fighting game cabinets. Some like the Ann Arbor Ice Cube had these shockingly large arcade sections, some would only have a couple. I recall one arena only had two cabinets, but those two cabinets were Street Fighter 2 World Warrior and Darkstalkers 1. I didn’t need much more than that.”

I can’t help but laugh at that Street Fighter 2 point. If you grew up in the 90s you played it, with very little exception. It was such a wildly successful title that it spawned many revisions and sequels for the franchise and has played no small part in Capcom’s continued dominance in the scene. However, after those early days Jay found community in another series by a different company entirely. 

“When I got to high school, I found a group of friends that all played Guilty Gear XX. This was the next big step for me because I now had people to play against. GGXX is one of those games that means the world to my life, it was such a pivotal game in my development and I cherish it deeply.”

Of course, the allure of Street Fighter remained all the same.

“By the time I exited high school, Street Fighter 4 released on consoles and the rest is history. I was one of the “09ers”, a term used to signal the influx of people who properly joined the fighting game scene with the explosive popularity that SF4 brought to the community. This term was originally a bit derogatory, like it was kinda used to beat up on the new kids, but 2009 is a long time ago now and with all the years I’ve put in being a part of the community I’m more of an OG than many.”

Speaking of Guilty Gear XX, it’s had a bit of a resurgence the last few years. The Accent Core Plus R version on Steam has continued to maintain a strong playerbase, with tournaments running on Twitch and through discord channels regularly — even before the rollback netcode update in 2020. What is it about Guilty Gear XX that gives it so much staying power and what does Jay love about it?

“It’s going to be hard to talk about this game without sounding like a bit of an “old man yelling at cloud”, but +R is a game that refuses to die. It comes from a better, more creative, more experimental time in fighting game design and those conditions created a release that stands as one of the best to ever do it. Fighting games are living documents, they grow and evolve as more hands dig deep into them over the years. But eventually, games should be ‘solved’, maybe there is some meta movement that shifts characters around a spot or two, but most games will have a point where they are mined clean of their tech. +R is different, +R is so alive. It’s the final revision of a game that is so formative for the genre, it's packed to the point of overflow with options and playstyles and character kits so unique it would make your head spin. +R feels like no idea was left on the cutting room floor, anything that sounded cool found their way into the game."

...+R is a game that refuses to die. It comes from a better, more creative, more experimental time in fighting game design and those conditions created a release that stands as one of the best to ever do it.

Comments like this might seem inflammatory, but I find it hard to argue when you look at a game like Guilty Gear XX and you can see those creative aspects so obviously on display. Its artstyle is bold and flashy, and the music is a rock-heavy assault on the senses. There’s a freedom to the way the game looks and plays that feels unmatched in the modern, more corporate gaming landscape.

“And to be an old geezer about it, when you compare it to modern fighting game design you can see how it stands out. I play a fair amount of Street Fighter 6 these days, it’s a fine game I guess. It’s more tightly designed and it creates a more balanced game, there isn’t much in terms of unplayable outliers or unstoppable top tiers. And that sounds good, like that should be something all fighting games strive for. But in execution, I think how tightly and fairly designed Street Fighter 6 is makes it come off as constrained and a tad boring. Maybe that balance is too safe, too tame. Maybe those outliers are the flavor that excites the palette. And if you look back at +R with that in mind, it is a game bursting at the seams with flavor.

+R has a reputation of being ruled by powerful characters like Testament, Baiken, and Zappa. And don’t get it twisted, these characters are insane, but they aren’t the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. One of the best players in America, Skeletal Minion, plays A.B.A., ostensibly a mid tier, and wrecks house across some of the biggest tournaments. TTTTTsd gained fame for taking Kliff, another character traditionally seen as a middle-of-the-pack choice and optimizing his gameplay to noticeably raise the character’s stock. Even Robo-Ky, one of the worse characters in the game, looks like a devil in the hands of a specialist like Dr. Stormlocke. 

Despite being over a decade old and being part of a game released a decade before that, it has never felt more alive. There is so much movement and discovery still happening, new strategies and tech being crafted by people who pull this game to its furthest edges to find something. +R represents the best of what fighting games can offer. It’s something that will never die, with all the certainty in the world I can tell you that +R will be played with passion and fervor as long as fighting games exist to be played.” 

Image credit: Arc System Works

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Jay mentioned visiting hockey arenas in the Metro-Detroit area in his youth, so I wanted to dig a little deeper into what shaped him into the man he is today. 

“Metro-Detroit is a large and somewhat-nebulously defined part of southeast Michigan, [and] I’ve seen official maps have it take up nearly 20% of the whole state. But I lived on the furthest ends of it and I don’t think a soul alive would look at my hometown of Howell and cleanly say it's ‘Metro-Detroit’. It’s like how people may as well call all of Illinois ‘Chicago’. I was born much closer to Detroit in an area called Dearborn, but pretty quickly my family moved to the sticks and I was living out of the rural woodland between Howell and Pinckney until I left for college. Outside of visiting my grandparents who lived in the Downriver area, a collection of small cities just south of actual factual Detroit, I rarely left my neck of the woods. Living in Howell is at least an hour away from Detroit on a good day, and with Michigan road construction there’s no such thing as ‘a good day’.”

The 90s are a very interesting time when I think about Detroit as someone who isn’t from there, as much of my knowledge about it boils down to sports successes in a town full of economic anxiety. I wanted to know what it was like growing up during that time, in that place, and get some insight into the formative memories uniquely attached to it that he carries with him now.

“I can’t say for sure, but I’m almost certain I watched the 1997 Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanches brawl live on TV. There was very bad blood between the Wings and the Avs, stemming from their violent meeting in the 1996 conference finals and during a game in 1997 a fucking huge brawl broke out. This wasn’t just a fight, this was a riot on the ice. It’s hard to say for sure that I saw this one live, because another historic fight between the teams happened in 1998. It was a bloody, heated rivalry and there’s always a part of me that feels, at like a core, DNA level, that I hate the Colorado Avs.

But as far as the city during that time, I was too removed from it. Detroit was always painted as this bomb-out of a city. A crime-ridden hellhole where you need to rolling-stop through every traffic light lest you get carjacked. Looking back on it, I can see how much of people’s view on Detroit was fueled by generations of either their own racism or the racism incurred by how media forces painted the city. I was told not to go there, not like I had much choice with how far away it was. It was only in the last decade that I started living close enough to visit Detroit and saw how wonderful of a city it is, with my career taking me there as my office and many sites I frequent being in Detroit proper.”

Looking back on it, I can see how much of people’s view on Detroit was fueled by generations of either their own racism or the racism incurred by how media forces painted the city.

A lot has changed since then, but Jay’s appreciation for video games and fighting games specifically has never wavered. Even now, after decades of playing and being intimately involved in the greater scene, he still loves what they bring to people’s lives.

“TarZangief [a fighting game player from Memphis] posted this very recently and it sums it up nicely: ‘The great thing about fighting games is seeing your progression in not just a single game but how it carries to other games. The fundamentals that carry you from game to game are a part of YOU not some hexadecimal code stored on a server.’

Fighting games are living documents, they never end but not because the content pipeline always has more for you. It’s because you can always get better at them and the act of getting better at them is a skill that transfers to not only other fighting games, but other games and just life in general. People who are deep in the weeds with fighting games take their knowledge and apply it to real life. Risk/Reward study, mental stack control, choice optimization, fighting games teach you skills, you can feel your brain continue to grow, for more grooves to form. There never feels like a point where you have to stop playing them, where they have stopped offering you something, because even in a hypothetical world where you are the single best person at a game; then you need to defend the throne. The game itself is almost secondary to the skills, the adaptation, the community, and friendship that fighting games can supply.”

Yet, in spite of this love, Jay has taken a step back from covering and commentating fighting games. Is a return to commentary possible, or have those days passed?

“I have only moved on from commentary because I no longer travel to larger events. Commentary is where I really started to make a name for myself, I have broadcast radio experience from college and I was one of the first people in the Detroit scene to really bring a level of skill to the mic for fighting games. Because I was such an early starter in the era of taking fighting games to broadcast, I forget how long I’ve been doing it. There’s one of the people at my local who is about a decade younger than me and they told me ‘I watched you on commentary growing up’. Which checks out when I think about the years, but sure makes me feel reeeeeeal old. 

But because I have mostly retired, insofar that I will no longer travel to big events for at least a good while, I’ve pretty much stepped away from the mic as well. If the chance shows itself, I’ll gladly commentate an online bracket, but without being in-person at these events I have to hang up the headphones.” 

Stepping away from commentary may have been the end of an era for him, but fighting games aren’t the only things Jay likes to play. Instead of live commentary, Jay has shifted to video content on YouTube, where he covers the history of games and offers his thoughts on the games and the circumstances surrounding their creation and reception. But what was the impetus for this change? 

“The emergence of Covid in 2020 really turned my life around. One of the reasons my name is held in such high regard within the fighting game community is my work organizing the Michigan Masters event series. You can ask anyone who attended them; these were some of the best events on the calendar. But Michigan Masters 2020 was scheduled for April and that is exactly the month the disease (Covid-19) tore through the world. Before the government shutdowns were implemented, my directors and I were losing our minds trying to find out what we were going to do. I was at one point staring down the prospect of being tens of thousands of dollars in debt because I would be stuck holding contracts for an event that didn’t happen. Thankfully, the work of the Michigan government and the charity of the community at large allowed myself and my co-workers to safely cancel the event and not burden ourselves with life-altering debt. We permanently shuttered the event series after that because not only did we not know when covid would end (I still don’t think it’s safe to run large offline events, personally) but the trauma of it all happening so we never wanted to revisit organizing again.

But now there was a major hole in my life. Michigan Masters was more than just running an event to me; I did the branding, I cut the event trailers, I designed the merchandise, this was my creative output. I needed something to do that could continue to fuel my creative passions. And so, I took what I knew and pivoted to making YouTube videos.”

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YouTube videos come in all types. Let’s plays, tutorials, reviews — there are many ways one can discuss video games using the format. Jay wanted to try something else, however, so he pivoted to video essays.

“This is something I decided early on and have stuck to ever since; I didn’t want to do reviews. Reviewing games felt rote to me, it didn’t have the spark I was looking for. I wanted to talk about games outside of just how good or bad they are. I adopted this as “topic-based videos”, these needed to be videos about games, but held together by a thesis that wasn’t just the video game itself. You could get a review from many places, video or written, I wanted something that was a bit outside that in scope. 

This dovetailed into a love for research. I was no stranger to trying to hunt through Japanese wikis for information on obscure fighting games, so the more that these videos [became] to be about the exterior of the game instead of the interior, the more I fell in love with research. After all, I’ve been around the block quite a number of times myself. I have a pretty good memory of most major gaming events within my life. But using that as a springboard and trying to find additional information and tie a video together with something greater than the game itself became the joy of creation. My video on Love Is All Around is a great example of this, on it’s face it looks like a review of the game (it’s one of the few videos I actually title a “review”), but to talk about the game requires you to talk about the state of the Chinese game industry, it requires talking about Chinese gender politics, it requires talking about the history of genre it is trying to fit into. There’s nothing wrong with discussing a game in isolation, but you learn so much more when building the story out and seeing all the influences and decisions that made the game what it is.” 

So far, most of the titles he’s covered on your channel have been RPGs. Why choose to focus on titles like Final Fantasy or Radical Dreamers over, say, a fighting game title that he may already be associated with?

“The quick answer is that I love RPGs and I think they have the most meat on the bone when it comes to discussion. I shy away from discussing fighting games because I find talking about them really messy and dramatic. Takes in the fighting game sphere quickly become discourse on ramps, the way those games function make them this weird living document where not only is it too easy to speak on something without all the information, but many times the information hasn’t even been discovered yet. There’s also a tendency to skill check anyone talking about fighting games, like you must have won X amount of tournaments for your take to hold any water.

RPGs, on the other hand, lack this combative atmosphere. They are not living documents in the same way, they feel more like historical artifacts. Yes, there’s always more to learn about them, we could always wake up to a new Yuji Horii interview that rocks our English-speaking world, but the games themselves feel complete. They offer interesting and nuanced discussion both in their mechanical play and their narrative focus. It is very easy for two people to like the same RPG for completely separate reasons or for them to split on the same game over a disagreement in how they see a singular aspect. I also just grew up in the golden age of RPGs, these games were such a big part of my life and they are pretty much a lock as my favorite genre after fighting games.”

My video on Love Is All Around is a great example of this, on it’s face it looks like a review of the game (it’s one of the few videos I actually title a “review”), but to talk about the game requires you to talk about the state of the Chinese game industry, it requires talking about Chinese gender politics, it requires talking about the history of genre it is trying to fit into.

With a deep and continuously evolving appreciation for RPGs, Jay has crafted numerous hous-long looks at some really great titles. Never shying away from his own passions, he paints detailed pictures of titles like The Final Fantasy Legend (known as Makai Toushi Sa・Ga in japan), rather than focusing solely on more popular RPG classics. But is that the long-term goal for the channel, or are there other avenues to explore?

“When I started the Playing Every Final Fantasy, Kinda series it was just an excuse to get off my ass and play through all the mainline FFs. I had always wanted to, but I was being a bit of a bump on a log about starting with the old and dusty ones. This has since ballooned out of control, not only have I realized the “old and dusty ones” are some of the best, but I have increased the scope of the series multiple times over because the discussion of Final Fantasy hits so many additional points.

The Chrono Trigger and Radical Dreamers episodes of a series that is ostensibly about Final Fantasy were the points I planned to reveal my trick. What started as just playing the numbered FFs is now an examination of Square and Square-Enix through the lens of their flagship series. Both the main PEFFK series and the Gaiden subseries are going to start featuring more and more non-FF games because to look at Final Fantasy and its growth through time, you have to look at everything that was going on around it.

I have mapped out everything I want to do for Playing Every Final Fantasy, Kinda; it will take me approximately 16 years to finish. And that might be charitable, I could be well into my 50s by the time I see the finish line. It has become harder and harder to make these videos because they continue expanding in scope. Not even because I’m trying to inflate them, but just because the discussions needed are so large. It’s entirely possible I burn myself out before I ever finish the series, but I am more ambitious than you may think and having this sort of long-term goal over my head is something that fills me with more motivation than anxiety.”

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That is an impressively lofty goal, but one that makes sense when you consider the scope of covering even just the Final Fantasy titles alone. With over 100 titles in the series, covering each and every one with this sort of care would take a lifetime and a half, let alone extending it to games outside of the series. But what about right now? What comes next for the “IdolismJ” channel? Well, Jay has one particular Final Fantasy title in his sights.

“It’s the Final Fantasy 7 video. Everything is in service of the Final Fantasy 7 video. I’ve been working on the FF7 video on-and-off this entire year and I still have so much left to go. FF7 is in the argument for one of the most influential games of all time, especially if you look at it as something well past the era of true innovators (Xevious, Tower of Druaga, etc.). I would not be shocked if this video eclipses 6 hours in length, that’s an egregiously long video, almost a masturbatory showcase of creation, but it’s a game that well and truly deserves every drop of ink spilled about it. My hope is that by the time it is all done you learn just as much about Final Fantasy 7 as you do everything surrounding it that isn’t Final Fantasy 7.

It will also be nice to have this video behind me because I doubt anything else in this series will ever require the effort this one will.”

In speaking to Jay, his passion and love for games comes across so strongly. I truly appreciate all of the time he has given me to shine a light on the work he has done and will continue to do and I can't wait to see what comes next.

That said, our ThanksGAMING event is all about shining a light on the people and things in our lives that we are grateful for, so I wanted to give Jay a chance to express his own appreciation for the people or things he loves. 

“I recently put out a video promoting a bunch of smaller creators I love, so check that out if you get a chance, but as far as what I’m thankful for; the researchers, translators, and archivists that make what I do possible. So much of gaming history has been logged by the hard work done by them. It’s one thing to tell people about what happened because I was there, it’s another to be able to pull together the artifacts of the time to show what all went down. When you look at everything we’ve saved, you can see the world where none of this was here for us anymore and it’s a cold and bleak one. Thank you to everyone who helps in games preservation.”