A month ago, I wrote a piece that was intensely critical of an upcoming event from startup gaming organization NOBï Gaming, particularly of its Chief Executive Officer, Fashun Rivers. In the midst of another criticism on X, Mr. Rivers offered up a chance to have a one-on-one interview to clear the air and explain some of the recent changes to his September 18th event – a grudge match between Rivers’ friend and business partner, the rapper Wacka Flocka Flame, and Dominque “SonicFox” McLean, one of the top professional fighting game players in the world. What follows is the 1st part of our interview, transcribed and edited for clarity:
Introduction
Fashun Rivers was formerly a hip-hop artist and producer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. It’s not the most orthodox path to becoming a FGC event organizer, but it’s an interesting starting point nevertheless
Let’s set some background for yourself – you started in the music industry, you’ve been involved in that industry, you’ve moved on since to video production and media consultation. Now you’re doing NOBï Gaming, so I have to ask, why gaming? Why Esports? Especially in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic?
Great question. Gaming is a embryo or early stages of most of our child development, y’know, I come from Atari with only one button and a joystick, playing E.T. and Star Wars, Pac-Man –
I wouldn’t admit to playing ‘E.T.’ on the record, by the way
Ha, terrible game, y’know! From that early stage of my life, I remember getting my NES, and my first game was a game called ‘Kung-Fu’, even before Super Mario. As a child, my father worked a lot, my mom worked a lot, so video games became an area of my life where I could comfort myself from the things I went through as a kid. I would play outside a lot with kids, my parents would give me money and I’d go to the local arcade, playing with a lot of older kids, teenagers. I played a lot of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, waiting to get my butt whooped.
There was a time in my life when I was…Music, and games, those were my two passions. But this was the early 2000’s, and it wasn’t really possible to make a living playing video games, so I chose music. Once I got exposed to the business, how they took advantage of people…I don’t wanna say it discouraged me, but it disappointed me. I started to fade from music in the 2010’s, I stop producing in 2015 and started to learn the mechanics of streaming, the business side of things, y’know? In 2018, I started my media company, and I was going through my first divorce –
Just for the record, that’s KDRMG, right? (Klosing Deals Regularly Media Group)
That is correct, yeah. And my first client, he understood what I was going through, with my divorce, y’know, I lost everything – my car, my house, all that. And he said ‘I’ma bless you with this check.” So my first client, who’s in the ministry, gives me a check for 30 thousand. They gave me this check to get the equipment and things I needed – I didn’t even have my own studio or equipment, because it was always with the studio.
So a client gave you 30 thousand dollars as, what, a gift?
Yeah we would do bible study, for six hours! And he said, y’know, ‘Fashun, I understand your character, and I want to give you this as a gift, this is God saying you deserve this’. He was from a ministry in Tennessee, and he said that on his trip to see me from Tennessee, God told him he was gonna have to do something for me, to bless me. He just had to see my character, to know I deserve to be blessed, y’know? And he pulled out his check and gave me 30 thousand and said ‘You need to go and get all the things that was taken from you’.
I bought all sorts of equipment, and my sister, she’s a publicist, said she got a job to go cover a baby shower for one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta. My wife now, Sara, she convinced me to do it, and I filmed it like it was Sara’s baby shower, crying as I did it. Next thing I know, I send it in, it makes everyone cry, and it goes viral, everyone loved it. So I’m doing a lot of events now in Atlanta off that, everything goes well for the next two years, then 2020 comes around…
Pandemic.
Yeah, yeah. At this time in my life, I’m pretty burnt out from the media as well. A lot of the entertainment world has a lot of shallowness, a lot of superficial energy, and I didn’t like it. When 2020 came and the Pandemic occurred, we were all forced to be on lockdown. I didn’t want to rely on music to comfort me in that lockdown time period, so I played a lot of Xbox, and it was like a therapeutic relief. So that’s when I came up with the NOBï Gaming concept, and that’s actually a acronym – it stands for “Network of Brilliant Individuals”.
Ah, that’s why it’s in all-caps
Yeah, and if you notice, the ‘i’, it’s a umlaut ‘i’, it’s a German ‘i’ that has the two dots. And the two dots represent gender equality, so that man wasn’t more important than woman. Because it’s about individuals. That’s why the two dots are above the ‘i’, which stands for individuals.
And in that same timeframe, a friend of mine contacted me to do a TikTok campaign for Ubisoft for the game Just Dance. And I started to see the research in Esports, how it trumped music and film, and I was like ‘Why aren’t a lot of people understanding this industry like that?’
Gamers are no different than us musicians, because it’s becoming a business. Us musicians are like the experiment for what gamers are being introduced to now, with the contractual obligations.
Right, it’s a young industry with a shark-y upper-class that can offer them things, and sometimes they don’t really have the context to understand what they could be offered.
When I look at Esports, the fighting game community reminds me of the underground music scene. How it’s more grassroots, and I felt closer to the FGC moreso than any culture in Esports. We felt we could be the most impactful and bring about a change that is strongly desired, because the players are underpaid yet they make these companies so much money.
With this event between Waka and SonicFox, I wanted to make a new type of exhibition where people could get paid just for appearance, like we do in the music industry. So that’s what I was trying to create a new revenue structure. We can create our own events, and we don’t have to wait. These majors, they’re great, but at the same time, all of these players…we’ve been brainwashed in all these industries to believe we are in dire need of these opportunities. And I wanted to show them how we do it in music on our own.
The Event
In 2022, after a friendly bout of Mortal Kombat, Rivers and Waka Flocka got the idea for Waka to challenge SonicFox to an exhibition match. Given Waka’s celebrity and the ambitions of Rivers to get NOBï Gaming underway, it was only natural to do it loud. According to Rivers, Waka’s tweet got the attention of several interested parties who would have liked to host a big party for the match.
So how does this event start to shake out? Are you talking it out in the background? It feels like there’s been some degree of hype for like a year now
One of the first people that reached out was the HyperX Arena in Vegas
At the Luxor, right?
Yep. I ended up speaking with an employee named Tiffany, and she was so excited about it, was really passionate about the FGC. She would talk to me even offline, and I liked her energy and commitment to getting these things done. This is in November of 2022, and there was talks of doing it in conjunction with LevelUp around February and NBA All-Star Weekend.
So what happened was, Tiffany – and you gotta understand, I don’t really care about people’s feelings, I gotta keep it real.
Yeah, keep it real
Tiffany called me, and remember, we didn’t have no sponsors, still don’t, this is just something we’re doing out of pocket for fun. So she calls me offline and says ‘They’re trying to inflate the costs of the event’. On the next zoom meeting with HyperX, I said the cost was kind of high, especially compared to Atlanta. And on the next meeting, Tiffany isn’t there, she’s replaced by a girl, Samantha. Tiffany, they said, unfortunately we had to part ways with Tiffany. I didn’t like how that felt. I was turned off from HyperX at this point.
So, Tiffany, it sounds like she was fired by HyperX? I guess the implication would be her talking to you about event costs was not something she was supposed to do?
No – yeah, it – a lot of it was undisclosed. I’m telling you my –
Interpretation.
Interpretation, right. ‘Cause it was ironic that that was the last call, and then she’s not on the next call, y’know? She said it was because of budget cuts but I just…I told her you can’t take the brains out the body, and I wanted her to see it through to the end with that passion of hers, but on my team. So I pulled outta that, we declined moving forward with that opportunity.
It was around then that we heard Mortal Kombat 1 is coming out in September, and it was like the universe was telling me that’s why we were gonna have to wait, to celebrate this game coming out
HyperX falls through, and now you want to shoot for September. How does it come to be that you get with the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, New Jersey? Classy joint, opened in the 1920’s, not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see a fighting game event at.
So the thing with Bergen PAC – and I want to give them props for being open-minded at first – is I’ve done business with them on the booking side. I wanted to pick a venue that, respectfully, I could [do] for the culture. I could go and do this anywhere, but I’d rather do it somewhere that it’s not appreciated for as it could be. I wanted to bring value to the venue and have that area be a part of the Esports scene.
Alright, so you book Bergen, we have a date – September 18th. Then the tickets go on sale.
Oh my God.
Yeah. There is definitely some pushback – the lowest price I believe was $105, which I think is even more than what Evo admission would have cost. The highest price was $205. So this becomes a boutique – some might say bougie – event. When you were booking this, was the implication at all from the PAC that this was going to be a high-dollar event?
When I approached them about the event, they said ‘If we do this event, we’ll give you control of the production of the show, and we control the pricing of the show’. I said that’s cool. When it got closer to the agreement, we saw the prices, and I told ‘em early on ‘these tickets are too high’. They said they’d modify if they had to, but I said the prices don’t sound reasonable. They were banking on the fact that Waka was involved.
The idea being that his name would command a high ticket price. The logic sort of checks out, but for a fighting game event…
Yeah, so I told them I wanted this to be a celebration of the fighting game community, but that’s not what those prices were. Push came to shove, they said they’d change it. But first I wanted to get the event out there, to let people know it’s coming to fruition.
The response from the FGC, at least on X, was mixed, to say the least. But in August, there’s an announcement that the prices are changing, going down to $50 max. Would you say that was a reaction from Bergen to that initial announcement?
I went to Evo, shoutouts to Markman, he hooked me up. And this is where I gotta give a shoutout to you, too, because, you got this article that weekend, hit me like a Mike Tyson punch, a haymaker
Well, I am King Hippo
Yeah, yeah, Super Punch-Out! Come Saturday, I was informed of this thing, and I realized I’m catching flak for these ticket prices, and I decided they gotta change those tickets. I put the fate of the ticket discretion with them, and that was a flaw on my part, I never shoulda signed off on that deal in the first place. But I heard from people at Evo who told me they would have loved to go but the cost was too high, so now I had proof.
Whatever your talks were, it must have worked, because we got lowered prices. And up until September 6th or so, it looked like the event was going to go off fine. Then we get another announcement, with a venue change – to BrookLAN in Brooklyn, New York. What was the catalyst for that change, what happened?
Great question. On August 22nd, [Bergen PAC] sent a message to me saying that they wanted to cancel.
Woah – so Bergen PAC was willing to just pull out completely, with that little time left?
Yes.
Interesting. Did they give you a reason?
They said that they was out, that the event wasn’t where they wanted to be financially. On our side, we still wanted to go through it to produce a great show for the community, which is what I told them. Then they responded and said ‘no we changed our mind, we don’t wanna cancel’, so I knew at that point they were just trying to railroad it, so it wouldn’t be a success. And I said that those ticket prices were what blew this thing off its hinges. Everybody knows about this event, but the ticket prices…Evo is a 2 day event with amenities, and they don’t even charge that much!
Right!
Yeah! Evo was an amazing event for me since I could see what was going on, and it gave me ideas to add even further to the event. And they said ‘that’s a lot, what you want to do’. And I said that people would come back to the place if we were successful, if people had a good time. But they had to do what they felt was best for them, and they waited until [September 7th] to say ‘we don’t wanna move forward with the event’.
Now luckily, BrookLAN was already in the conversation, as the venue of choice for the after-party. So I called and said we had to make some modifications and make sure these people that paid already have a good time.
I see. Just to be clear, too, Bergen PAC already refunded everyone who bought a ticket, that’s on their webpage, so that’s taken care of?
Yep.
But I mean, at some point, it’s got to sting, especially if people were being flown out or flying out to this event in New Jersey, and now it’s farther away –
It’s like 47 minutes yeah, I did the math
New York makes sense though – the majority of the community lingo and culture is mostly derived from inner-city New York arcade culture, so ultimately it’s not a bad spot to relocate to.
Right. Exactly.
Addressing My Blog
Along with the initially ridiculous prices of the event, Mr. Rivers’ had intimated that some of the claims in my blog may have caused him to catch some side-eye while he was at Evo. Given that I had harsh words for him in the blog, I felt it was appropriate to address the criticisms I had and let him answer for himself.
In the interest of fairness, I don’t want to pretend like my blog doesn’t exist. I can only speak from my perspective – I don’t consider myself a journalist, just a concerned citizen – but I’ve been a part of the fighting game community for over ten years, a long time. And I feel like I have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what the community looks for. This is a community of young people, in an industry considered growing, and that means there’s a lot of sharks in the water. And my blog has always been about looking at these pitfalls, at this internal strife, the patterns that keep repeating.
When I saw the event crop up, as a pretty big skeptic of celebrity involvement in general, it gave me the same feeling of exploitation that I’ve seen in the past. I did my due diligence, and looking into you, my bad feeling persisted, and I wrote the blog. Now that you’re here we can go through some of these red flags and shine a light on them.
[Laughs] Go ahead.
One of the big projects you were involved with through 2022 was NFT’s, or Non Fungible Tokens. For anybody who doesn’t understand, what is an NFT?
In short, a non fungible token is just a digital asset, similar to like a skin on Fortnite or sneakers in [NBA] 2k, a transaction acquired through the blockchain. A digital asset.
A digital asset, yes, that’s how I’ve understood it. In and of itself, not unethical – Counter Strike: GO skins, for example, if you want that, I don’t agree it has value, but in and of itself not unethical. But there was a company you owned, called NFTLuxe –
Yeah, yeah it was an extension of KDRMG. I just didn’t want any client that was not familiar with NFT’s or blockchain to be associated under the same umbrella. I made that specifically for blockchain projects.
The big project you were involved in was something called the Drip Teddy Club, a sleekly designed bear you could purchase an NFT of. Besides being an NFT you could buy and sell in the marketplace, there was also – I took a look at its whitepaper, and you had this tweet about how you wouldn’t be associated with a project that had a fake DAO. Drip Teddy had a DAO associated with it, or that was the plan –
That was the plan.
It was a plan to have a marketplace where people could invest with their [money] in this community and get money back. Or, at least, maybe build it into something that would have a lot of growth. What is the current status of Drip Teddy Club and this DAO?
That’s a great question. The status of Drip Teddy…When the economy changed, I had the artist – Let me rewind and give a background of Drip Teddy Club. During 2021, the NFT had a lot of amazing artists, but it also had a lot of, erm…It had –
Fraud.
Fraudulent players that gave it a bad name. In this timeframe, a lot of people – I was one of Waka’s blockchain strategists, and a lot of projects came to us to be involved.
There’s an artist named Vic, who is based out of Nigeria, and he showed me this project, Drip Teddy Club, that he released prematurely, uh, on OpenSea [Author’s note: one of the biggest NFT marketplaces in the US, that suffered a 99% crash in transaction volume in the span of 4 months] and he said ‘check out my project’. And, y’know, there was so much fraud at the time, I had actually seen a project that looked like Drip Teddy Club, and [con men] took that project’s identity and monetized it on their own. Once I saw it, it reminded me of that kid from Nigeria who wanted me to get involved. I went and found that kid, but he didn’t answer on his account. Then, he hit me up on a brand new page and said that his project had been hacked, and they deleted his social media account so he wouldn’t look like the original author.
Like I said, I try to get involved with things that I think have some type of, uh, humanitarian –
Value?
Yes, value, thank you. When he told me his story, and how he drew the collection on a broken iPad, or tablet (he didn’t have a iPad at the time we hooked him up later), he was trying to feed his family with custom art. And cut his finger every time he drew the picture. Seeing this kid’s stuff get stolen I…You know I don’t usually like to personally get involved with NFT projects, I just help market the ones that showed value. But this project, it was something I wanted to get involved with, and we mapped out this whole gameplan for the project.
When there was a executive order from the White House about crypto, and they started to do all these things to slow down the momentum of it, we made a change. My thing was to make sure this project was successful, regardless of whether or not it’s an NFT. Now it’s more so in a direction that we wanted it to be…The DAO was only gonna be a collection of people that had interest who were going to be able to benefit from the success of the project. We’ve moved on to wanting to develop a game aspect and bypass the whole NFT part of it. We always wanted to do a fighting game anyways, that the community was going to have equity in from the DAO. We just got away from the NFT part of it.
It’s interesting, that part about the young man, Victor Eghose, I believe his name is –
That’s correct.
He’s from Nigeria, and [the DTC whitepaper] does mention that he used a cracked Android phone with his bare fingers…You wouldn’t think that a random Nigerian teenager would reach out to you. How did you get acquainted with this gentleman?
Uh, you know, I didn’t believe it, at first. Unfortunately, the world has a lot of stereotypes and a lot of false, um, y’know, perceptions of a lot of people in different places. I was hesitant at first.
It’s unfair, but you hear ‘Nigeria’ you hear this really wild offer, you get in mind a chain email, a Nigerian Prince…
Yeah, so I felt disappointed in myself that I – there were so many fraudulent players in the space, and that I thought [helping] was a bad thing to do. Once, I was able to see him on Telegram, and we did a video chat and I was able to meet his mom, his grandma, some of his siblings, and y’know what’s crazy is my wife, Sara, and I have a son born in 2021, and he has the same birthday as Vic. But hearing in your DM’s, about a project from such-and such-area, you feel like ‘nah, man’. It was educational for me, about how you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.
So he reached out to you through Telegram, and he knew you from…Being a person who marketed NFT’s, or…?
He was, uh, just a student, y’know? And he was watching uh, the different projects, and at that time, in 2021, a lot of projects, we were, um, our name would come across a lot, y’know? So he came to me, and…Y’know my LinkedIn was going crazy! I was like ‘oh my god’, man, every day it was someone hitting me up. Everybody just knew I was that guy, and Waka was educating people on blockchain technology, so that’s why they came to me.
I see. The reason I ask about the NFT stuff, mostly, is because the FGC is – Every event, the artists’ alley is a big part of any event. People in the community who have all kinds of art can sell their wares, and that’s also a big part of the event’s own graphics and logos, too. Art and the community kind of go hand-in-hand. So, with NFT’s, there was a lot of fraud, and theft – artists would put up their work on Twitter or their site and some bot would crawl through, take it, mint it as an NFT and sell it for an outrageous price.
Naturally, there is a distrust of both NFT and cryptocurrencies broadly in FGC circles. You have another quote, from February 20th of this year, and it’s this here. Just from the nature of that tweet, you sound very, very confident that this is the future, and anyone who’s not hip to it is losing out, or misinformed. Given how the market has corrected for NFT’s and cryptocurrency, would you say you still have that same mentality?
What I would say to anyone reading is when we look at the way society is evolving, everything is evolving to digital currency. Fiat cash as we know it, there’s so many places everyday that are limiting the use of cash, as we know it. Eventually everything in society will transition into a cashless society. When we look at the way blockchain is designed, the way people buy crypto, they take fiat and that cash is transferred into digital currency that allows them to purchase digital assets or NFT’s.
If you look at most video games, you convert cash into currency that has no value outside of that game where it’s utilized to acquire skins and different assets. When you look at the majority of youth, they’re being indoctrinated into that, uh, eventful time frame where we’ll come into a more digital society. So I don’t regress from the fact that I feel like the language might change, but the formula of how that system is utilized will be implemented in a different way. It’s already, covertly, being programmed through video games and other things we use today.
I just want people to understand, what I was able to witness in 2021 was remarkable. One guy made the first media company in Web3 and amassed $30 million in about 4 days. The system I seen in place reminded me of the independent artists now finding a way to create their own freedom and escape from the corporations taking advantage of us. So that part I was excited about – not those who were naive about the technology getting taken advantage of. Sometimes the wrong people get involved, and everyone gets a bad taste in their mouth.
One NFT project, Tanner, said they would give me $100,000 up front and 10% of all future revenue if I just got Waka involved. But I don’t sell out my integrity or my friend, it was not worth it. If you don’t have relationships, you ain’t making money. So that’s what I really meant in that tweet, to clarify.
That’s why we can have this conversation right? It’s only fair. I would push back, though, and say this – when you had NFTLuxe, you had a marketplace where people could buy and sell NFT’s. The basic NFT (and crypto) pitch, which in my opinion is unethical, is to pitch them as assets that appreciate in value and can make you rich quickly. This is the tack that the United States government has taken – that many cryptocurrencies are securities, like stocks, but are unregistered and extremely risky.
In a Ponzi scheme, original investors make money when new people buy into that investment, believing in its value. When you had Drip Teddy, did you ever – I mean, was it your method to sell NFTs to others on the basis that they would be valuable someday? Did you buy into that?
Let me correct that, and give you some pushback. The government itself, the thing is, narratives are given out on purpose. The majority of people are going to have a negative connotation to something that could be beneficial. If something could be beneficial to you, they’re not gonna give you a narrative that it could change your life. Not all of these projects had the “unregulated” aspect to the project, I can’t say the purpose was to purposely take advantage of people in an unregulated space.
In 2018, a bunch of people who invested early in Bitcoin were now millionaires and billionaires. They told me in 2011 that this thing was fake and had no value, but now some of the youngest billionaires are because of cryptocurrency. And they don’t want us to know about that – the things they are saying can’t be true, too many young people are being successful. It’s the same with fiat! Richard Nixon took away the value of gold backing the dollar, the dollar is backed by nothing, just like crypto. It’s backed by the people – the more we spend money the more debt circulates, and it’s how fiat stays alive. That’s how you got BRICS -Russia, China, all them – that’s why they create their own financial system, because they’re tired of this…they’re doing their own thing.
It’s not about ‘regulation’. Most of the government is hiding money! Money disappears everyday – at least with this you can trace it back to where it actually –
But hold on, we can’t trace it! FTX is still trying to recover actual liquid assets lost from its exchanges. I mean this was fraud on the scale of Bernie Madoff, and to say that –
Same with Wells Fargo! JP Morgan, and Bank of America, all in the same conversation. They all been caught up – they just said with the whole Epstein island, the banks were involved! There’s a scheme that’s run across all financial structures, not just crypto. They’re all corrupt, we’re just programmed to believe in the one they control. They can’t control crypto, so they don’t tell you to go there.
That’s the illusion they’ve created – all we know is cash, we see this new version, and we’re turned off. Has the government ever had our best interest? No. So why now, in certain subjects, is the government trustworthy? They never have been, they been lying the whole time. Used to tell us to drink tap water, now we see all these chemicals in there that cause cancer. We should be listening to us, people like you and me, not them. That’s what I wanted to say.
I appreciate the pushback, believe me. The reason [NFT involvement] was a big part of my blog was because we just had FTX go down. The downsizing in the Esports scene has partially been because of the crypto winter. There’s a high distrust of this crypto ideology within the space, and anyone who has that background is definitely going to catch some side-eye.
No, you’re right, I agree 1000%. You don’t see a lot of narrative about crypto in my stuff because I’m not going to shout to the mountaintops about stuff I’m not familiar with. I’m not gonna call myself ‘Captain Crypto” because I –
Can I call you Captain Crypto?
[Laughs] I’ve been disconnected for quite some time, with the information. I can’t communicate the current climate, I’ve been too focused on gaming.
For the record, Drip Teddy and NFTLuxe, their social media has gone pretty cold.
Yeah.
I don’t mean to hold you up as the sole representative of that ideology or industry, just pointing out how it might be seen as a red flag.
You’re right, you’re right.
One other thing I did want to bring up: I couldn’t help but notice the NOBï Gaming site used to have, last month, a header that read ‘NFTs’. It used to lead to a YouTube video that had a holo NFT you were raffling away along with a chance to play Waka 1-on-1. Now, there’s an ‘About’ section, and not only is the ‘NFT’ header gone, but the video has been totally scrubbed from your YouTube page. I’m curious – what happened to those sections?
If you look at the date and the timeframe, that was still around 2021. The website just hasn’t been updated, so it was stuck there for a long time. We wanted fans to be able to engage by buying a digital raffle ticket, and we also wanted people to have equity in NOBï Gaming by buying NFTs with the DAO system.
Once we saw the disconnect between the gaming world and crypto, we decided that’s not a good look. We didn’t want to turn people away with the wrong connotation.
Okay, so it was a decision based on having a project that was no longer available that you were moving away from. Is that fair?
Yeah we haven’t touched that project since 2021, it’s just updated, the site was just a static site and we hadn’t touched it in a while.
That concludes Pt. 1 of my interview with Fashun Rivers. Pt. 2 will feature a story about Rivers’ FGC connections in Atlanta, as well as continuing to address some concerns from my original post, such as the acquisition of a foreigner’s YouTube page for his own, and more. Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next time.
Them's fighting words!! 
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