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In This Game Changed My Life, Ryan Hart tells games journalists Aoife Wilson and Julia Hardy how video games not only changed his life, they very probably saved it.

To people who never play video games, they might be considered just a fun way to fill time. Some even call them a waste of time.

For Ryan Hart, video games not only changed his life, they very probably saved it.

Today, Ryan, 40, is an extremely successful professional gamer. He’s won titles all over the world and earned a lot of money doing it. But when he was starting out in the late nineties, things were very different. Hart was on his way to becoming one of the greatest gamers in the world, but he was also homeless.

Ryan Hart got his first taste of gaming when he was 10, as he played the fantasy adventuring game Golden Axe on an arcade machine in a minicab office in South London.

Its mere existence blew his mind.

“I could put 20p in and press a button and create a reaction on screen,” he says. “I’d never felt an experience like that.”

He was hooked. As he grew, so did the sophistication of video games. Huge video arcades were increasing in popularity and Ryan spent a lot of time at the UK’s most famous: London’s Trocadero Centre.

He gravitated toward fighting games, which appealed to his competitive side, eventually fixating on Tekken. He had watched someone crush their opponent with a combo so insane he knew he needed to learn how to copy it.

“One move changed the entire spectrum of my gaming world,” he laughs.

Ryan began playing Tekken obsessively and started climbing his way up the growing competition circuit. In 1996 he won his first national title.

Then, at 17, he found himself with nowhere to live.

“There was a mish-mash of events that went down,” says Ryan.

Ryan on Japanese television

Problems with a landlord meant that Ryan and his mum were evicted, with nowhere to go.

“I spent a lot of nights on the stone benches of Trafalgar Square sharing stories with Nelson’s Column”. He felt trapped, unable to process what was happening to him and scared to tell anyone.

“I wasn’t confident enough to talk about the reality of my life,” he says. “I tried to open up to a few friends and only faced rejection and the pain of that was really difficult…You start losing your sense of self-worth.”

Gaming became a solace.

“This is the thing that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have gaming in their world,” he says. “Inside the arcade is a community. They’re there for most the same reason you’re there. They’re going through something they can’t face and they’re escaping.”

Gaming also introduced Ryan to the wider world. In 1998, after a few successes in the UK, he won an invite to a tournament in Japan, the video game capital of the world.

It was the first time he’d left the UK and a massive culture shock.

Compared to London, Tokyo’s gaming scene was a whole other level of intensity and sophistication. He lost horribly in the tournament. However, this crushing defeat taught him a valuable lesson. It helped him process the trauma of his homeless experience.

“The way I lost in Japan was so devastating that after that experience nothing could keep me down. It can’t get worse than that.”

The knowledge that the only way was now up gave him a new philosophy on life: “Failures are stepping stones to victory. You have to look at today’s losses as tomorrow’s victory.”

When he came back to London, he turned his life around, helping him and his mum find a new home, and he started studying video games harder.

He was determined to be the best of the best.

In the years that followed, Ryan established a legacy as arguably the greatest fighting game competitor of all time. He won scores of international titles in Tekken, Street Fighter, The King of Fighters and Virtua Fighter.

He holds several Guinness World Records including one for the most well-travelled fighting game champion.

Ryan is now happily married and a new dad. He works as a bilingual presenter and content creator at ESL, who produce e-sports competitions around the world. In his free time he enjoys coaching up-and-coming players. He also works together with a charity called The Felix Project (Link: https://thefelixproject.org) to help support getting food to homeless people in the UK. He knows none of this would have happened if he’d never played that first game in the minicab office.

“[Gaming] brought me back from a place where there was definitely no return,” he says. “I don’t know where I would be today if it wasn’t for gaming… gaming was the key to happiness.”