Style Select: Capoeira in Fighting Games

Here in South America Eddy Gordo from Tekken was a Hero. He legitimately was the person little kids like me wanted to be when grow up. I remember around year 2000 when I was 6 years old and talk to some other kids about who was our "Idol" Eddy was the answer of many and when playing Tekken (pretending to be the characters, not playing the videogame) we all wanted to be Eddy

By the way, about the "practice of roda", "roda" just means "wheel" or "circle", so "roda de capoeira" is just a "capoeira circle" because people form an actual circle in it.

1:44 the Elden Ring footage to visually explain the odds the Quilombo warriors faced was a nice detail!

In Tekken 8, they iterated on the moves and re-did all the mocap for the coming Eddie Gordo DLC character. The capoeirista who did the motion capture for Eddie in T8 ... only got into capoeira because of playing Eddie Gordo in a Tekken Gane almost 20 years earlier. Full circle. :)

Also, I gotta say, it can't be understated how Eddy's mere existence helped immensely to popularize capoeira in Brazil itself. Like, overnight, there was a massive surge of capoeira schools everywhere here.

Just to add a little more context to Capoeira's history, and the whole "is it a martial art?", people often forget that not all martial arts are created equal, most martial arts were developed thinking on battlefields and such, capoeira was developed with the focus more on ambushes and surprise attacks, where the opponent would, and often had, an upper hand in the form of weapons and equipment, that's why capoeira has so many attacks coming from low angles for example, sometimes the slaves would literally be on the ground and they would have to make a surprise attack on whoever was upstanding close to them. It is a martial art focused on confusing enemies with it's movement and attacking from unorthodox directions, it is not a martial art meant for direct open combat like the most well known ones

I fucking LOVE how 90% of Brazilian characters in videogames are the embodiment of their flag: Eddy, Lucio, Blanka, Laura, Rikuo, etc. The only one that is the exception, is Jetstream Sam, and I feel it elevates him higher. He's such an interesting and complex character, depicting him as another Brazilian flag inspired goon would be a disservice.

For those who may be hungering for more capoeira action, there's a martial arts manga called Batuque which features capoeira as the main style.

As Brazilian I commend your bravery into the world of Brazilian words, but holy shit the pronounciation of those moves had me in stitches

As a Brazilian, I appreciate the effort in the pronunciation of Portuguese words and the context you gave about part of my country's history. You guys are amazing

As a brazillian and capoeira fighter for about 10 years, I must to thanks for your clip and excellent work on our history.

Fun Fact: The person playing the capoeira fighter in "The Protector" at 7:17 also played Eddy Gordo in the 2009 Tekken Movie! His name is Lateef Crowder

I knew about the history of Capoeira but I was away of how effective it was against the Portuguese government. These testamonies are the kind of thing you'd hear in a martial arts movie and thing "yeah right", the fact that an actual governor said that is insane.

Fun Fact: Elena was originally going to be from Brazil. But when Sean was changed from being American to being Brazilian, Elena was changed to be from Kenya.

I'm disappointed that the flash game series Capoeira Fighter wasn't mention. Its a fighting game series where every character does just Capoeira. Its gives a nod to the diversity and various flavors the style has to offer. As for future styles I would say Muay Thai but I'm interested in any of them.

Eddy made me practice Capoeira. Yeah, i'm brazilian, and here, in Bahia, one of our states, Capoeira It's something we've been in touch with since forever. But much more like a dance, in "Roda" . It was Tekken that showed me the offensive side, and made me want to train.

Never knew the origin of this style, so hearing that it survived for so long when it was taught in a very limited way speaks volumes to the longevity of Eddy Gordo. Absolute icon for such an iconic style.

A Druken Capoeira master where I lived (Bahia) was notorius for getting into street fights, I heard a story about how he took 2 man down at bar putting one in a crutch for months... the moves may be fancy but the kicks are no joke, they throw all their wheight into them

There's just one complaint I have about many popular portrayals of capoeira. They actually leave out the very integral grappling and upper body based striking methods that tie the whole thing together as a system of self defense. I could also say that they neglect to describe how for much of it's history, traditional capoeira was quite brutal and actually included weapons. It's sort of like how people forget that Tai Chi Quan, the actual martial art, frequently resembles many more direct striking arts in it's techniques when executed properly. I know this is about capoeira in fighting games and fighting games tend to emphasize the more flashy side of any style shown to make playing it more fun and frankly, I don't think most people would want to play out a completely "realistic" street fight, but it always bothers me when people leave some of this stuff out.

history of capoeira honestly sounds like a fairy tale. That is crazy! Learned a lot today