Tekken City Malta rebranding to City of Fighters

The longstanding and beloved Maltese Tekken community of TCM has changed its name to City of Fighters to stronger represent the will to integrate more fighting games into the group. The Facebook group, officially created in 2018 but to serve a community which was already established a while before that back in 2011, also released a statement showing how this rebrand reflects what the community has always been since day 1 – a home for all fighting game competitors in Malta.

Asking Joseph Facciol, the creator of the Tekken City Malta Facebook page and one of the stronger and veteran Tekken players on the island, he told us that ever since the group’s inception, the fact that this had Tekken in the name proved to be a bigger barrier to entry than anticipated, as many just looked at the name and instantly looked elsewhere for a place to hopefully embrace their fighting game love. For this purpose in fact, back in 2021, a discord server called FGC Malta was created with the aim to bring together fighting game players from all games into one common place.

Talking still with Joseph, he says how ever since the later months of 2024, he has been pondering the decision to change the name of the group to a more welcoming one, an opportunity which he relished as it could be bringing in a good number of new people into the community. In the end of October, as he was approaching people to confirm their attendance to the Tekken City Malta Casuals Season 2 Finals, one of the participants could not attend because of a Super Smash Brothers bracket happening on the same weekend, to which Facciol immediately tried improvising a change of venue to make it at the same one the Tekken event was being held. There was an agreement between parties, and it was finalized to have a common location for both brackets. On the date, Facciol and the Smash Bros communities also had a chance to network and meet up, and this led to the first big step of the rebrand – getting a new community into the already established one.

The smash bros community and the Tekken community were what spurned the definitive creation of a multi-fighting game community in the Maltese Islands, and hopefully following this, more fighting game enthusiasts representing different games emerge and start creating their sub-community into City of Fighters to make the fighting game community bigger and stronger and more diverse.