King From Tekken is Based on a Real Guy

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If you want to see the author of this article butcher a bunch of Spanish pronunciations and deliver an awkward monologue in a luchadore mask, this article was recently turned into a video for our YouTube channel.

Alternatively, read the original article after the jump.

If you’ve never played Tekken, here’s everything you need to know about King. He’s a 6ft 7 Mexican dude who wears a jaguar mask and wrestles to help orphans. If that description sounds like something so stupid it could only be in a video game, we should point out that King was totally inspired by a real guy who did exactly that, Fray Tormenta.

Like King, Fray Tormenta (real name: Sergio Gutierrez Benitez) donned a bitchin’ wrestling mask in his youth for no other reason than to earn money to help a bunch of orphans, the only difference between the two is that Fray Tormenta was a priest, not a giant 300 pound man-mountain. Despite being a small, pudgy man of God, Tormenta continued to wrestle for 23 years straight, becoming a Mexican folk hero in the process.

The children
This is how Mexico treats its heroes, apparently.

If you’re struggling to make out which one is Fray Tormenta in that picture, he’s wrestler with a paunch wearing a Santa hat, we have no idea who the other guy is, or why he’s so happy about having his ankle snapped by Mexican orphans, but we sure as hell want to know his story. If you’re thinking that Tormenta looks a little heavy around the midsection to be a wrestler, he was, which didn’t stop him from kicking ass anyway. Proof that size isn’t everything if you’re powered by orphan prayers.

Like his video game counterpart, literally the only thing Tormenta gave a shit about was his orphans, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2006, Tormenta openly said that he only cared about winning money for the orphans during his career and that glory and fame could eat a dick. Likewise, many of King’s storylines in Tekken involve him elbow dropping people purely to earn money to buy orphans Christmas presents.

Unlike King
King, pictured here levitating orphans though sheer manliness.

Perhaps the best part of Tormenta’s legacy is that even after he stopped being a wrestler in 2011, he continued wearing his mask while performing his day-today priestly duties. Seriously, here’s a picture of him conducting Mass while wearing the damn thing that we hope doesn’t melt your fucking face, Raiders of the Lost Arc style, from sheer coolness.

fray-tormenta

So the next time you see something in a video game and dismiss it as stupid or far fetched, just remember that somewhere out there, there is a priest who dropkicked people to save an orphanage.

And I'd do it again.
“And I’d do it again.” – source.