From Street Fighter, Tekken, and all the way to Dragon Ball FighterZ, it’s been over two decades of fighting games. It’s time to look at games that shattered the mold and K.O.’d the competition. These six fighting games gave us mechanics that are the foundation for modern fighting games.
Karate Champ — Player vs. Player
In modern fighting games, the image of two legendary karate masters fighting across the world in red and white gis might bring to mind an iconic image. What you most likely weren’t thinking of, though, was the 1984 game, Karate Champ –Player vs. Player. Karate Champ is the framework which the Street Fighter franchise would be built upon, with its special moves, bonus stages, directional movement, and multiplayer mode.
It may be hard but think of any great fighting game moment, such as Evo Moment #37 or the first match between Daigo and Valle. Any of the billions of dollars worth of fighting games that have been sold all started here: two nameless men fighting in a time where a quarter circle was nothing but a dream.
Street Fighter II
In 2017, the three highest grossing video games of all time, were Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Street Fighter II. This feat is truly well deserved, as Street Fighter II would go on to lay down the fundamentals of what a fighting game is. When Street Fighter II graced arcades in 1991, it introduced the combos. Combos are now as important an aspect of fighting games as quarter circle inputs, pop-offs, and salty runbacks.
While combos were, without a doubt, the greatest technical evolution that Street Fighter II introduced, the most iconic was its cast of unique characters. In fighting games, it was normal that you and your opponent would play mirror images of each other, but Street Fighter II burst the game open with its colourful original cast of eight, eventually expanding to 16 (or 17 if you don’t play by the rules). Street Fighter II characters like Guile and Chun-Li are now just as Street Fighter poster-boy Ryu. It’s hard to miss its mold-breaking status, and new versions and updates of the game still are a regular as recently as May 2017 — 25 years after it staked its claim as the most exciting debut in fighting game history.
Super Smash Bros. Melee
At EVO 2018, Super Smash Bros. Melee saw 1351 entrants, only three less than the most recent Smash Bros. game, and many more than modern releases such as Injustice 2 and BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, with 363 and 1178 respectively.
Many Smash Bros. detractors, and even the game’s creator, Masahiro Sakurai, write it off as a simple party game. However, the game has managed over fifteen years of tournament prowess. Its rich technical gameplay keeps people wavedashing into pools still to this day, no matter how many new characters are added to the new games or how many people fail to summon Randall.
Divekick
It’s become popular to think of fighting games as a progressively more and more complex set of commands and gestures, overflowing with mechanics and lingo. What if there was a game that had no FADCs, Aerial Raves, or Fuzzy Guard Breaks, but could be as deep and rewarding as many others? That game is a Divekick, a game that literally involves two buttons: a button to jump and a button to kick.
While it may have been a joke at one point, Divekick broke fighting games open, as both a teaching and testing tool of the pure fundamentals fighting games. Spacing and timing become key when one hit is all you get, and two buttons are all you need. With an extra layer of Fighting Game Community parody on top, Divekick was able to show that sometimes complexity doesn’t always equal depth.
Virtua Fighter
It’s easy to look at the runaway access of the Tekken franchise and think that it all started there, but the original champion of the 3D fighting game was Virtua Fighter. While it’s easy to look at this older game with blocky models and floaty jumps and pass it off as a relic, it is the granddaddy of the 3D fighting lineage. Virtua Fighter is a key influence for the many 3D fighting franchises that would follow, including Tekken, Dead or Alive, and Soul Calibur.
Mortal Kombat
While Street Fighter II may have revolutionised fighting games with combos or The King of Fighters 94’ may have brought a whole new level of team-based gameplay to the genre. It’s very rare that a game not only changes a genre but the industry as a whole. It’s easy to look now, with it’s digitised graphics and B-Movie-esque characters and laugh at the comical fatalities, but this one game not only incited a moral panic in one country but across the world. The Spine Rips, Arm Pulls and Heart Rips provoked enough panic, that Mortal Kombat would pave the way for the modern ESRB rating systems that we know today.
While it’s easy to focus on the controversies, it’s important not to forget the 90s ninjas, slick gameplay, and particular taste in grammar that would lead Mortal Kombat to not only still be a franchise to this day but to spawn into a full-blown multimedia juggernaut. We’re still find your ermacs and testing our might with this classic to this day, and we wouldn’t be here without the original fighting game klassic.
