The History of Fighting Games!

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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This is will be an ongoing article/thread, that i’ll be adding to from time to time, charting the history of fighting games, specifically looking at the goods and bads many fighters contributed to the best video game genre ever.

Chapter 1: In the beginning, Part 1

In the beginning, in a time even before Street fighter, where graphics were blocky and sound was often nothing more than the odd bleep, there was a fighting game which gave birth to the genre. Its name Karate Champ (Data East USA). Made in 1984 during the day where arcades were supreme, this odd game let you fight your opponent in unarmed combat. There wasn’t life bars, or specials moves, just plain old normals. However this was not the oddest thing about the game, each player had two joysticks with which to control their identical men (only a palette seperated them, a brass tactic also employed by Street Fighter). The left joystick for movement and blocking and the right joystick for attacking, moving both sticks would result in different normal moves, similar to how command normals work in more modern fighting games. Attacks range from jumping attacks to sweeps, from long range pokes to little kicks to the legs.

Now it doesn’t sound at all remarkable, but the game actually had tactics believe it or not. Your moves don’t simply work by pushing the stick in a direction. All the moves had a start up time, for which you had to hold the stick a direction untill the move finally came out. If you move the stick away from that direction, then the move would stop mid start up. This allowed for feints, coaxing your opponent to make a wrong move so you could strike them. Now both you and opponent are trying to do this so to try and land a hit to score a point. First person to win 2 points won that round. However this in itself caused a serious problem at “high level play”. More often than not the person who commited a full move first would get hit for thier trouble. This meant both players would play very defensively, not wanting to try and strike eachother.

One of the best features about the game is the little training part, just before you start. Its quite common in snk games to see a little tutorial on how to do the universal moves, utilising the ABCD buttons. Now Karate Champ you have something similar, but instead of just watching you actually get to try them out with your character as your being shown. I think this is great and should be standard in all fighters. Karate Champ laid down the foundation, but who would be the ones to bring the genre to new heights.

Next time on the History of Fighters, i’ll be taking a look at Galactic Warriors, Shanghai Kid and Yie Air Kung-fu.

Thoughts, comments, memories are all welcome. I’d particularly like to hear stories of anyone who used to play this back in the day.

Thanks
r3ko

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Nonsense. Rock’em Sock’em Robots came first. Link.

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I used to play a Karate Champ clone called ‘Way of the Exploding Fist’ back in the day. I only ever played against the AI though, and found that the lunge punch was quite broken. It would come out fast (just 2 frames of animation) and had long range, although I think you could block it (the AI never did though).

[media=youtube]E1y974yLKWU[/media]

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Thanks for the comments so far, sorry Alpolio this is the history of arcade fighting games only for now. But if you want to chat about toys, by all means go for it.
Lebowski, thats really cool, thanks for the link. Karate Champ is much better though, nothing beats the original :stuck_out_tongue:

Moving on…

Chapter 1: In the beginning, Part 2

In the first of part of “In the beginning” we looked at the father of fighting games, Karate Champ, the intitial blueprint which all future fighters would follow. The original release of Karate Champ was a single player game, two player versus didn’t come about till slighty later. However in 1985, a few other companies took a stab at the fighting game genre based on the original of Karate Champ, Shanghai Kid and the more popular Yie Ar Kung Fu. Both Single player games.

Shanghai kid was similar to Karate champ in alot of ways, but quite different at the same time. First major difference is that there is only 1 joystick, used for movement and blocking. And 2 buttons for attacks. While the attack commands become alot simplier, blocking became much more complicated. Most of us are accustomed to only blocking high/mid and low attacks in fighting games, but in Shanghai Kid you had 3 areas to block, head, high/mid and low areas. When playing through the game you would face opponents of increasing difficulty, but the thing which set it apart here is that you was told by red circles on your enemy where you should at attack for that moment. If you attacked elsewhere there was a good chance you would get countered and lose some of your health. Which reminds me, the point scoring system employed by Karate Champ is now gone. In its place a small life bar which would deplete if you was hit, much more familiar.

Many of you have probably at least heard of Yie Ar Kung Fu. A single player fighting game which makes use of the same controls are Shanhai kid, a joystick and a punch and kick button. Now what makes this game stand out is are the enemies you face. You control Oolong and with your deadly kung fu attacks you take on many different opponents each weilding a different weapon and with each boss brings a new challenge, each requiring a different strategy. Yie Ar Kung Fu also brought greatly improved graphics to the fighters (well compared to Karate Champ and Shanghai kid). All the characters look very unique and theres even two different backgrounds/stages to the game, awesome.

Next on the List is Galactic Warriors. It allowed for 2 players to fight eachother, nothing new there (karate champ already did this), it allowed for a choice of characters. Granted there was only three, but three is better than one. Galactic Warriors also introduced the projectile, not bad for a game made in 1985. Granted they were little more than rockets, activated by only a push of a button (not the motions we are used to today), but it did add a new playing experience to fighting games, now you didn’t have to be right next to your opponent to do damage. Also of note is that the character sprites where much larger and alot more detailed than the previous games. This would soon become standard among fighting games.

It would be two years before another fighting game appeared in the arcade, but it would be one of the most important fighting games in history. Next time on the history of fighters, “The Birth of Special Moves”

Thoughts, comments, memories are all welcome. I’d particularly like to hear stories of anyone who used to played these games back in the day.

Thanks
r3ko

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The first fighting game was actually made 5 years before Karate Champ.

Warrior, an overhead-view vector swordfighting game made in 1979.

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Overheard view is not what i would call a fighting game, but whateva, good find.

Those anyone actually have any comments about the games themselves, or do people just want to nitpick.

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The only thing I remember about Karate Champ was Van Damme and Jackson having a few matches on Bloodsport. OK USA!

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Yie Ar Kung Fu was another fave of mine, but again only the cruddy spectrum conversion. Still, I found a broken strategy. You’ve got an absolutely huge (empty) jump in this game, and if you jump right on to the opponent he/she’ll try to move away and strike you. So long as you get the first strike in it’s easy to just trade hits until your enemy is KO’d (and you have one life block remaining). Best to use the old lunge punch, seems that in the old fighting games that was the closest you’d get to a DP.

Oh, YAKF also featured the debut of the now-standard “fat guy flies in a straight line at you” special move (the first bad guy has it, can’t remember his name now).

Anyway I guess I should get these running in MAME now, I put up with awful 8-bit home computer conversions for far too long.

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My first fighting game was International Karate on C64. Used to play for hours.

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Hey r3ko: as you’re UK based, you heard of Team 17’s Body Blows series? Not much of a fighting engine but isnt bad, as fighting games of non-Japanese origin go.

EDIT: info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Blows
It’s 1993 though so a bit of a jump forward… some funny shit in that game though. Nic/Dan air-fireball would be accompanied by “WELL 'ARD” and of course Mike’s win pose “I’m… sorry… about that”