Sometimes, when you put certain ideas/things/forms together, they combine in such a way that just feels right and something really wonderful happens: you get an art-form. Like, for me personally, if you get a nice beat, a looped sample and some rapping (and scratching) then, provided each element is produced right, then that arrangement just works. The art-form you get there is of course hip hop music. To be a hip hop artist you don’t need to be original each time in the sense that you need to re-invent the form, you just produce the elements in a competent way and let the magic just happen.
The same is true for the 2D fighting game format. Design some characters, produce an engine which provides a universal set of moves for all of those characters (walk, jump, dash, crouch etc), give each character a unique set of moves (normals, specials, supers etc), a bunch of bars (health, block, stun etc) and add a timer. What you have at the end is the art-form of the fighting game. And it just works.
The evidence that this is true if easy to see. Ok so these kinds of games arent so commercially viable, in that the masses don’t really jump on fighters (especially 2D ones) anymore. So what? The Japanese (the nation who, lets face it, best understand the form) now produce these games as non-professionals. Melty Blood, Akatsuki Blitzcamp, Big Bang Beat… whether the professionals get back into it or not, I don’t think there’s any possibility of this form dying out because it is true art! Just in the same way that Nas is talking bullshit when he says hip hop is dead. People still make text-adventure games, there’s still an annual competition for even those.
I play fighting games for the same reasons people still make them: I love them.
PS I don’t mean to sound pretentious talking out of my “art” about this stuff, but I think it’s true. Although if you wanted to break it down further, you’ve actually got two arts going on here: 1) the art of producing a fighting game and 2) the art of playing it. But eh enough already.
