The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Competitive Action Games and Fighters
Competitive games were far more varied in the 1980s than the 90s as head to head fighting games found their footing. Here's an overview of how the genre evolved!
It’s interesting how gamers tend to presume that games with popular or recognizable titles are the true originals in any category or genre of gaming. If you were to ask most modern gamers where the competitive fighting game genre began, most would probably point to Capcom’s 1987 arcade oddity Street Fighter. And yet there are ideas that were baked into Street Fighter which hearken back to earlier competitive martial arts games, which were in turn inspired by games about wrestling and, even before that, the sport of boxing.
The first of these boxing games was probably Sega’s 1976 Heavyweight Champ, which is often credited as being the first fighting game ever made. In a time when arcades were still dominated with paddle-style games like Pong and simplistic overhead racing games on single-screen courses, Heavyweight Champ must have really stood out – it featured large and impressive monochrome sprites of its two competing boxers and a unique control scheme where each player grabbed a boxing glove and moved it up or down and pushed it in towards the cabinet to punch.
But even Heavyweight Champ drew from an earlier legacy of competitive head-to-head video games derived from the 1962 PDP-1 game Spacewar! (which went on to become the inspiration for Nolan Bushnell’s initial 1971 video arcade game, Computer Space) and 1973’s smash-hit Pong.
And there were plenty of other contenders. Atari’s 1974 arcade game Tank (republished as part of the 1977 cartridge Combat for the Atari 2600) also focused on competitive play, as did Tomohiro Nishikado’s Western Gun (also known as Gun Fight), which was itself based on a 1969 electromechanical game from Sega. We even could take things back still further to William Higinbotham’s Computer Tennis (sometimes known as Tennis for Two) in 1958, in which two players battled a ball back and forth on an oscilloscope. Suffice it to say that so long as there have been video games, the category of competitive action games has existed, and they were informed by earlier non-electronic games of sport or leisure pitting people against each other.
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Competitive action games are also the crucible in which the popular fighting game genre was formed. While our discussion of fighting games on the PC included brawlers in the style of Kung Fu Master and Renegade, things are a bit different when it comes to arcade and console games, where we can carve out the beat ‘em ups into their own category and instead lump in competitive action titles. A few common categories of competitive action games include:
Head to head competitive fighters like Karate Champ or Street Fighter which tend to be two-dimensional single screen or side-scroller action games with complex commands and health bars for each combatant.
Wrestling games, which are often patterned after professional wrestling rather than the actual sport. While Tag Team Wrestling established the formula, WWF SuperStars perfected it by bringing in the professional wrestlers most of the other games were imitating.
Boxing games, which are often focused on rising through the ranks and either simulating the sport (Ring King, The Final Round), incorporating some rhythm game mechanics (Punch-Out!!) or having action take a backseat to exciting theming (Rocky) to keep the gameplay exciting.
Competitive action games like Combat, Warlords, Joust or Scooter Shooter in which players compete head-to-head in a manner resembling an action game such as a sidescroller, shoot ‘em up or beat ‘em up, but where competitive multiplayer play (against a human or computer-controlled opponent) in the main draw.
Let’s return our focus to 1984, where three very important games laid the foundations for the fighting game subgenre of competitive action gaming. The first was Technōs Japan’s Tag Team Wrestling, an arcade game which was released in Japan in late December, 1983 but which became quite popular in 1984 as it was released internationally. Though the game is simplistic by today’s standards, it was an exciting title for its time because it allowed players to utilize a team of heroic wrestlers (named Jocko and Spike in the North American version) to try to grab one of the Mad Maulers and unleash an action from a menu that appears above their head. The isometric perspective of the ring and the freedom to move in four directions made Tag Team Wrestling feel quite different from other games of its vintage. But Technōs Japan, of course, was just getting warmed up.
The next big game was Karate Champ, also created by “Piston” Takashi Nishiyama while he was part of Technōs Japan and released in 1984. Whereas Tag Team Wrestling played up the pageantry of wrestling, Karate Champ attempted to simulate a martial arts tournament by having two karatekas battle it out for half points or full points by landing strikes and kicks created from a combination of movements from two joysticks. And while the original Karate Champ was a single-player affair, a follow-up called Karate Champ – Player vs. Player debuted later in 1984 and added in competitive play as well as additional stages around the world and bonus stages. Despite feeling extremely dated today, Karate Champ laid down a major cornerstone of the foundation for the fighting games that would become popular in the 1990s. But it was still lacking a few elements that would appear in later games like Street Fighter and its successors, like health bars and fantastic special moves that went beyond the realism of the martial arts tournament.
Those elements were derived from a Konami arcade game from 1984 called Yie Ar Kung-Fu, a competitive fighter heavily inspired by Bruce Lee films and which involved defeating eleven martial arts masters with unique playstyles and methods of attack. As the protagonist Oolong (also known as Lee in some later home versions), players could crouch, jump and vary the level of their attacks, and rather than attempting to win by scoring points, players were given the goal of depleting an enemy’s health bar. While Yie Ar Kung-Fu is often referred to as one of the first fighting games, it lacks something important that was not added in until its PC-only sequel: a 2-player competitive mode.
Another important fighting game from 1984 that was also only intended for single players was Nintendo R&D3’s Punch-Out!!, a peculiar arcade game with two screens, a hero rendered in green wireframe graphics and amazingly cartoonish sprites with distinct personalities, special powers and hidden weaknesses. Both Punch-Out!! and its same-year sequel Super Punch-Out!! featured gameplay centered around understanding the rhythm of a boxing match and watching for foes to telegraph their moves so they could be knocked off balance and slugged with a combo leading up to a powerful attack. While both games attracted some imitators and generated follow-ups (such as a classic NES adaptation and a Super NES remake), their main influence on the genre was in the cartoonish, over-the-top presentation of the opposing boxers.
By 1985, the influence of Tag Team Wrestling was felt even more strongly with the release of Technōs Japan’s Mat Mania, which popularized many of the mechanics that would become central to the wrestling subgenre, such as 8-way movement around the ring, the ability to climb up on the turnbuckle and the ability to go outside of the ring. While the original Mat Mania only included alternating play between two players, a 1986 sequel called Mania Challenge added in head-to-head play.
Other wrestling games soon followed, such as Tose Co.’s Kinnikuman: Muscle Tag Match (better known in North America as Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E.), Sega’s Champion Pro Wrestling, Robo Wres 2001, Pro Wrestling (a.k.a Body Slam) and Wrestle War, TRY Co. and Nintendo’s Pro Wrestling, Konami’s The Main Event and Taito’s Champion Wrestler as well as the NES-only Tecmo World Wrestling. Human Entertainment even managed to shake up the formula with Fire Pro Wrestling Combination Tag, a Japan-only wrestler with unique mechanics and a distinctive diagonal perspective on the wrestling ring which led to a long-running series of games (few of which, sadly, have made it out of Japan despite their quality).
But the shining star of the decade, once again developed by Technōs Japan, was WWF SuperStars, a stellar arcade-only update on the Mat Mania formula featuring six playable officially-licensed professional wrestlers from the World Wrestling Federation including Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Big Boss Man, Honky Tonk Man, Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Macho Man Randy Savage as well as bosses The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase and André the Giant. Two players could either enter the ring cooperatively as a tag team or face off competitively.
As wrestling games grew more sophisticated, so did boxing games, including Woodplace’s Ring King and Konami’s The Final Round. One surprising release from 1987 was the Atari 2600’s RealSports Boxing a fast-moving and relatively fluid game that wasn’t a terribly convincing boxing simulation, but which turned out to be one of the last and best games for the platform. The codebase was also used to create an Atari 2600 wrestler called Title Match Pro Wrestling the same year.
But the other notable release from 1987 was, of course, Capcom’s Street Fighter, an odd and unusually complex one-on-one fighter directed by “Piston” Takashi Nishiyama that was intended to be a spiritual successor to Kung-Fu Master and to build upon the idea of boss fights. While the game had many ideas that would go on to be foundational – karatekas named Ryu and Ken battling unique foes utilizing different styles of martial arts, six-button control schemes with different intensities of punches and kicks, powerful secret moves like a psycho fireball, hurricane kick and dragon punch, head-to-head competitive play – it also cribbed quite a few ideas from Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung-Fu, such as health bars, unrealistically high jumps, projectile attacks, varied heights in attacks, globe-trotting encounters and, of course, the iconic white and red karate gis of the player characters.
Street Fighter was not a success, and its deluxe cabinet, which included pressure-sensitive pads rather than buttons, was such a flop that it’s difficult to even find parts for it today. Nishiyama eventually moved on to SNK to create 1991’s Neo Geo classic Fatal Fury: King of Fighters while a Capcom team headed by Yoshiki Okamoto moved on to the beat ‘em up Street Fighter ’89, which was rebranded as Final Fight before release. That same team would later create 1991’s Street Fighter II, an arcade title which would become a major turning point in fighting games and beat Fatal Fury to release by a good six months. Arcades were never the same after that.
Fighting games soon shifted largely towards the Street Fighter II formula that many still follow today while wrestling and boxing games morphing into more distinct subgenres. Competitive gaming outside of these three formats took a big shift in the 1990s towards puzzle games like Puyo Puyo, Bust-A-Move and, of course, the 1996 Capcom hit Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Action gaming gradually morphed into the category of party games like Mario Party or Sonic Jam and arena combat titles like The Outfoxies, Bomberman and Power Stone.
Today, fighting games and brawler offshoots like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continue to be the primary competitive titles gamers reach for when it comes to local play. While it’s possible to find a few good competitive alternatives including the pseudo-wrestler Gang Beasts, the high-octane Rocket League, the incredible TowerFall Ascension, the wild Stick Fight: The Game, the trigger-happy Rounds, the crazy Ultimate Chicken Horse and the whimsical Boomerang Fu, the widespread availability of multiplayer online games has scratched most of the itch for competitive play.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!