The History of Fighting Games: Part 1
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.
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.
posted by r3ko at 1:09 pm
1 Comments:
1984, I was so young. I haven't played it before, but I've heard of it. Sounds not bad for the time. I'm reading your entries from the start, so I don't know what you're going to say later. But I'd just like to comment by saying that I was quite surprised that beat-em-ups died out the way they did. I never thought at the time, that when the PS2 era started, that would be the beginning of the end for fighters. Before then, fighter releases for consoles like the Saturn and Playstation were a big deal, even in the UK. Everyone would be looking forward to the release of Zero 2, and then Zero 3, for example. Fighters are such a niche thing now, even in the 3D arena, there's only a hand full of popular ones. Over all, one-on-one type fighting games are so unpopular now. It's just all about Halo, Pro Evo, and bloody Burnout sequels now.
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