| The 90's ushered in a new era of beat 'em ups. In the arcade Final Fight was the undefeated champion with it's massive graphics and ultra violent co-op gameplay, but it didn't stop there. Capcom were to take the same team that gave us Final Fight and make a monster but they weren't the first or only new attempts on the market and a new angle. |  |
The One on One fighters hadn't really moved much past Karate champ, but in 1987 Capcom released a new type of One on One fighting game called simply: Street Fighter.
The game saw you take control of a young fighter named Ryu who would travel the world fighting international opponents to win the Street Fighter competition. The game itself was clunky and not much fun to be honest although some models of the cabinet had custom rubber balls instead of buttons which if you punched hard you got hard punch on screen and vice versa. The gimmick couldn’t really save the fact that it wasn’t a very good game but multiple opponents and a six button cabinet were genetics that would be ported to the next generation.
Pit-Fighter began the craze of digitized graphics
Atari started the 90's race with Pit-Fighter in 1990, a unique game to say the least. Pit-Fighter was the first game to use digitized graphics of real people and the graphics had a clever scaling effect whereby if you moved 'back' into the screen your player would get smaller and vice versa. The premise of the game was based around a seedy underground tournament where fighting dirty was not only allowed, it was encouraged and this combined with the (almost) photo realistic visuals did create a sense of sinister tension as at the back of your mind there was something that said “Ok, these are real people getting hurt!” Pit-Fighter enjoyed more notoriety than actual success due to it's violent nature and new graphical style but the innovation didn't help the fact it was rather shallow and although the graphics looked great they moved terribly with some atrociously piss poor animation. Pit-Fighter certainly deserves it's place in beat 'em up history, perhaps not for it's playability but more so for it's influence on 'future' games.
1991 saw what was to be the nuclear bomb of one on one beat 'em ups set off with zero restrictions. The team that made Final Fight released Streetfighter II: The World Warrior to the planet and started a global domination that lasted almost a decade. SFII took everywhere by absolute storm. Media raved about it and even console only magazines like Mean Machines did specials on the game because it was just so absolutely mind blowing. For the first time you got a selection of not one or two but EIGHT characters, each with a vast selection of moves and special moves. The game is actually so simple it's crazy, there are two modes of play. You can either go one player and work your way fighting the other CPU controlled characters or you can play against a chum who also has the choice of any of the 8 characters. The sheers depth of play from having so many characters with so many moves was almost bottomless and add to that the actual gameplay was coded to absolute perfection and backed up by some of the most stunning pixel art graphics and animation yet seen at that time along with some iconic music and crunching sound effects. Streetfighter II wasn't just a game, it was an experience and one that took months, nay years to fully master.
1991 saw what was to be the nuclear bomb of one on one beat 'em ups set off with zero restrictions. The team that made Final Fight released Streetfighter II: The World Warrior to the planet and started a global domination that lasted almost a decade. SFII took everywhere by absolute storm. Media raved about it and even console only magazines like Mean Machines did specials on the game because it was just so absolutely mind blowing. For the first time you got a selection of not one or two but EIGHT characters, each with a vast selection of moves and special moves. The game is actually so simple it's crazy, there are two modes of play. You can either go one player and work your way fighting the other CPU controlled characters or you can play against a chum who also has the choice of any of the 8 characters. The sheers depth of play from having so many characters with so many moves was almost bottomless and add to that the actual gameplay was coded to absolute perfection and backed up by some of the most stunning pixel art graphics and animation yet seen at that time along with some iconic music and crunching sound effects. Streetfighter II wasn't just a game, it was an experience and one that took months, nay years to fully master.
In 1991 Streetfighter II brought the most awesome graphics, gameplay and depth the world had ever seen
In the years that followed the scrolling beat em' up was almost all but forgotten in the arcades (but not on the home consoles!) and everywhere you looked there seemed to be a new game that would want to take on the might of Streetfighter II. Capcom steadily released rehashes of the original World Warrior game starting in 1992 with Streetfighter II: Champion Edition (or Streetfighter '92) which was a superb update featuring re-touched graphics, the ability to pit the same character against one another and most importantly of all the game gave control over the 4 bosses as selectable characters which added even MORE depth to the already well like gameplay. The following releases were sub par attempts to stop pirate hacked boards with the official SFII: Turbo Fighting featuring garish colours and speed settings that made the gameplay less realistic (and less fun to me anyway). The trend took a peak with the release of Super Streetfighter II in 1994 which introduced fresh characters to the play as well as the original cast along with new music and sound effects from Capcoms CPS-2 board but followed up with more cheesy updates until the Alpha series in 1995 which was a prequel to The World Warrior. Street Fighter Alpha had completely new graphics done in a more anime style and featured characters from Final Fight to add to the action and giving game geeks a much needed smile. The game played smoothly and stylishly and was the first real attempt at a new game since the originals release 4 years earlier. The following Alpha games were vile, messy cash in beasts with far too much going on on the screen at the one time and once again ridiculous speed settings obviously made for the attention deficit struck child with a cola brain damaged head.
Sega were experimenting with next gen beat 'em ups with the release of Virtua Fighter which transported the action to a polygon constructed 3D environment but it was in 1993 that Midway release a game that 'almost' reached the heights of Capcom's flagship but for very different reasons.
Sega were experimenting with next gen beat 'em ups with the release of Virtua Fighter which transported the action to a polygon constructed 3D environment but it was in 1993 that Midway release a game that 'almost' reached the heights of Capcom's flagship but for very different reasons.
 Virtua Fighter - Sega attempting to cash in |  Eternal Champions - A footnote in the Beat 'Em Up history |
Mortal Kombat was released to an unsuspecting public and was the equivalent of a video nasty in the gaming world. The makers of Mortal Kombat had obviously seen Pit-Fighter and went with that concept of shocking realism and hence the game featured massive digitised sprites and backgrounds but this time they used newer and different techniques to capture the actors making the animation unsettlingly smooth. The biggest addition was the buckets and buckets of gore. Yes, Midway had tapped into the mindset of every horrible teenager at the time and the game was filled with blood aplenty. Gobs of the red stuff splat everywhere, even with just the basic moves and the makers included the now notorious fatalities, finishing moves which triggered off some ghastly animation of heads exploding or hearts being ripped out. News of this game got back to the moral tight arses of the world rather quickly and the usual bullshit of moral outrage and “Satan will eat your wife's tits” came flooding out but was soon dismissed but not before the creation of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) which provided age restrictions for games much like films. In the wake of Streetfighter II fever many reviewers dismissed Mortal Kombat as just another clone (the C+CG review was painfully transparent and mentioned Streetfighter II in almost ever paragraph) but the phenomenal success of the game left many looking rather sheepish for being so arrogant. Mortal Kombat wasn't just controversial of course, it was actually good to play. The balance of characters was a bit simpler then SFII but the game had a tremendous atmosphere that took from films like Enter The Dragon and Big Trouble In Little China and washed it down with a good coat of sinisterness and 3 doses of uneasy feeling.
Mortal Kombat introduced groundbreaking gritty realism and gore to the beat 'em up genre
Streetfighter II and Mortal Kombat kicked off the era of competition gaming which grew and grew into it's very own beast with games appearing later on in the 90's specifically designed for the pro player rather than general arcade rat and huge conventions with cash prizes held worldwide using these games as their medium but something got lost along the way as the market filled to the brim and over saturated itself like some fat crime boss who just can't stop the good life. Clones of all kinds once again appeared from all corners of the world but while the arcades were raging with the new style of beat 'em ups what was afoot back in the home?
NEXT – Part 4: Domestic Violence Part 1 - 'The Home Console Market'
