Personal History of Karate Supers, part 1

Fighting games and me go way back. I'm old enough to have been part of the "arcade generation;" those kids who were the right age to remember the golden age of video game arcades before home consoles "caught up" with arcade hardware and made the arcade obsolete.

I don't know how many hours I spent, mostly during the '80s, hanging around in darkened rooms with the bleeps, bloops, and flashing lights of arcade cabinets all around me, dropping quarter after quarter into the machines. For that matter, I don't know how many hours (and dollars) I spent in the early to mid '90s as a college student doing the same thing, as fighting games really came into their own and artificially prolonged the life of video game arcades as a viable business. But through it all, fighting games have always been amongst my very favorite.

One of the earliest such games I remember was Data East's Karate Champ, from 1984. This game was absurdly primitive compared to fighting games today, but it was also 1) martial arts focused (as opposed to boxing or wrestling, like many of the others that I played back in the day), and 2) semi-realistic. You fought for points, so any good hit was a half point or a full point. The first guy to get two points won. This did, however, really set the stage for what was to come. The backgrounds that you fought against were a clever innovation that became super important in the presentation of fighting games in the future, and the minigames in between rounds were something that carried forward to most of the early fighting games. Not to mention the fact that "white" and "red" karate guys, the two characters in Karate Champ can be seen as direct ancestors of Ryu and Ken.

One of the next leaps forward in the evolution of fighting games was Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu, a Hong Kong cinema-based game in which you had a character who had all kinds of different moves he could make by making joystick and button combinations. He went through a parade of colorful antagonist characters that you had to fight to beat the boss at the end and… do whatever you did at the end of the game. I confess that I don't remember now what happened when you got to the end. The parade of colorful characters leading up to a boss, as well as the variety of moves you could pull off as a fighter were dramatically improved from earlier games in this arena, though, and was certainly a watershed moment in the evolution of what would come to be known the original fighting games. I had a copy of this arcade cabinet at a grocery store about a block or two away from my house, so within easy walking distance. It had a big effect on my evolving tastes as a video gamer and is generally created with being incredibly important to the development of the embryonic fighting game genre. Yie Ar Kung Fu came out in 1985, and it's impressive to see the evolution from Karate Champ to this game in just a single year.

The original Street Fighter (1987) was probably the next major iteration in the evolution of fighting games. The graphics had been substantially improved. Moves were systematized; there were three types of punches and three types of kicks. Early cabinets actually had pressure pads that reacted to how hard they were pressed; this, naturally, led to many broken buttons. Capcom, the developer, fixed this by releasing a six button layout that wasn't pressure sensitive, and the modern control scheme was born. Of course, the original Street Fighter didn't have very tight controls yet, but it was clearly a harbinger of what was to come. The graphics were lush and highly detailed (by mid-80s standards, anyway) providing a backdrop for the fights that was unprecedented up to that point. The sprites were as well; large, detailed and colorful compared to what had come before. Also, an innovation that was to have a striking impact on the development of the genre, was the use of "magical" special moves. You could only play as one of two characters (who played identically to each other to boot), Ryu and Ken. And although how to pull these off wasn't well known, and was tricky to do anyway, the three main "special" moves that Ryu and Ken were later to become incredibly famous for, were already present in this game; the fireball, the dragon punch, and the hurricane kick. If you could land a blow with one of these moves, it was devastating in these early games, doing anywhere from 30-50% damage against the opponent's lifebar.

And although Street Fighter is, of course, a household name nowadays, it wasn't 1987's game that made that a reality. In fact, the genre continued to develop in a lot of ways in parallel to the standards that Street Fighter would later crystalize as crucial to the evolving fighting game genre. Perhaps inspired by the popularity of side-scrolling "beat-'em-ups" like Double Dragon or Final Fight, one game that in particular rings a bell with me is Taito's Violence Fight from 1989. I can't claim that it was a significant moment in the evolution of the genre, but it was certainly a popular stop for me. This game had even bigger and more detailed sprites than Street Fighter, it had the semblance of a story as you advanced from venue to venue and opponent to opponent. Most of the stages weren't truly two dimensional in the sense that we think of them today; you could move up or down across a somewhat isometric arena, and to jump you pressed a jump button. Combining the jump button with the punch or the kick button give you variations on your basic attacks, again, probably a nod to Double Dragon or Final Fight which operated the same way.

It was 1991 when the genre, which had been struggling to develop, was finally and truly born with the wild and completely unexpected success of Street Fighter II. Coincidentally, rival company SNK had been developing something that could also be seen as the next iteration in the development of the genre which was also released in 1991, but it was eclipsed and overshadowed by Street Fighter II. That's a little bit unfortunate, because SNK's effort, the original Fatal Fury game, had a lot of really cool ideas, as does their subsequent release, Art of Fighting, which followed less than a year on the heels of Fatal Fury, and almost certainly had started development before Fatal Fury was released. Several of the innovations in those two SNK games pervaded the genre: super combos and the super combo meter, taunts, and more had their origin here. But Street Fighter II was really the game that single-handedly created the fighting game genre from the early efforts that pointed the way and previewed the conventions that were to come. Not only did it create the fighting game genre, but it also is a fine example of the karate supers subgenre, to use my own term yet again (I'm going to keep talking that up until at least one other person starts to use it too. And then I'll talk it up some more!) meaning that the karate supers subgenre is actually the original mode of fighting games, and subsequent developments away from it were, in part, characterized by how they differed from that subgenre first. Later, as those other subgenres developed some traction of their own, they could stand on their own two legs as well.

Anyway, let's stop there for now. This is part one of my personal fighting game history, and it really only gets us to the beginnings of the genre. I'll have at least two more entries talking about my own personal experiences with karate supers and fighting games in general, maybe three, before I'm done.