There was a point not too long ago when it seemed as if the American video arcade was only days away from utter collapse. Flash back to 1991, a year when Capcom's visually stunning walk-and-punch title Final Fight was waning in popularity, and similar games such as Sengoku and TMNT 2: Turtles in Time were titles that people wanted for their Super NES and Sega Genesis systems, as well as shooters such as Smash T.V., Mercs, and R-Type 2. Some of those games bring back great memories, and if they were without competition in arcades, they might have been strong enough to stand out in a person's memories as classic. They were not alone. Dozens of lesser walk-and-punch fighting games - including Combatribes, D.J. Boy, Crime Fighters, Violence Fight and Alien Storm - and shooting games - including Aliens, Thunder Jaws, U.N. Squadron and Vapor Trail - were flooding arcades, and almost no one seemed to care. This was the close of an era when many people liked games that had two buttons and a joystick, and hitting the two buttons quickly while wiggling the joystick meant that you stayed alive.

Ryu vs. Ken in Street Fighter

The seeds of change had been planted six or seven years earlier, but the arcade industry had hardly noticed. Sega had been working on 3-D simulation games since Hang On debuted in 1985, and by 1991 the company had released the cutting edge jet combat simulator G-LOC and was readying the genre-defining race game Virtua Racing for a 1992 release. Capcom, for its part, had studied both Data East's 1984 one-on-one fighting game Karate Champ and Konami's 1985 title Yie Ar Kung Fu before releasing its own game, Street Fighter, in 1987. Like Hang On, Out Run, After Burner and other 3-D simulation titles, Capcom's lonely Street Fighter had found a niche - it was different from everything else, and so people wanted to play it. It even inspired a clone that appeared a year or so later, SNK's Street Smart, which let characters move not only left and right but in and out of the screen as in most popular beat-'em-ups of the time, and players could fight against two enemy characters at once, so the game felt more like boss stages from a walk-and-punch than anything else.

Next: More on the History of Street Fighter

 
Street Fighter, Dark Stalkers, Final Fight, Star Gladiator, and all related characters and likenesses are TM & © Capcom Entertainment 1997. All rights reserved. Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men, and all related characters and likenesses are TM & © 1997 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.