Although the 70s saw the advent of fighting games with 1976’s Heavyweight Champ, it was not until the 1980s that the games began to resemble the fighting genre of today. Karate Champ, a 1984 arcade title, began the march toward the modern fighting genre.
Spanner Spencer at EuroGamer.net wrote:
The colourful and highly accessible coin-op karate simulator rocked the arcades graphically, imaginatively and literally. The brilliant control system, wonderfully responsive gameplay and encyclopaedic list of martial arts moves set an immediate and lofty benchmark for the tournament games that would follow, and still holds its own in the one-on-one arena to this day.
B. at ProgressiveBoink.com described his experiences, writing:
Karate Champ began its life as a one-player contest versus a computer opponent. Player WHITE and Player RED faced off in a martial arts dojo under the supervision of a tournament judge. The two ‘Ryu and Ken’ trendsetters battled back and forth until a blow connected. Sometimes you'd haul off and hit a super fire convoy back spinning magical dream kick and crush the guy's face with your big toe and the judge would scream out ‘half point!’ This is where I learned to curse.
From there, the genre grew. Fighters and beat-em-ups became one of the most reliably profitable genres in the business, an attractive option to everyone in development and design. So, as one might predict, a vast number of fighters were produced and varied from inconsequential nothings to industry changing.
Street Fighter, the originator of the most influential fighting series of all time, arrived in the arcades in 1987. Although the rise of the fighting genre still lay ahead, this is the game that directly defined what the genre would become. Colorful characters, fantastic abilities with special hidden moves, blocks, challenges, pressure sensitivity and more originated here.
While the game was received with mixed reviews, Capcom excitedly pushed for a sequel.
The fighting genre’s ascension marked a broad move toward more mature subject material for games, a move that would see video games become one more battleground in the American culture wars of the 90s. On the other hand, the maturation of content would aid in the accelerated mainstreaming of games during the same period. If they ever were, video games were not just for kids anymore.
Street Fighter 2, the most important fighting game of the era and the most lucrative arcade game in a decade, arrived in 1991.
A game that has sold over ten million copies at home and tens of thousands of arcade machines all over the world (‘60,000’ according to Replay by Tristan Donovan), Street Fighter 2 in the early 90s rejuvenated arcades that had atrophied since the golden age in the 80s.
The "combo system" allowing for the combination of several standard and special moves has its origins in this game and would become a feature in the genre henceforth. The breadth and diversity of the attacks gave the player a larger arsenal than they’d previously had. The player was making more decisions than ever before as they fought an increasingly tactical battle with each punch and kick, jump and crouch, advance and retreat. The foundations of a truly competitive game were forged with Street Fighter 2 in the newly crowded arcades and in living rooms on the Super NES.
The early classic Street Fighter 2 arcade scene would gather a full head of steam as a competitive game. It would become an era in which machines were found not simply in dedicated private arcades but in grocery stores, liquor stores, laundromats, your local pizzeria, gas stations, restaurants and many public areas in between.
In the beginning, local arcades were isolated and competition was generally limited to a small group of regulars. That would soon change as competitors migrated from arcade to arcade in search of games.
Zaid Tabani’s documentary series "RUN IT BACK: The Road to SoCal Regionals" opens with an anecdote describing the growth of the scene.
"One day, there were two people who walked into the arcade [where I played] and they just got on the Street Fighter 2 machines and they destroyed us," said James Chen, now a top commentator and a player with deep roots in the genre and scene. “Everything we knew about the game changed all of a sudden. One of the tactics that was just getting popular at the time was jump attack, walk up and throw. A lot of people considered that cheap so people didn’t do it.
"When we played these guys, they’d just jump attack, walk up and sweep. Every time they did that, we’d stand up to counter-throw and get swept. Every single time, almost by reflex, by reaction. We couldn’t control it even though we told our hand not to stand up, we’d just do it and get swept every time.
"All of us at that local arcade were just confused because these two random guys just came in and destroyed us. After they finished beating us, they actually came and said to my brother and I that we were two of the better players they’d faced because we actually realized something was going on. They handed us a couple of fliers and told us about a tournament at a comic book store called ‘World’s Finest’ and said they wanted as many good players there as possible.
"It turned out that the two guys who walked into the arcade was a guy named Tony Tsui and Tomo Ohira. They were actually going around recruiting people for World’s Finest. They basically showed us that we sucked at the game. What we saw at World’s Finest was on a whole different level. It was one of the most amazing experiences ever because it showed us that Street Fighter was being played at a level far beyond anything we knew existed."
The two men that James Chen encountered that day were some of the most important American players of the 90s. Additionally, World’s Finest was the most competitive tournament of the era. Suffice to say, Chen caught quite a break when he met Tony and Tomo.
Tony Tsui was a top tier tournament player.
Tomo Ohira has been called ‘the first legend’ of Street Fighter, the Mozart of the game, a player whose historic tournament winning streaks are still revered today. From 1991 to 1994, Ohira reigned on-screen and off as the king of Street Fighter in America. His unparalleled physical reactions, his mental agility and his indefatigable dedication put him atop his game until he retired at the ripe old age of 17 to chase girls and, eventually, an education.
Mike Watson, a contemporary and rival of Ohira’s, has written much on Ohira’s dominance.
"His Ryu was beyond anyone," wrote Watson in 2006. “I would destroy anyone else in this game and he would still beat me 70-30. Seriously, out of all the best Street Fighter players ever, Tomo was by far ahead of everyone at any time. By far.”
One great question mark in Tomo’s brief career was Japan. Although Ohira utterly dominated many American tournaments, his interaction with Japanese players was severely limited by the lack of online play and the lack of a modern worldwide tournament infrastructure, one that enables players to jet-set around the globe in search of the world’s best.
The second great question mark in Tomo’s career is put to everyone who brings up Ohira’s legend. Was he really as good as they say? After all, you will not find a full recording of an Ohira match. Ohira did not compete in Japan, did not play against modern greats such as Daigo. Ohira played in a time without online play, before modern esports. Was the level of competition lower?
It is important to take into account the distorting effect that time and nostalgia can have on memory. That said, one must to some extent defer to the other top players of the time, many of whom have played and succeeded into the modern era, such as Mike Watson, Kuni Funada and Jeff Schaefer. Although they differed slightly on where exactly to place Ohira in the grand scheme (Funada, one of the few players in that era with experience on both sides of the Pacific, thought there were several players in Japan who could compete on Ohira’s level), none of them do anything but reassure us that Ohira was the best player in America by a significant margin and a top candidate for best in the world.
Jeff Schaefer, one of the best players in Southern California during the early 90s, described his introduction to Ohira in a 2009 YouTube vlog.
After establishing himself as the dominant force in Orange County, California, Schaefer began to hear of a little kid from Los Angeles County named Tomo who was "just a steam roller, just a machine."
"Some people I knew arranged a meeting with him," said Schaefer. “He got dropped off at some arcade. Just this little hundred pound Japanese kid walks in, must have been fourteen years old. I’m sitting there, we’re playing old school Street Fighter 2 and this kid just took me to the cleaners. He just annihilated me. I’d never seen anything like it, I didn’t even think it was possible.”
At this point in the video, Schaefer is shaking his head. Even two decades later, the memory is still vivid and incredible to him.
"If Tomo played, he’s going to win," said Schaefer. “The kid was way better than me, way better than anyone else. He was the best.”
In another moment, Schaefer takes a stab at an obvious question which has been asked again and again: was Tomo better than today’s top player, the man they call "the beast", Daigo Umehara?
"I’ve played Daigo," said Schaefer, who has famously beaten Daigo with a perfect round. “Daigo is good. Daigo is no Tomo.”
In any enduring competitive game, comparing players across eras is a tempting but tricky task full of maybes and could-be’s. Although we cannot transport today’s great Street Fighter players back in time to play Ohira at his peak, it is always a fun argument to have.
What is not up for argument is that Ohira’s legendary play still holds significant weight and Ohira’s legendary wins still send an amazed grin across the faces of those who witnessed them.
In celebrating Street Fighter 2’s twentieth anniversary, the 1UP.com staff described their collective discovery of the now classic game.
... We were stunned. There may have been only a dozen on-screen characters (and you couldn't even control four of them!), but each was huge, unique, and blessed with an embarrassment of animation. The breadth of the fighters' movements was matched by the diversity of their moves and the depth of the possible strategies. Mike Haggar and friends could punch, kick, jump, swing a mean steel pipe, and sacrifice a chunk of health to perform a secret move; the World Warriors could deliver punches and kicks in three different levels of strength apiece, and each of those varied further, contextually, according to the fighters' current stance and motion. Special moves weren't a dangerous desperation move but rather an integral part of each fighter's repertoire. Street Fighter II may have been a game about dirty brawls and solving disputes through force, but it courted intimate knowledge of each character's move sets and rewarded tactical play. It required thought and smarts -- hardly what you'd expect to see in a game where you could punch a dude in the stomach so hard he'd puke. And that was before we discovered combos.
For a time, Street Fighter 2 and its iterations dominated the competitive arcade scene. It is still played competitively today.
The hustler ethic last seen prominently in the 80s reemerged once again as tireless top tier players travelled from tournament to tournament, arcade to arcade in search of the next victory, the next prize.
Relatively competitive scenes emerged independently in New York City (at arcades such as Chinatown Fair), Southern California and Northern California, sparking a national arms race. In particular, the California scene was the site of an increasingly heated intrastate rivalry, one that survives until this day.
The Street Fighter scene of the 90s is remembered by players such as Alex Valle as one of fierce competition, an all-out experience fueled in no small part by the lack of easy access online gaming and thus the cost - mental, physical and financial - that it took to play at a high level. Old school players describe a competitive environment in the 90s where the investment required to be great was exponentially higher than today and where the reward was greater still.
"Fuck yeah, I miss the 90s," said Valle in “Run it Back.”
"I don’t know how to explain it but when we played, we played it with everything we had," said Jimmy Nguyen, Chief Operating Officer of LevelUp Gaming, in the Run it Back documentary. “It was like the last thing on earth to do. Now, it’s like there’s so much to play and people choose what to play, they split their time. It’s just the focus isn’t completely there when it comes to dedicating your skill and time to it.”
Tomo Ohira, the ‘first legend of Street Fighter’, was not above mocking a tournament opponent standing just inches away. Top tier players regularly shunned anyone deemed lower than them, relegating the lesser players to the ‘little boy machines’ while greats occupied the ‘big boy machines’. Trash talk was and is a part of the soundtrack of the game. The Street Fighter 2 competitive culture was brash, hot blooded and deeper than almost anyone truly grasped.
The next significant game in the genre was Acclaim’s Mortal Kombat, released in October 1992. Arcades, already reanimated by the new wave of games led by Street Fighter, took to Mortal Kombat immediately, making it the most popular game since Street Fighter while never replacing Street Fighter’s competitive scene.
Mortal Kombat’s relatively high quality, violent and unique visuals set the game apart. The game used "digitized footage of real-life actors … [to] acheive a high level of detail," said artist John Tobias in Replay. Of course, the famously bloody fatalities used to end fights were one of the game’s biggest selling points as well as a lightning rod for controversy, furthering hostility toward games in an environment where US Democratic Senator (and Vice Presidential candidate in 2000) Joe Lieberman said publicly that he wished for an outright ban on violent video games.
3D games such as Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Marvel vs. Capcom pushed the genre forward technically as the 90s went on but could not match the high intensity competitive culture of Street Fighter 2 in the first half of the decade. As arcades eventually went the way of the dinosaurs, home consoles became increasingly prolific. The competitive fighting scene’s heart rate slowed greatly as the new millennium approached.