Kapow! The history of fighting games
We’ve come a long way since that 80s one where you punched a bull in the face. As fighting games hit home in Black Mirror’s Striking Vipers, we chart their evolution
It was not an auspicious beginning. The first video game featuring hand-to-hand combat hit arcades in 1976: Sega’s boxing sim Heavyweight Champ, starred two chunky monochrome pugilists in striped underpants. Players controlled the action by putting their hands in plastic boxing gloves and making thrusting movements.
Heavyweight Champ bombed, and so did its rivals. Atari’s 1977 arcade game Boxer would have used two analogue handles as controllers, but it was never released because in-house testers of the prototype cabinet kept wrenching off the handles. In 1979, another arcade machine, Warrior, featured vector-based graphics and two sword-fighting knights viewed from a top-down perspective, but the temperamental technology kept breaking down.