Preliminary Research of the Field - History & Culture of Fighting Games, Modernization of the Genre

What are you Fighting for?

Imagine picking up a sport or an instrument; games often don't cast up the same kind of view as these physical arts, but picture it for a moment. The well-practiced memorization of concepts, their applications, strengths, weaknesses, and the actual, consistent execution of those concepts. With a fighting game, each character in a roster provides their own set of moves, their aesthetic design, personality and dominant strategies. Characters in fighting games are your position in a sport, or your instrument in a band, and part of selecting a 'main' or your primary character to practice, is finding the right one for you, in turn fighting games provide players with a sense of identity, just as taking part of an orchestra may give a musician a sense of duty, a role and purpose in a larger scheme. You can dabble with every character, but ultimately each provides a potential for hundreds of hours to learn and master at high level play.

Furthering the analogy, imagine a combo as a bar of music, a fight as a song where the victor is the one who has practiced their instrument and responds to their opponent's notes quickly and correctly, applying pressure to play louder and harder. Fighting games are a battle of the bands, they're a competition but also an expression. Fighting games are an expressive scene populated by people who find their passion in coming closer to mastery of their craft.

That's what fighting games at their height represent as an entertainment outlet. From a game developer's perspective, fighting games are an intense zoom-in on high-detail character design and mechanical fidelity built and balanced for play between two or more humans. Fighting games are intense, mechanically dense, and difficult as all hell to create. They are also one of the most satisfying projects to work on.

This is Daisuke Ishiwatari, game designer, illustrator, musician... Basically an all-in-one. This guy is my idol. Daisuke has worked for decades under the Japanese game company Arc System Works, a developer and publisher of many popular fighting games. One such project, released in 1998, was Daisuke's passion project, Guilty Gear. This series is an amalgamation of his passions. Character designs, the names of special moves mechanics, and art aesthetic all paint a world of punk rock backed by the supernatural in the modern day, from Japanese folk legends of ghost possession to a society which shunned technology in favor of magic.

Here's one of the cast members, I-No. She's basically Guilty Gear's style personified in one character: Punk Rock, Magic, and High-Speed Aerial Combat. These three phrases are the bedrock of the series, it doesn't seem like much, but these three tenets inform the entire universe, and Daisuke's designs pervade the entire product. While obviously the scope of these projects require large teams, the amount of work Daisuke contributes to the world vision and more importantly to the art and music are considerable and respectable, he's not just an idea guy, this series is his baby.

I'm enough of a realist to understand this is too much to expect of a single person, it's very rare to find a person like Daisuke, and it's certainly not something to take lightly. The reason I bring him up is simply because the sheer amount of work the guy does is inspiring, and it shows the other side of fighting games. They are just as fulfilling to design, to create a world, a cast of characters and an intricate shell in which others can engage and identity with on a high level both independently and as a community.

What Strength!! But Don't Forget There Are Many Guys Like You All Over the World

But this by itself doesn't really provide background to the genre itself. How about we get a little history?

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/fighters/fighters.htm

Hardcore Gaming 101's article here provides a mostly exhaustive pre-Street Fighter II history of fighting games, which goes as far back as '76 with the black and white fighter, Heavyweight Champ, or depending on who you ask, as is the case in the HG101 article, the '79 top-down sword duel game, Warrior. These were the early years of video games in general, and along the same lines as Space War, Warrior did not use AI, so the game could only be played as a 1-on-1 fight between two human players. Interestingly, many of these early video games showed that even back then we were approaching video games as social medium, a conduit to interact with others for entertainment, for competition, etc. The biggest change over time has been the visual fidelity and mechanical complexity, but the core purpose behind fighting games have always remained much the same.

The FGC, or Fighting Game Community is a social group that has emerged in prominence to mass media over the last decade with the popularization of e-sports, but their origins go as far back as the mid 80s to late 90s, where arcades had their boom. Back in these days, communities were close-knit, converging on local arcade spots where reputation, friendships and rivalries were built over this genre. The short documentary below shows one instance of this history at the Chinatown Fair Arcade in New York City.

The standout point that is made in this documentary I feel is the diversity of the players. Fighting games in the age of arcades brought people together from all different age groups, cultures and walks of life. Today, they are recognized as an international sport, with competitors hailing from all different countries. In spirit of this, Street Fighter, one of the most long-running and popular fighting game franchises, reflects this diversity in the expansion of its cast over the years.

Just as much as the people who play fighters hail from all over the world, so too do the developers, and many modern fighting game developers come from a background of competitive, sometimes professional play in the FGC

See Skullgirls, developed by American studio Lab Zero Games and headed by professional BlazBlue tournament player Mike Zaimont. Chocked full of references to classic Capcom and other Japanese fighters from those arcade days

French company Piranaking based out of Paris developed the 3D fighter Lastfight, based on Bastien Vivès' Lastman comic series and inspired by Dreamcast fighter Powerstone

Japanese studio French Bread has grown in popularity over the past decade to presently work alongside big publishers like Arc System Works, most recently releasing Under Night In-Birth.

And even on independent levels there are many small studios working away at innovative projects, such as Brazilian developer Onanim Studio and their project Trajes Fatais.

Gimme Your Best Shot

My point is, the influence of fighting games is strong. They translate on a worldwide scale in the spirit of healthy competition, building connections and communities both local and large-scale, inspire travel and broadened horizons in both players and developers. As a young, aspiring developer, as well as a somewhat seasoned fan of the genre I want to immerse myself in this world in both respects. I want to play these games and meet new people through them, and ultimately, I'd like to connect with those who create them, and offer my own talents to contribute to an amazing genre with deep history and instinctive roots in what we enjoy about games as social tools for personal betterment.

Fighters for the Modern Age

In the past, fighting games were largely 2D affairs, and the amount of work that would go into a quality fighting game from art to design, even for a single character, was painstaking and expensive. This has not changed today, but in an effort to remain relevant, fighting games have taken strides both in the realm of stylistic choices as well as the content they bring to players to improve their appeal to people who normally are turned off by their large skill gap and complicated nature, and to make the best use of today's available techniques and technology to optimize the creation process.

Today, many popular fighters have made the switch to 3D, sometimes retaining 2D gameplay as is the case with Street Fighter IV and V. Some have utilized 3D models from the beginning, and built their gameplay systems around the use of 3D space, major franchises to list being Tekken, Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur. Using a full 3D movement system meant that the Z axis would also be considered, not just X and Y as it is in 2D fighters. Sidestepping and sweeping attacks become an inherent part of the strategy of these sorts of games. The point is, 2D or 3D, the use of 3D technology in fighting games is becoming a standard part of their polish. Nothing is wrong with retaining the 2D roots of the genre, as games such as Under Night In-Birth have done, but we're seeing more and more games use 3D to great, and surprisingly still cost-efficient effect. In many ways, other than retaining a retro feel, there's little difference considering a 2D fighter to a 2.5D fighter. A full 3D fighter is a different beast altogether and thus requires different considerations, the two are not transferable, but they utilize the same base concepts of high detail character design, animation and in-depth movesets with steep learning curves.

To appeal to a wider audience, Fighters have also diversified their appeal by trying to reach out to a player base that does not have a history with fighters and cannot easily recognize the complex button inputs required to use all the tools a character has to offer. Many fighters have begun to implement cinematic story modes, where simple fights to round out the player's knowledge of the roster and gameplay fundamentals are accentuated by longer narrative-driven scenes, contextualizing all the fighting.

Even back in the day, fighting games often provided single player modes if nobody else wanted to play, from multi-stage arcade modes to practice several matches against computers of increasing difficulty, to actual training modes which set you up with a dummy to practice and experiment with combos and special moves unimpeded by a usually aggressive opponent. Some separate out gameplay altogether, and provide these story-heavy modes as standalone experiences the player can watch or read like a movie or book. This approach has been popular with several Japanese series, including Blazblue, Guilty Gear and Under Night In-Birth. Still, in the end, the main attraction is the genre's namesake, and the genre as a whole continues to provide a standard of quality for players to enjoy while providing new worlds, characters and lore alongside unique systems to set themselves apart from the competition.

Finish It!

Ultimately, Fighting games still face a challenge of being a niche market with a dedicated audience. That audience has allowed them to thrive, but to continue into the future they must continue to innovate to become accessible to a greater audience.

With Temp Work Mercenary, I hope to use my knowledge of the field alongside my pursuit to increase my proficiency in 3D art to create a new world full of colorful characters, a compelling world aesthetic, and something of meaning both in terms of mechanical depth for fighting game fans, and in terms of narrative experiences.