FOne evening, my housemates and I were coming back from the pub with a few hangers on. The classic 1990s TV show “The Word” ends with a raucous live performance by the up-and-coming grunge band, and now it's time to play video games.

Online multiplayer didn't exist during the original PlayStation or Sega Saturn decade. If you wanted to play against a human, you had to play against a friend in your living room or someone else you found in the pub when it closed. It had to be accessible, competitive, and something that two or four people could play at the same time. We had to keep the rounds short because everyone wanted to play. That always means one of his two options: a soccer sim or a fighting game.

In the mid-1990s, fighting games were the most popular genre on consoles, along with driving sims. At the time, major hardware manufacturers and arcade companies were keen to corner the emerging market of real-time 3D games, games with polygonal characters and environments that replaced the essentially flat 2D world of sprites and backgrounds. did. These games were the future. And the fighting genre was the perfect showcase. These games featured large character models that benefited from 3D graphics and smooth animation, but also featured primarily static arenas, so they didn't need to fill up your disk or system. Memory that stores a lot of environmental data. He also has a huge fan base thanks to his 1980s classics like Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Karate Champ, as well as early 1990s hits Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. Did. It fit perfectly.

1995 saw the release of Tekken on the PlayStation and Virtua Fighter on the Saturn. There was also the beautiful battle arena Toshinden by Tamsoft, which featured a feast of then-cutting-edge texture-mapped visuals, bizarre characters, and special moves. When Tekken 2 was released in August 1995, it sold over 5 million copies and cemented the genre's importance with its cinematic sequences and cool combatants. A year later, the N64 entered the fray with Killer Instinct Gold, Sega gave us Fighting Vipers and Last Bronx, and Capcom diversified the genre with Street Fighter Alpha 2, the horror-themed Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, and 3D weapon-based I was desperately working on it. The sci-fi battle Star Gladiator and the crossover classic X-Men vs. Street Fighter. Squaresoft, the creator of Final Fantasy, also took on the bizarre futuristic fighter Tubal No 1, which became a bestseller in Japan, probably because it came with a playable demo disc for Final Fantasy VII. .

Fighting games never went away. Even as people began to flock online for first-person shooters like Call of Duty, or abandoned social play altogether for new narrative adventure titles (Tomb Raiders, Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto). Regardless, Tekken, Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, Guilty Gear and a few other heavy hitters have held on, supported by a fiercely competitive community. It's great to see renewed interest in it through the excellent Street Fighter 6, the ridiculous Mortal Kombat 1, and the recent Tekken 8. I hope this ignites a passion for the old titles, the ones you used to play from 11:30pm to 5am on Friday nights. Once the Word is finished. Honestly, every Street Fighter game is worth playing. Tekken 3 remains a benchmark classic. Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is beautiful and complex. He then ventured into the cult world of SNK's greats (Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, etc.) and descended the rabbit hole of his Arc System works to the frankly insane Guilty. You can also dive into the world of Gear.

The colors, the sounds, the characters, the combat…the praise you get when you pull off a super move and throw your fellow characters into space. The camaraderie of the arena. Log on to the Internet and raid his GameFaq site for a list of fan-created character moves and combos. Give your friend a boring third-party controller to play with while investing in his first fighting stick. The 1990s were his decade, the furnace of modern industry, as the game grew, diversified, brought in new people and spread its tentacles into wider culture. And for a few intense, glorious years, fighting games were at the absolute forefront.