Fighting Games
The one-on-one form arrived in 1984 with Karate Champ (developed by Technos Japan, published by Data East); the same year, its versus edition put human against human at the center. Yie Ar Kung-Fu (1985) multiplied the moves, and Street Fighter (1987, Takashi Nishiyama) settled the command inputs for the fireball and the rising uppercut. Here the lineage forks. Nishiyama moved to SNK and made Fatal Fury (1991); the side that stayed at Capcom shipped Street Fighter II the same year. Its developer Akira Nishitani has been refreshingly plain about it in Capcom's own column: the six buttons were chosen because “the six-button cocktail cabinets from SF1 were still lying around, so we figured we would somehow make it work with those.” Even the combo — the thing the genre is named for — came from cancel behavior the team could not fully control, and a decision that it was “fun, so let us leave it.” Twenty-six years after release, in 2017, players discovered a combo nobody knew about. A game whose makers did not know all of it either. In 1993 Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter opened the door to 3D, and Katsuhiro Harada, who made Tekken the following year, says flatly that “the early Tekken was made by studying Virtua Fighter like crazy.” SNK merged Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting into The King of Fighters ’94; crossing licenses, X-MEN VS. STREET FIGHTER (1996) grew into MARVEL VS. CAPCOM (1998). Then in 1999 Masahiro Sakurai's Super Smash Bros. threw out the health bar entirely. Its prototype was a 1996 in-house pitch called Dragon King: The Fighting Game, and the person who programmed it was Satoru Iwata. The festival started small too: Battle by the Bay, a grassroots tournament in California in 1996, drew about forty people. In 2002 it renamed itself EVO.
The myth, corrected
Street Fighter II invented the fighting game.
The form itself is seven years older. Karate Champ (1984, developed by Technos Japan, published by Data East) and its versus edition that same year built the game of two people facing each other one-on-one. What Street Fighter II invented was not the form but the culture — that stranger who drops a coin in the next cabinet and barges into your match.