Street Fighter IV is just five days away, and it’s seen a lot more hype than any fighting game release in recent memory. Fifteen years ago, the fighting game was the most popular genre in the arcades and on home consoles, but over time, people started to lose interest. The latest versions of one-time best-sellers like Virtua Fighter and Tekken barely made a dent on the charts. Fighting games aren’t dead by any means, but their popularity is just a fraction of what it once was.

In this week’s edition of The Warp Pipe, we’ll look at a few factors that I believe lead to this decline in popularity of the fighting game genre.

Fighting Back

The market was flooded with too many games that played the same way

Around fifteen years ago, one could walk into any arcade and see a crowd of people surrounding machines like Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat II and Virtua Fighter. Arcade operators would have several units of each machine, and they’d be sucking down coins all day. Home conversions of these games would follow several months later and top the charts, becoming among the best sellers on the 16-bit and 32-bit formats. Fast forward to the current day – if you can find an arcade, it’s usually pretty empty, with a bunch of outdated and dilapidated machines, unless it has Street Fighter IV, which usually attracts a small crowd.

The decline of arcades outside of Japan dealt a large blow to the popularity of fighting games. Without a steady stream of opponents to test one’s skills against, there was little real incentive to develop new strategies and play for extended lengths of time. You could bring groups of friends together but one would usually dominate over the rest, who’d get tired of being beaten. There was a certain mystical air that a new fighting game in the arcade would have surrounding it, which just can’t be replaced. Being able to play fighting games online brings back some of the competitive element, but latency issues, quitters and the inability to see your opponents cringe when they’re beaten means the experience can never be the same.

Too many fighters spoil the fun

What about the games themselves? Early on, the main audiences stuck to Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, and too many companies jumped into the act, delivering poor quality games to try and cash in on the craze. Soon, even the companies that made the more successful fighting games were splitting into multiple streams – Capcom had the main Street Fighter games, the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero games, the Street Fighter EX series, the Darkstalkers series, the Marvel-licensed and crossover games, and one-offs like Rival Schools and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure coming out in rapid succession. A large number of games coming out at any one time is going to spread the audience too thin.

Complexity is another factor that drove away the masses. The fighting game fans love their frame counting, cancels, counters, super and infinite combos and extreme parries, but this level of depth is something that the casual fans will never discover, yet most fighting games after about 1996 rely on some knowledge of these concepts. Higher character counts also add to the learning curve – we’ve gone from having about 8-12 characters in the early Mortal Kombats and Street Fighters to as many as 60-70 in games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Mortal Kombat Armageddon. It’s harder to fully realise characters from a developmental perspective when you’re putting in so many of them.

Gimmick characters and cross overs are not the keys to long term success

As fighting games have become more complex, they’ve shown little real progression. Many of Capcom’s games in the late 90s to early 00s were even sharing the same artwork and basic mechanics. Fighting games still rely on the main concept of two characters pummelling one another until one’s life bar is diminished. There’s the obvious step into 3D, but most 3D fighting games still work on a 2D plane, with a little bit of side stepping and environmental interaction thrown in for good measure. Some games have experimented with different approaches – Bushido Blade abandoned the traditional energy bar for a body damage system, where players could strategically disable parts of the other fighter’s body, with the fight ending when one fighter was either crippled or killed by a critical strike – but such systems never caught on with the major players in the genre.

There are still a number of people who like fighting games the way they are, but that number is dwindling. Some manufacturers have had to resort to cheap gimmicks to pull the masses back in, like guest characters such as Link and Darth Vader in Soul Calibur, to nonsensical crossovers like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Really, a fighting game needs to sell based on its own merits. The reason people are flocking to Street Fighter IV is because it gets back to basics – fewer, more tightly designed and tested characters and less crazy moves - but brings with it a few things to satisfy the more competitive fighting fan.

Will Street Fighter IV be a breakout hit?

So what can be done to stir up more interest in fighting games? Super Street Fighter II HD Remix has proved pretty popular, and looks pretty damn swish – how about we see more 2D fighters with HD sprites? The upcoming King of Fighters XII has them, but how about a HD Remix of something like Mortal Kombat II or Killer Instinct? Much more can be done on the 3D side of things. Fighting games should be able to accomplish a lot more visually, given that you’re usually focusing on only two characters and a small environment. Animation really needs to come along too – most fighting game animation is still static, so surely the use of real time animation engine like Euphoria could add benefit collisions in fights. Many gamers are “graphics whores” at heart – if it looks good, they will come. From a design perspective, I’d like to see more fighting developers focus on fewer, but more fleshed out characters in their games, while sticking to simpler tiers and fewer gimmick characters. Finally, a good online system needs to be devised. The slightest bit of lag can mean life and death in a fighting game, and the issue needs to be addressed (and not in the way Dead or Alive 4 did it).