Fighting game
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Fighting game refers to a genre of action video game where the player controls an on-screen character and engages in close combat with another character. These characters tend to be of equal power and fight matches consisting of several rounds, which take place in an arena. Players must master techniques such as blocking, counter-attacking, and chaining together sequences of attacks known as "combos". Since the early 1990s, most fighting games allow the player to execute special attacks by performing specific button combinations.
Heavyweight Champ (1976) was the first game to feature fist fighting, and more refined fighting games appeared throughout the 1980s. The seminal Street Fighter II (released by Capcom in 1991) was the progenitor of the genre's popularity, the fighting game subsequently became the pre-eminent genre for competitive video gaming in the early to mid-1990s. Fighting games were popular in arcades, where players could play against human opponents. The genre spawned several successful and long running franchises, in addition to Street Fighter, such as Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter. The genre's popularity stagnated as games became more complicated, and as arcades began to lose their audience to increasingly powerful home consoles near the end of the 1990s. Today, the genre remains popular but retains a much smaller proportion of enthusiasts than it once did, due to the increasing popularity of other genres.
