The Fighter is Dead

(Submitted to The Platformers 4-2-07)

This article started off as an examination of three traditional console genres and how developers and fans alike were responsible for their demise. But upon further research, I realized that two of these genres I had thought dead or dying- the shooter and the racing game- were still vital parts of the gaming dynamic, evolving new concepts and thus able to attract new fans. However, the third- the fighter- has not seen a major revision in gameplay mechanics since the first Virtua Fighter nearly fifteen years ago. How did the fighter, so recently a essential factor of the gaming universe and a driving force of console sales, collapse into irrelevance? And how have the shump and the racer, both far older than the fighter, managed to escape obsolescence? The Racer-- Mirror Course I know, it's hard to understand how I could think the racer was near the edge of relevance, especially when you consider how much marketing faith Microsoft placed in Project Gotham 3 or how important Mario Kart is to Nintendo. But as a devoted fan of the genre, I am hard pressed to find appreciable evolution as of late. Today we see racers split into two camps, with little leeway between. In one you have the over-the-top brainless arcade frenzy of Burnout, where catastrophic wrecks at 200 miles per hour with no discernible loss in position are common. On the other end of the spectrum you have Forza Motorsports and Grand Turismo 4 engaged in mortal combat over who can produce the most soulless Nurburgring experience, the joy of driving wrung dry amid a maze of menu screens set to a jazz fusion soundtrack. But something happened to racers, the subtle sort of shift you don't really notice until it's already passed by, and I believe the roots of this change lay in Grand Theft Auto 3. Free roaming gameplay has come to the racing genre, first seen in a full fledged game in Eden Game's Test Drive: Unlimited, and it represents a fundamental change in the philosophy of how racers are played and presented. Whereas practically every other racing game made gives you a list of racetracks to chose from with no transition whatsoever between, TD:U presents the player with a thousand miles of roadway modeled on Hawaii's Oahu island. The island is the racetrack, the player able to seek out races and events staged within. Further, TD:U has a fully integrated online component, one that melds seamlessly with the single-player game, the player often unable to tell the difference between the normal AI cars and other, flesh-and-blood drivers. As an actual racing game though, TD:U is a tad uninspiring. Cars are largely the same, with little other than acceleration and top speed differentiating them, and the racing physics lean toward the arcade end of the spectrum while still not able to approach the reckless joy of Burnout. However, it points a way forward, and the sort of idea I desperately want to see Polyphony Digital (the detail obsessive madmen behind Gran Turismo) copy whole cloth and place their own racing ethos within. The Shooter-- Smart Bomb By the end of the PlayStation 2 cycle Shumps had fallen into utter irrelevance. While the games remained fundamentally sound (after all, it's hard to screw up a something three steps removed from Space Invaders), they had become exercises in franchise self-abuse, with gameplay conventions carved in stone before the NES was set to silicon. If anything, the genre has actually devolved from previous generations that gave us Panzer Dragoon, Galaxy Force and Star Fox 64. Even Treasure, masters of the traditional 2-D shump, gave us the excellent, inventive puzzle shooter Bangai-O for the Dreamcast... barely a console generation later they returned to remaking Gradius. Shumps find themselves travelling quite the opposite path to redemption taken by the racer, their evolution represented by a return to the roots of the genre. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved hearkens back to the frenzy of the arcades shooters of yore, using the power of the 360 not to create high-rez polygons, but instead to throw a riot of lethal particle effects at the player, frantic action not seen since Berserk and Defender. Meanwhile the freely distributed Warning Forever literally evolves, constantly pitting the player in single-screen combat against a single, constantly changing enemy. This minimalist (and free-of-charge)ethic is also found in the work of Kenta Cho, creator of rRootage, Torus Trooper and GunRoar; any of which in another age would have easily qualified for franchise-worthy blockbusters.

The Fighter-- Ring Out I want you to try an experiment next time you're mooching coffee and magazines at the bookstore. Find a strategy guide for a 3d fighter, something relatively simple, say Dead or Alive 4. Now find a beginner's guide to C++. Open them side by side. Which seems more rewarding, learning the counters, command throws, string combos, alternate stances, step-baiting, ect of DoA, or programming your own videogame from scratch? It's going to take you a good couple of hundred hours of practice either way, at least one of the two will land you a degree somewhere down the line.

You see, instead of devolution or division, the fighter fell victim to its fans. Mired within arcane language and obtuse concepts, the fighter finds itself cursed with a hardcore fanbase struck with tunnel vision, a tunnel vision which the developers have embraced. excluding new fans for the demands of tiered tournament play. The hardcore fighter community does not want change, they want incremental improvements to the same basic strategies laid out in Virtua Fighter, and that's something Namco and Sega and Temco are more than prepared to dole out along with regularly scheduled graphics upgrades. There is simply no way for a newcomer to the genre to find a foothold, and without new fans any demand for new gameplay mechanics have fallen to the wayside.

Summary Stagnation of gameplay leads to stagnation within the playerbase. Once your market stops growing you're stuck with the same core group of people who will buy your sequels no matter how stale they are, and you wind up catering to those fans, forcing out new players. Within a short time you wind up with Virtua Fighter 5 selling all of fifty thousand copies in it's opening week. This is the trap the racing genre found itself on the precipice of, and the one the shump is currently trying to free itself from. I don't know if there's a way out for the fighter, perhaps we've seen everything interesting left to do with it. Nintendo fans tell me the Smash Brothers franchise remains uncompromisingly fun while still allowing a semblance of high-level play- I'll have to take their word for that, it's not the sort of game that appeals to me. Even Midway has admitted that the promise of fighting action itself isn't quite enough to sell Mortal Kombat anymore, having long ago decided to fill game discs out with kart racing and puzzle games, turning what was once a well-respected fighting franchise into something of a slipshod party game. Even Capcom, progenitors of the genre and renown for their willingness to squeeze the final penny from a franchise, realized there was no money left in the 2d fighter and vacated their crown.

Which leads us to the real crime of all this. We'll never see an updated Morganna sprite.