This Week in Retro: Pit-Fighter [1990] (Patreon)

August 1990: Pit-Fighter Beats Mortal Kombat to the Punch

by Diamond Feit

In the long history of video games, innovation doesn't always guarantee a legacy. Being first can be nice; it can turn heads and earn you a few coins out of curiosity. Yet there's no way to predict which games will capture the imaginations of gamers and which will become footnotes in history. Case in point: This month marks the 30th anniversary of the very first fighting game to use digitized images of real-life people for the characters on-screen. That game was not called Mortal Kombat... but that's the game you're thinking of, isn't it?

Digitized images in video games were not a new phenomenon in the 1990s; the tech had been there for years and could be seen on a small scale in titles such as Journey, where it incorporate the band's famous faces on screen. By the late '80s, digital cameras were available commercially to consumers; I can remember seeing digital photos of the graduating class on the walls of my middle school. Video games were not far behind. In 1988, NARC featured digitized images of real people playing cops and drug dealers, which made the on-screen violence all the more shocking. Speaking of shocking, I was once lucky enough to visit a friend's house with a strip poker game on his home computer starring actual women (much to our disappointment, we only ever managed to see one boob).

It was sometime in August of 1990 that Atari's Pit-Fighter hit arcades across the United States with much aplomb. The game's unique visual style was the centerpiece of the marketing: The arcade flyers boast of "DIGITALLY PROCESSED GRAPHICS for the ultimate in realism!" More to the point, Pit-Fighter looked like an interactive version of what seemed to be the million martial-arts action movies flooding video stores and cable channels alike at the time. I'm frankly amazed there isn't a single ninja in the game.

Besides its distinctive aesthetic, Pit-Fighter arrived at a time when beat-em-ups were still hot: Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Capcom's Final Fight let players team up together and knock their way through hordes of gang members. Pit-Fighter took that cooperative element—three can play at once—but blended it with the then-young fighting game genre, which had yet to be codified. The original Street Fighter already existed, with action locked into a single 2D plane, but there were also arcade fighters like Street Smart and Kageki which allowed for free movement inside an arena.

The result: Pit-Fighter is a co-op fighting game where combatants are trapped in a dive bar, warehouse, or perhaps a dirty basement, surrounded by an enraged audience willing to beat or stab any fighters who get too close to the edge. There are no hordes to dispatch, just an opponent (or two or three) who must be knocked out to proceed to the next match. Loose objects like boxes and knives can be picked up and thrown, but most of the fighting is done with punches and kicks. Pushing all three buttons triggers a "super move," which automatically knocks an opponent down if it connects.

Pit-Fighter does subvert its co-op nature in small ways: players can hurt each other during the fights, and the prize money is doled out based on who knocks out the most opponents, adding a hint of competition to what should be straight teamwork. There are also periodic "grudge matches" in-between fights where the players must face one another, the goal of which is to knock each other down (but not out) three times. This culminates in an "elimination match" before the final boss, where it truly is a knockout battle: Only one player is allowed to face the "Masked Warrior" and beat the game—no teammates allowed.

Pit-Fighter had a hook and a look of its own, which certainly called attention to itself, and it was out in arcades two full years ahead of Mortal Kombat. So why is it a trivia answer instead of a beloved classic? Simply put, it isn't very good: For all the work Atari put into photographing real-life human beings, the in-game animation of those humans is choppy even by 1990 standards, making the characters feel flat. There's also very little effort put into making those characters unique or memorable; all three playable heroes are shirtless men, and the opponents lack abilities which would make them stand out. Beat-em-ups can get away with forgettable, cannon-fodder enemies who walk on screen only to be swatted down, but battles in Pit-Fighter can last minutes at a time. I lamented their omission earlier, but frankly, Pit-Fighter would have benefited from a ninja or two to break up the motley crew of challengers who all look like pro wrestling jobbers

Pit-Fighter was an arcade hit and was ported to numerous consoles, including home computers and handhelds. There was even an 8-bit version on the Sega Master System. But even the 16-bit renditions featured significant graphical downgrades, which undermined Pit-Fighter's one claim to fame. Years later, Midway would include Pit-Fighter on various arcade game compilations for consoles and PCs, despite not being a game developed or published by Midway.

All of this means Pit-Fighter has outlived a great many of its peers despite being little more than a curiosity at this point: A game that did something first but didn't do it particularly well. But that's ok! Preserving game history isn't just a matter of saving our best and brightest; there also needs to be room for the mediocre or just plain bad. I leave it to you to decide where exactly Pit-Fighter sits on the spectrum of flavorless fighting games. Personally, all my Pit-Fighter memories were from messing with it in bowling alleys in-between frames, which seems like the best possible scenario for interacting with this game.

(Header image from LaunchBox Games Database)