This Week In Retro: Fatal Fury (Patreon)

November 25, 1991: Legendary men debut

by Diamond Feit

When we speak of Street Fighter II changing the medium of video games, it wasn't overnight. Capcom's sequel to Street Fighter spent months capturing the attention of arcade regulars, eventually spreading out beyond dedicated game spaces into grocery stores, delicatessens, and eventually any corner on planet Earth near a power outlet (my regular machine was, no joke, in a "malt shop").

We all know how success breeds imitators, which in the case of a genre-defining work like Street Fighter II includes a huge swath of games produced in the 1990s. Yet Street Fighter II was not the first "fighting game," not by a longshot, so just like the term "Doom-clone" was broadly applied to scores of first-person shooters, so was almost every player-vs-player fighter unfairly classified as a Street Fighter II "wannabe."

Such was the case at the end of 1991 when the first honest-to-goodness fighting game appeared on the Neo Geo. By that point in the year Street Fighter II mania was running wild, so another game in the arcades focused on 2D single-screen combat naturally drew a lot of unfavorable comparisons to Capcom's blockbuster title. Ignoring the fact that video games take a long time to make, what none of us knew at the time was that SNK's Fatal Fury was a response to Street Fighter I, not II, made by its original creator no less.

We touched on this topic back in our 30th anniversary episode about Street Fighter II, but Takashi Nishiyama came up with and later directed the first Street Fighter for Capcom. That concept took a lot of inspiration from his earlier creation Kung-fu Master for Irem, specifically the showdowns with the bosses at the end of each floor. "I think you could say [Kung-fu Master] was the basis of the whole idea for Street Fighter," Nishiyama told Matt Leone in 2020.

When Nishiyama left Capcom to join crosstown rival developer SNK, he still had ideas on how to improve upon his Street Fighter concept. After all, that game had been experimental in a lot of ways, so Nishiyama and his team had to leave a lot of planned components out of the finished product. One of the biggest, hardest cuts was to the number of playable characters: Only Ryu and Ken can be controlled in the original Street Fighter, and they are virtually identical in appearance with exactly the same moveset.

In Fatal Fury, players have their choice of three different fighters, and while they share certain techniques (all of them have projectiles, anti-air vertical attacks, and long-range horizontal charges) they are fundamentally different in their appearance and skill sets. Terry Bogard is a ballcap-wearing brawler, his brother Andy is a cool-headed martial artist, and their friend Joe Higashi is a Muay-Thai kickboxer. Their enemies are even more varied, including a young breakdancer, an elderly shapeshifter, an oversized pro wrestler, and even a pole-wielding henchman with extraordinary reach.

While Fatal Fury operates much the same way as other 2D fighters, it features foreground and background planes on most stages that characters can hop between. Not only does this show off the Neo Geo's sprite scaling ability, it doubles the amount of space players can explore during their bouts. Switching planes is an easy way to close in on opponents who use long-range attacks, and can also be used to evade counter attacks, perhaps even to run out the clock if necessary.

In an even more dramatic shift, Fatal Fury handles two-player action in a unique manner unlike any other fighting game I can recall. In Street Fighter or its many descendants, should another player walk up to the machine and join a single-player game in progress, that CPU match ends immediately so the two players can fight each other. In Fatal Fury, the two players instead team up to fight the CPU opponent before competing to see who gets to continue the story. These two-on-one fights are never a sure win, but they can turn into delightfully  lopsided manic contests that I wish more games would explore, but I suppose there's less profit in letting one credit buy two fights.

If you snickered when I said "story," shame on you. Fatal Fury is no Silence of the Lambs but it outdoes its peers (especially other fighting games) by delivering characters with clear motives. Unlike the globetrotting journey that is Street Fighter, Fatal Fury takes place in a single American city called South Town, where local martial artist Jeff Bogard ran afoul of organized crime kingpin Geese Howard and got himself killed. His two sons (and their friend) vow revenge against Geese and enter the local "King of Fighters" tournament for a chance to face the man himself in his high-rise abode.

Fatal Fury's storytelling is not limited to win quotes and interstitial dialogue; the game shows a rough map of your character fighting their way around the city, ending up at Geese's tower for the final battle. His lair is 100% Japanophile with elaborate Buddhist statues on display and the most kick-ass theme song ever composed (well, I'm partial to the version heard in 1993's Fatal Fury Special, but the original is where it all began). The winner of this fight kicks the loser off the roof; players see their character falling to their death while the game tempts them to insert an additional coin. If Geese is the one who plummets over the edge, the game declares "Geese Howard dies in the hospital 3 hours after falling from a high rise," using the exact date based on the system's internal clock for his mini obituary.

I know I've spent many a column and podcast declaring my enthusiasm for Neo Geo games, but even in 1991 I could see that Fatal Fury didn't measure up to the excellence that was Street Fighter II. It's much slower, the moves are harder to pull off, and these three heroes cannot compare to the eight World Warriors I could choose in Capcom's game. Yet Fatal Fury still captured my imagination by presenting its characters as occupying a communal place and telling its tale of betrayal and vengeance, delivering an experience just distinct enough that I found room for it in my heart.

Knowing its history as I do now, Fatal Fury is even more impressive when viewed as a spiritual sequel to Street Fighter I, a game it blows out of the water in every regard. I'd argue that the original Fatal Fury holds up well even 30 years later, as its rough edges do not overshadow its innovative gameplay. Yet the original Street Fighter looks like cave drawings in comparison to even its late-80s peers, and it falls light-years behind any of its own sequels. It's a piece of history to be sure, but one that belongs in a museum, not on my Nintendo Switch (even though it's there thanks to the 30th Anniversary Collection).

Fatal Fury carries a lot of weight on its shoulders. It was not SNK's "first" fighting game, nor was it the first on the still-young Neo Geo platform. Yet Fatal Fury is the rough draft for the many incredible games that would come out of Esaka in the decade that followed. Besides its own sequels, Fatal Fury would also inspire another series set in South Town called Art of Fighting. When those two franchises began to crossover with one another, SNK made that tournament from the first game a reality with The King of Fighters '94.

That makes Fatal Fury the bedrock upon which SNK's entire future would be built, one that's still going strong as we approach the release of The King of Fighters XV in 2022. SNK has long used the corporate slogan "The Future is Now" but that was never more true than on November 25, 1991 when Terry Bogard first threw his hat into the air and said, with authority, that things are going to be "OK!"

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.