Pit-Fighter

“There Can Only Be One!”

When I’m in the Pit [Fighter], I’m gonna
punch and kick.
North American promotional flyer.

Let’s get something out of the way up front here: As a matter of purely personal preference, I am not a fan of fighting games. Simply put, I don’t have the aptitude to play them well, and that’s just as well because I’m not particularly enchanted while playing them. That being said, they make up a fascinating genre with a rich history, and I find myself fascinated by them despite the fact I don’t really care to play many of them. At their best or at their worst, they are spectacles to behold either way… Maybe especially “at their worst,” though.

There really is nothing else quite like a bad fighting game. In developing for a genre where the fundamentals are so well-established, and where the list of things you need to get right is so well-defined, you’ve either gotta be incompetent or misguided to mess it up. Which is to say, you’re either lacking in the technical prowess to put everything together, or your number one priority in developing a game isn’t to “make it entertaining to play.” You’d think that should be number one on any developer’s list, even if only for the ulterior motive of making money! So, if you’re apparently not too bothered by whether your fighting game is actually fun or not, then what exactly are you hoping it manages to sell itself on?

“Eye candy” is a term which gets tossed around a fair amount when discussing fighting games these days. Typically, it’s used in reference to the oversexualization and objectification of female characters in order to engage the horndog demographic. But let us remember that there was a point in time where photorealism in games was not the norm, and where having a game with what even approached “realistic visuals” would qualify it as eye candy. And as the trend seemed to emerge, most of these fighting games which innovated in the graphics department didn’t seem to be very much fun to actually play. Enter 1990’s Pit-Fighter.

“The Ultimate Competition.”

In 1992, Midway’s Mortal Kombat changed everything we knew about video games, became the most important and influential video game of all time ever, and also cured all disease and brought about world peace. For these reasons, we are contractually obligated to mention it in any discussion about video games, regardless of whether not it’s actually relevant or not. It’s always relevant though, because it’s the greatest most notable and most game-changing game of all time, and the industry would be NOTHING without it, you got that?!

Alright, so that last paragraph is obviously a bit of exaggeration (it only cures a handful of lesions and sores). But sometimes, I can’t help but feel like that “contractual obligation” bit might somehow secretly be true. Sometimes, it really does feel like you can’t go one review or retrospective without seeing Mortal Kombat mentioned in some capacity, being lauded for all its innovations and whatever else. Trivia bits indicating that it was the game that necessitated the foundation of the ESRB, that it innovated the concept of finishing moves in fighting games, that it was the first video game to feature the use of digitized graphics for characters… Wait, that can’t be right, can it?

Some of you reading this may already know where I’m going here, but please bear with me while I clear up a misconception for some of the misinformed out there. Now, if you did believe Mortal Kombat really was the first game to use digitized graphics, it’s totally understandable: Revisionist game historians have done a great job of writing MK’s predecessors out of the proverbial history books, in order to make it seem like an even more important game than it already is. Perhaps a more honest distinction might be to call it “the first competent game to utilize digitized graphics.”

Okay okay, I’m being a bit cheeky there again. Of the handful of games with digitized graphics that predate MK, a few of them are quite alright. 1983’s Journey (developed and also published by Midway) was a fun enough little gimmick, comprised of a series of six minigames wherein the members of the band Journey are depicted using digitized images of their faces atop comically undersized bodies. This game was also notable for its use of an accompanying audio tape for the kickass track “Separate Ways,” which the machine would play during the final minigame. Surprisingly, both of these concepts would later resurface together at the same time in the 1988 PC Engine CD game No-Ri-Ko, a proto-dating sim in which you dote on the digitized likeness of J-Pop idol Noriko Ogawa. Not only that, but you also have the option to watch [and listen] to primitively re-rendered versions of several of her music videos. Novel as all that may be, there isn’t much to it as an actual game.

1988’s NARC, as developed by Williams Electronics (who would release the game under the banner of none other than Midway, yet again), is probably one of the first truly notable games to employ digitized graphics. A realistic depiction of American law enforcement procedure, the game has you mow down countless criminals in the middle of public streets and non-descript buildings. Occasionally, you can make use of a missile launcher, exploding them into bloody gibs. Naturally, digitized likenesses of actors are used to depict our heroes as well as the various villains, adding to the realism of the whole simulation experience. The digitized sprites (in layman’s terms, the individual frames of animation that make up a character in a game) themselves are relatively small during gameplay, with larger digitized images used in cutscenes demonstrating more of the detail capable at the time. NARC was Midway’s first foray into including then-shocking levels of violence in games, and its success would ensure it would not be their last.

Perhaps a more relevant example for our purposes is the 1988 arcade fighting game Reikai Dōshi: Chinese Exorcist, developed by Home Data (now known as Magical Company, and best known for the Kōshien series of baseball games). An important distinction to be made is that the characters in this game are digitized clay figures, rather than actors. This would earn it the dual distinction of being the first fighting game to feature both digitized graphics and claymation. As if that weren’t enough, it also featured decapitations on defeating enemies, as well as for your protagonist should you fall in battle! So why the hell is this game forgotten in favor of MK? Oh, that’s right; because it’s a decidedly lousy game with ludicrously unfair AI and generally janky gameplay. Yeah, that’ll do it.

The next several years would see the gradual rise of the fighting game genre leading up to the release of Street Fighter II, followed by its first wave of initial imitators, and shortly thereafter by Mortal Kombat. Until MK proved digitized graphics were a viable option, these games in-between would continue to primarily rely on digitally-illustrated graphics, as was the standard for the time… With one more exception. One last attempt at digitizing actors for the purpose of pitting them against each other in hand-to-hand combat. In 1990, Atari Games would unleash Pit-Fighter onto the fighting games scene, hoping to wow arcade-goers by presenting them with “the ultimate in realism!” (An actual quote from a promotional flyer, there)

“Look For Power Pill!”

(North American arcade cabinet)

Pit-Fighter actually isn’t a traditional fighting game, technically speaking. Its mechanics are more akin to a beat-em-up of the era, featuring eight-directional control and weapon pick-ups. However, with each fight typically presented as one-on-one combat [in the single-player mode], penalties for touching the edges of the ring, and with no scrolling progression through the stages, it can just as arguably be categorized as a fighting game. So I’m gonna go ahead and do just that.

The premise is simple: Win fights, earn cash, defeat the final opponent and become the new champion. In this case, the big baddie at the end is the enigmatic Masked Warrior, who goes as far as to taunt you between matches by standing against a black backdrop and mumbling “just wait” at you. Intimidating. But for an opportunity to square off against him, you must first defeat seven other weirdos — some of them several times in order to prove that you really want it I guess? More on them in a minute. First, we’ve gotta talk about your choice of playable characters. After all, what good is a fighting game without a roster of unique fighters? (Special exception for International Karate’s cast of one martial artist and his identical twin)

Pit-Fighter gives you your choice of three buff hunks of muscle, who each have a unique super moves and stat distribution. Buzz is an ex-professional wrestler, who excels in doing / taking damage but has the slowest movement speed. If he were any good as a pro wrestler, he should really have the opposite stats there, since the goal in pro wrestling is to not actually hurt your opponents. Kato the third degree black belt fills the “speed over power” slot, boasting the least health but also being the quickest on his feet and to attack. And finally, Ty is your middle-of-the-road statwise kickboxer, who does edge out the other characters in attack reach. His super moves are also the most reliable to hit and easiest to chain together, which makes him my pick for the best character in the game. Buzz comes in at a close second, while the third degree black belt coincidentally places at a distant third.

While your choice of playable characters may all be fairly generic, the cast of enemies is actually quite varied. In fact, they actually almost border on being completely inconsistent with one another! Your first opponent is the hooded Executioner, who sadly does not carry an axe into battle to complete his gimmick. He is followed shortly thereafter by Southside Jim, who is far less intimidating clad in sweatpants. Angel is your token female opponent, donning black leather S&M gear, because of course she is. C.C. Rider is sadly not an anthropomorphic dog with a guitar (bit of a stretch, I know), and is instead a generic biker type. Heavy Metal is probably the oddest of the bunch, with their closest approximation being something like an 80’s punk, but also actually made partially out of metal? Mad Miles playing the role of a camo-pants clad ex-military type is a bit like Guile, minus the hair and the sonic booms and any other memorable qualities. Chainman Eddie (later paired with his twin brother in a potential 2v1 match against you) is… well, a man wearing a chain ensemble. And finally, Masked Warrior is best described as… well, a man wearing a mask. Kinda like that baddie from The Road Warrior, yeah?

It’s here where I should mention the quality of the game’s graphics and animation. Now, I’m of the general opinion that games with digitized graphics have not held up as well as games from the same era with digital illustration. But that comes with the benefit of something like 20 years of hindsight. Back in 1990, graphics like this would’ve been impressive… to a point. Yes, the digitized likenesses of the actors would’ve stood out if you placed the arcade cabinet between Violence Fight and Street Smart — two comparable games in terms of gameplay. Or taken as screenshots and pasted into the pages of a magazine, you’d be hard-pressed not to be impressed at the time. To their credit, the actors hired to portray the characters look like they could be legit fighters [for the most part], and their sprites are rendered as well as was possible for the time, with appropriate size and lighting consistency across their animations. But the longer you look at Pit-Fighter, the more you begin to realize where it’s lacking, and what keeps it from matching up against the likes of the first Mortal Kombat just two years later.

There is a serious lacking of frames of animation, which makes all motion and attacks come across as particularly janky and choppy. I don’t think any walk cycle or attack animation consists of more than four frames of animation, with several consisting of even fewer. For example, there are a few kick animations where characters go from a standing position to lifting their leg nearly straight above their head and immediately down towards the ground, with no frames of animation between them to convey a real sense of fluid motion. As such, fighting in the game looks less like an exchange of delivering attacks and receiving damage, and more like a series of spasms and other rapid uncontrollable movements. In other words, whatever perception of “realism” the use of digitized graphics may initially convey is quickly and unceremoniously shattered the moment you see the characters go through their motions.

Furthermore, everything in the game that isn’t digitized sticks out like a sore thumb, which further kills the gimmick of realism. As an example, there’s an arena at a point in the game inside what I gather to be a parking lot. As such, there are several cars about, which act as minor obstacles. Not only does the cartoony look of these cars completely clash with the fighters and the crowd around them, but they are also at a completely odd scale to where it’s clear no person visible on the screen could possibly fit inside the vehicles. Also, speaking of the crowds in the game, their animation loops are particularly noticeable, and it’s best not to stare at them too long if you don’t want your eyes to go sore. On the bright side, the designers did have the sense to color the crowd in monochrome, which keeps them from being too distracting and from blending in with the fighters when they get too close.

A final note on the graphics: The hardware used in the arcade version of Pit-Fighter is the same used to power another Atari Games title released in 1990, Hydra; an action driving title which makes liberal use of sprite-scaling effects in order to give the illusion of depth and forward movement. Having the same hardware at its disposal, the developers of Pit-Fighter clearly thought they should make the most of it, and as such include scaling effects in their game as well. The problem is, scaling the digitized sprites of Pit-Fighter does them no favors, revealing how low the image resolution truly is in shots such as the zoom in on our player characters during the attract screen. It also adds a mildly sickening effect while panning around the arenas of the game as it struggles to keep all the characters in frame at once, stretching and shrinking all involved. There’s a valuable design lesson to be learned from this: Just because you have access to an advanced technology doesn’t mean you have to use it! Especially if it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the design of your game.

So, with the game’s visuals demystifying themselves in pretty quick fashion, this would leave it in need of compelling gameplay in order to hook arcade-goers past their first or second quarter. Unfortunately, due in part to the lack of frames of animation mentioned earlier, fighting in Pit-Fighter is more a test of patience than it is skill. Along with your eight-way joystick you’re given three buttons: Punch, kick, and jump. Pushing combinations of the different buttons simultaneously will perform either a block or one of several “super moves,” which are not tied to any special meter or stamina bar and therefore can be used constantly without penalty. As a matter of fact, it is in your best interest to use the super moves exclusively, since several of them can be chained into near-unstoppable combos. The only problem is, on successful completion of your most devastating three-button super move, your character will immediately strike an uninterruptable pose. Every single time. Needless to say, this gets as repetitive as… well, using the same move over and over again, I reckon.

The hit detection is generally hit-or-miss, pardon the pun. I’m not sure whether it’s to do with how brief and choppy the attack animations are, or more to do with a poor implementation of the multi-planed arenas. Either way, it leaves you feeling like the controls are unresponsive, and like your best bet is to simply button mash and hope for the best. Blocking certainly doesn’t seem to be very useful, since your opponent will almost instantaneously switch to an attack capable of breaking your defense. And don’t get me started on how useless jumping is, with jumping attacks having almost no chance of actually landing on your opponents in addition to looking completely goofy. It doesn’t take playing Pit-Fighter to realize how badly it controls: You can get a good enough impression just looking at it.

In addition to your unarmed attacks, you can pick up a variety of weapons strewn about the floor in the arenas, ranging from your standard knives and bats all the way to tossing whole motorcycles at your opponents! Amusingly, none of these do nearly as much damage as any of your given super moves, and are therefore totally useless. The only items worth tossing around are boxes and barrels, as some of them may contain “Power Pills.” These magical pills cause a fighter to flash green for several seconds while growing in size and making them more resilient to damage, as well as apparently upping the damage they deal. This buff lasts for about 20 seconds, which gives you plenty of time to bring the pain… Or to receive it, if your opponent picks it up instead. With my luck, it always seemed to me as if my opponents were quicker to pick up the pills, even if I was the one breaking the box on top of their head and knocking them to the floor in the process. Just one of several ways the game would seem to be biased towards its own AI, which is of course par for the course when it comes to arcade games.

Another fun way your opponents are able to screw you is by not having to strike a pose every time they use one of their own super moves on you, allowing them to more easily be able to pound on you the second you get up from the ground. But perhaps the most unfair advantage the game possesses is the fact that each successive opponent boasts a far larger health bar than your own fighter, not to mention the fact that each fresh opponent has a full bar of health to start with. Yes, that’s right: Your fighter doesn’t replenish health between fights. This is a ridiculously cruel condition, and one which effectively ensures you’ll be dumping quarters into the game mid-match as you progress further. To further this incentive for anyone who wouldn’t be immediately repulsed by this mechanic, getting knocked out doesn’t mark the end of the match for your fighter, which does mean whatever damage you managed to inflict on your opponent will still be there if you should choose to revive. Again, this would make Pit-Fighter mechanically more in line with a beat ‘em up than a proper fighting game, but I’m sticking to what I said earlier. As a further bit of substance to my argument, I should explain the “Grudge Match” system.

For every third match in the game, the rules are changed, stripping away the health bars and replacing them with a three-point scoring system. The goal is to avoid being knocked down three times before knocking your opponents down that number of times. Curiously, the only penalty for losing this match (as well as the only benefit of winning) is to your score, effectively making the match mostly pointless in spite of being the most fair bout in the game. In a single-player playthrough, this match pits you against a recolor of your fighter, which is particularly silly given the fact that there are the two other player characters that could just as easily stand in in order to avoid the “fighting your clone” trope. In fact, that’s effectively what the game does when you’re playing with more than one person as different characters, pitting you against each other in this game mode.

How about we finally get around to talking about the multiplayer in Pit-Fighter? Rather than the traditional fighting game model of multiplayer amounting to player-vs-player exclusively, the game allows three players to work their way through most all of the fights in the game together, upping the number of opponents present in order to balance for the number of players. This means that as many as six characters are capable of being on-screen at once, which allows for some of the hardest-to-follow and headache inducing multiplayer action this side of a 64 player free-for-all match in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s “Shipment” map! It becomes damn near impossible to track the action with three players working against three opponents, two of whom are likely to be clones, further making it difficult to tell who’s fighting who and which opponents have how much damage dealt to them. Furthermore, friendly fire is always on, meaning that you’re very likely to hit your friends in the process of trying to hurt enemies. I reckon you’ll be knocking your friends down more often in the co-op fights than in the grudge match mode put aside specifically for you to fight against your friends!

As a final insult, the co-op is designated to end before your final fight against Masked Warrior, meaning you don’t even have the benefit of added assistance in tackling the final boss. Immediately after what would be the penultimate fight of the single-player playthrough (a battle against two Chainman Eddies), the game changes the rules one last time, pitting you against your friends in a battle where your health bars are actually taken into account in an “Elimination Match.” Hilariously, this is the one and only time in the game where it has the courtesy to refill your health, demonstrating that the programmers could’ve done you that favor all along, the cheeky bastards! And just as soon as you’ve killed your friends, you are immediately thrust into battle against the Masked Warrior, still suffering all the damage you received in the previous fight. Unforgivable.

Some final positive notes here to counter-balance some of the negatives: Between matches, you’re given a cash value based on your performance (serving as the game’s score system), and it’s accompanied by an animation of you standing on a pallet being raised by a forklift as stacks of dollars appear underneath you. In addition, there are amusingly dated affirmations that appear at the top of the screen declaring you to be “TOTALLY STUDLY” or rating your performance as “AWESOMELY DONE.” These are funny until about the second or third time you see them. On a conceptual level, the idea of pitting fighters of different styles and backgrounds was still sort of novel at the time, in an era of games where the norm was still pitting fighters with identical movesets (typically karate) against each other. And let’s not forget the fact that the digitized graphics, for a brief moment in time, were genuinely unique and sort of impressive. No, of course they don’t hold up at all, but there’s something of a charm to them still.

Atari’s goal in releasing Pit-Fighter was simple: Impress arcade-goers with the initial presentation, and hope they could drain enough quarters from them before the shininess faded away and revealed the dull gameplay. And, to their credit, it was a successful tactic: Pit-Fighter was a largely successful game in the arcade, and its ports to various consoles and handhelds released over the course of the next two years likely sold alright as well. I doubt it was a game many ever played to completion, but at the time it was a game capable of sinking its hooks in players deep enough to drag them through a few fights, convincing them to insert more coins mid-fight until the proposition was no longer appealing. The merger of beat ‘em up mechanics with the fighting game premise gave the game an edge over more traditional fare, especially the idea of alternating between co-op and competitive multiplayer.

For all I’ve said about Pit-Fighter, it’s not an entirely frustrating or unplayable game. It can be enjoyed as a mindless button masher if that’s your style and you have the quarters to spare. If you cared enough to master the “technique” of the game, you could show off to your skills to your friends back in 1990 and prove that you were the true Pit-Fighter all along. Knowing that it is a game designed entirely around separating fools from their money, there’s certainly a satisfaction that comes with figuring out the tricks and eventually being able to complete the game with a minimal number of credits. Plus, it was a game you could play co-operatively with two of your friends at the same time (up until the final boss, anyway), and back in 1990 that wasn’t as common yet as you might think. To call it a game completely lacking in depth? Yeah, sure, I’ll grant you that. But to call it a game completely devoid of merit is unfair.

“Awesomely Done!”

With the undeniable success of the arcade game, ports to consoles and handhelds were inevitable. Luckily(?) for soldiers of the then-ongoing console wars of the time, Pit-Fighter found its way to nearly every major platform available at the time! Unluckily, some versions were worse than others. Far worse, in fact. Let’s very briefly go over all of them, shall we?

Versions of the game on Atari’s own platforms should have been given particular care and attention, seeing as the game was published under their company banner. The port to the Atari ST home computer does retain much of the visual fidelity of the arcade version, including scaling and scrolling effects, but runs at an agonizingly slow framerate. On the bright side, it does boast a soundtrack composed by all-time great Matt Furniss, who many might recognize from his infamous “hello hacker” message embedded in the otherwise obscure 1990 Krisalis Software platformer Mad Professor Mariarti. Search that one out if you don’t mind a bit of salty language, but do yourself a favor and listen to some of his actual musical works as well. Now, moving on to the Atari Lynx version, its port of Pit-Fighter was actually advertised as something of a flagship title for the handheld! Desperate times indeed. While the game is very clearly scaled down in terms of resolution and color palette, you’re still able to discern the fact that the sprites are still based on the digitized likenesses of actors, which is honestly a hell of a feat for a handheld at the time. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of the Game Boy port (we’ll get to that shortly), and does demonstrate the potential power of the Lynx. Maybe I should write a retrospective on the Lynx itself at some point? Oh, before I forget, there was also a planned Atari 7800 version of the game, of which a very early prototype exists, but it’s no surprise it was never finished seeing as the 7800 was more or less dead and buried by 1990. Still, I’d love to hear the story behind that development process.

Then there were the versions for two of Sega’s consoles at the time, the Master System and Genesis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Master System version is an almost completely different game, doing away with any pretense of digitized actors and opting instead for more cartoony, ridiculously tiny characters. Seriously, they barely take up one-twentieth of the screen, leaving you with arenas that are honestly overly-spacious. It also plays with the rules some, limiting your ability to perform special moves and featuring a more traditional round-based gameplay system. It’s also the only version of the game to include a hidden slider puzzle, accessible if you enter your name as “MARCO FOOTBALL” on the high score listings (a reference to developer Domark Software’s title Marko’s Magic Football). Port duties for the Genesis version were handed to Tengen, who do a fairly decent job of it, retaining all the original gameplay features (sans sprite scaling and three-player support) with acceptable graphical trade-offs. The character sprites are all scaled-down, as to be expected, but are still clearly identifiable by their actors. A commendable effort at replicating the arcade experience, for whatever that’s worth.

Which brings us to Nintendo’s offerings. Surprisingly, despite it still being very much alive and kicking in 1990 and hosting versions of other arcade games of the time, the Nintendo Entertainment System never saw a version of Pit-Fighter. Perhaps someone realized that with the game’s primary selling point being its graphics, a version on the NES would be kind of pointless (didn’t stop them from making that Master System version though, did it)? Instead, we’re given versions for the SNES and Game Boy, which are more similar than you might expect. You see, both the SNES and Game Boy versions omit several of the possible opponents from the game, saying sayonara to Southside Jim, Mad Miles and Heavy Metal. This causes the remaining characters to be repeated multiple more times on your road to Masked Warrior. Furthermore, the weapons are nowhere to be seen in either version, stripping the game down even further. The presentation also pales in comparison to comparable versions, with the SNES version outclassed by the Genesis version and the Game Boy version really demonstrating the limitations of the hardware in terms of attempting arcade and console ports. As a final added insult to injury, unless you enter an unlimited lives cheat on the Game Boy version that’s not even present in the SNES version, you’re only given one life to play through the game. This renders the game damn near impossible by my estimation… Save for the use of two separate exploits that exist in either version of the game when playing as Ty, which allow you to trap opponents in endless combos.

This leaves us with several of the other home computers of the time, the only one I have any real familiarity with being DOS machines. In this version, the game runs slower than the original, and the animations are all noticeably choppier for it. In addition to sprite scaling issues, there’s also the issue of sprites shaking from left to right when in close proximity to any other objects, especially the crowd at the edges of the arena. All in all, the DOS version of Pit-Fighter ends up being one of the most difficult to look at, despite boasting higher resolution copies of the digitized characters than some of the other ports (still inferior to the arcade version). This poor port of the game demonstrates that home computers of the day still had catching up to do with the dedicated games consoles of the time; a role which would be reversed in time. From what I can gather, the Amiga version is the best of the home computer ports, boasting the closest to arcade graphics but suffering from having to adapt to a one-button control scheme. A Commodore 64 port by Domark would attempt to replicate the arcade game more closely than their Master System effort, but with the inability to replicate the digitized sprites on the hardware it’s only just barely recognizable as a version of the game. But perhaps the weakest ports of the game are to the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, which are seemingly identical to one another and equally unplayable on either machine.

So, with the game ported several times over and all the money to be made off the game likely made at this point, what was left for Atari to do? Sequels, of course! Well, more like a spiritual successor in the case of 1992’s Guardians of the ‘Hood, a frankly offensive beat ‘em up on the same engine with similarly rendered digitized actors. A few of the Pit-Fighter cast even return again for a second paycheck, including the actor for Southside Jim! Can’t hardly blame him for it; seems like a cushy enough gig if you’ve got the patience for it. Needless to say, Guardians was not as successful as its predecessor, as both digitized graphics and the beat ‘em up genre had evolved since Pit-Fighter. Further testament to this fact is that fact that a direct sequel – a Pit-Fighter 2 – was teased for release and seen in screenshots in a 1993 issue of EGM,^[1] but never materialized. The two pages taken out in the magazine boldly challenged players to “engage in mortal combat,” and also claimed the game was 75% complete. It appeared as if the game would’ve ran on the same engine yet again, as well recycling many of the original characters, which would account for most of that completion percentage I imagine. But Mortal Kombat was already contending quite handily against its own first wave of imitators by this point, and Pit-Fighter 2 was unlikely to be the game to dethrone it if it had come to see the light of day.

Despite a lack of longevity or the inability to follow it up, I think it’s safe to say that Atari did a solid job captivating players with their initial arcade release for Pit-Fighter. They found a way to take a sub-par fighting game and prop it up with enough gimmicks to make it look appealing. Of course it’s all style and no substance, looking at it through modern eyes. But the goal at the time was never to make a game that would hold up over the course of decades: It was to make a game that would make a splash at the time, and get it in before digitized graphics became a trend or before a truly great fighting game came around to change perception of the genre. The timing here was essential to Pit-Fighter’s success, and it did manage to turn a profit in the time before Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat came to dominate the scene. With the release of Mortal Kombat in particular, Pit-Fighter faded almost immediately from public memory, having been thoroughly outclassed in nearly every regard. Fitting, perhaps, but sort of curious given how big an impact Pit-Fighter had made initially? I honestly believe that a game so historically significant does deserve mention every now and again, even given its lack of quality.

Make no mistake: Pit-Fighter is a mess of a game. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a spectacle to behold.

[1] “Pit Fighter II.” Electronic Gaming Monthly. Aug. 1993: pg 134-35. Print.