The release of Street Fighter II in 1991 is often considered a revolutionary moment in the fighting game genre. Yoshiki Okamoto's team developed the most accurate joystick and button scanning routine in the genre thus far. This allowed players to reliably execute multi-button special moves, which had previously required an element of luck. The game was also highly successful because its graphics took advantage of Capcom's CPS arcade chipset, with highly detailed characters and stages. Whereas previous games allowed players to combat a variety of computer-controlled fighters, Street Fighter II allowed players to play against each other. The popularity of Street Fighter II surprised the gaming industry, as arcade owners bought more machines to keep up with demand.[4]
SNK released Fatal Fury a few months after Street Fighter II.[12] It added a two-plane system where characters could step into the foreground or background. Meanwhile, Sega experimented with Dark Edge, an early attempt at a 3D fighting game where characters could move in all directions. Sega however, never released the game outside of Japan because it felt that unrestrained 3D fighting games were unenjoyable. Several fighting games achieved greater commercial success, including SNK's Art of Fighting and Samurai Shodown as well as Sega's Eternal Champions. Nevertheless, Street Fighter II remained the most popular,[47] spawning a special Champion Edition that improved game balance and allowed players to use additional characters.[4] The popularity of Street Fighter II led it to be released for home game consoles and allowed it to define the template for fighting games.[4][47]
Many American developers tried to capitalize on the template established by Street Fighter II,[4] but it was Chicago's Midway Games who achieved unprecedented notoriety when they released Mortal Kombat in 1992. The game featured digital characters drawn from real actors, numerous secrets,[47][49] and a "fatality" system of finishing maneuvers with which the player's character kills their opponent. The game earned a reputation for its gratuitous violence,[49] and was eventually adapted for home game consoles.[47] The home version of Mortal Kombat was released on September 13, 1993, a day that was promoted as "Mortal Monday". The advertising resulted in line-ups to purchase the game and a subsequent backlash from politicians concerned about the game's violence.[49] The Mortal Kombat franchise would ultimately achieve iconic status similar to that of Street Fighter with several sequels as well as movies, television series, and extensive merchandising.[27][50] Numerous other game developers tried to imitate Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat's financial success with similar games; Capcom took unsuccessful legal action against Data East over the game Fighter's History[16] after Data East reminded Capcom their Karate Champ arcade in their largest objection.[51]
Sega began to attract attention with the 1993 release of Virtua Fighter in arcades. It was the first fighting game with 3D polygon graphics and a viewpoint that zoomed and rotated with the action. Despite the graphics, players were confined to back and forth motion as seen in other fighting games. With only three buttons, it was easier to learn than Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, having six and five buttons respectively. By the time the game was released for the Sega Saturn in Japan, the game and system were selling at almost a one-to-one ratio.[47] Meanwhile, the 1993 title Mortal Kombat II captivated American audiences, and is considered the best Mortal Kombat game in retrospect.[52] In 1993, Nintendo entered the genre for the first time since Urban Champion in 1984, by releasing Joy Mech Fight. The Family Computer game featured fighting robots that are composed of multiple smaller sprites, enabling smoother movement while being able to hold up to 36 characters, due to large sprites being too difficult to program on the Family Computer hardware. A year later, Rare started with their futuristic Killer Instinct in arcades. The arcade game retained finishing moves of Mortal Kombat and introduced a unique combination system. SNK released The King of Fighters '94 in arcades, where players choose from teams of three characters to eliminate each other one by one.[53] Eventually, Capcom released further updates to Street Fighter II, including Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II Turbo. These games featured more characters and new moves, some of which were a response to people who had hacked the original Street Fighter II game to add new features themselves. However, criticism of these upgrades grew as players demanded a true sequel. By 1995, the dominant franchises were the Mortal Kombat series in America and Virtua Fighter series in Japan, with Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams unable to match the popularity of Street Fighter II.[4] Throughout this period, the fighting game was the dominant genre in competitive video gaming, with enthusiasts popularly attending arcades in order to find human opponents.[27]
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