Pit-Fighter (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
157A playthough of Atari's 1990 arcade fighting game, Pit-Fighter.
Played through on the machine's default difficulty level.
Though Mortal Kombat is often credited with popularizing the idea of "photo-realism" in fighting games, it was Pit-Fighter, one of the very first video games to make use of fully-digitized sprites, that made the first meaningful splash using the technique when it first appeared in arcades in the summer of 1990.
The game gives the player control of their choice of three fighters. Buzz (the big, beefy guy), Kato (a martial arts master), and Ty (a kickboxer) all partake in a 15-fight tournament against the likes of some (hilarious caricatures of) fighter archetypes like Southside Jim, The Executioner, and Chainman Eddie.
The fighting system is simple: you have five buttons (two kicks, two punches, and a jump) that can be pressed in various combinations in order to do flips, rolls, throws, and other suitably violent things - my favorite has to be how you can pick up a motorcycle and throw it at somebody's head.
As you might expect from a fighting game that predates both Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, the action is a bit clunky and the controls are exceedingly awkward. It all works, but it's clear that the genre still had a ways to go.
But the real draw of Pit-Fighter wasn't its gameplay. It was the presentation. The graphics, especially for 1990, were unbelievable. The characters are huge and they scale fairly smoothly as they move in and out of the screen, and the animation is surprisingly smooth for its time when you consider that there was no rotoscoping used. It looks rough and awkward today, but just imagine how attention-grabbing it would've been at the arcade sitting next to the majority of its contemporaries!
Though its reputation wasn't done any favors by its home ports (as much fun as I had with the SNES version, there's no denying it was a hideous mockery of the original) and its chances at a respectable legacy were all but decimated with the release of its pseudo-sequel/spin-off Guardians of the Hood, the original arcade version of Pit-Fighter makes for quite a time capsule that's still a blast to drop a few quarters into today.
And for those of you that love surprising, random bits of trivia, the Japanese arcade game was actually put out by Konami under license from Atari. Who'd have thought?
My videos of various ports of Pit-Fighter, if you're interested:
SNES: https://youtu.be/V-JzHHM_XUs
Genesis: https://youtu.be/9NX-9ap0afw
Atari Lynx: https://youtu.be/zGYI1_OGJ3g
Game Boy: https://youtu.be/We8T3wOvsF8
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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