Final Fight (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Final Fight arrived in arcades in 1989 with a premise that could have come straight out of a Hollywood action film: a former pro wrestler turned city mayor tears through six rounds of urban chaos to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Capcom's beat 'em up dropped players into Metro City, a fictional city on the Atlantic coast drawn to resemble New York, and asked them to brawl through the Slums, the Subway, and finally a showdown with gang boss Belger himself. It sold 30,000 arcade units worldwide and became the highest-grossing arcade game of 1990 in Japan. What makes that commercial story more remarkable is where the game started. It wasn't supposed to be Final Fight at all. It began life as Street Fighter '89, a direct sequel to Capcom's 1987 fighting game, and by the time it reached players, the genre, the title, and even the protagonists had all been replaced. How that transformation happened, and why this particular game ended up mattering so much to the history of arcade gaming, is the thread running through everything that follows.

• 2. Origins of a Street Fighter

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  Yoshiki Okamoto produced the game, and Akira Nishitani designed it. Okamoto has pointed to Double Dragon II: The Revenge, the 1988 Technos Japan arcade game, as his direct inspiration for the concept. Capcom's sales division had originally pushed for a Street Fighter sequel, so the team promoted the project at trade shows under the title Street Fighter '89, going as far as referring to one of the lead characters as a "former Street Fighter." That framing lasted until operators who played the game gave blunt feedback: it bore no resemblance to Street Fighter, and the name was misleading. The title was changed before official release. The characters underwent a similar reinvention. Nishitani's team had initially planned for Ryu and Ken Masters, the heroes of the original Street Fighter, to lead the new game. That idea was scrapped in favor of a fresh scenario: the kidnapping of an attractive young woman by a city gang. Capcom's president then pushed the team to treat the project as though they were making a film. Nishitani later described the process of approaching planning and design "as if it were a movie." Nishitani confirmed in a 2018 Japanese book that his boss K. Tsujimoto instructed him to watch all the films of director Walter Hill, particularly Streets of Fire, which fellow developer Akiman (Akira Yasuda) had flagged as a key reference. Because time was short, the team watched the films simultaneously on three monitors in a dedicated Video Materials Room, with Nishitani describing the process as literally cutting and pasting movie stills for reference. Literary inspiration also shaped the characters: Les Misérables contributed the idea of a protagonist, Jean Valjean, who becomes a mayor in the latter part of the story and is depicted as a devoted father, a template that maps closely onto Mike Haggar.

• 3. Metro City and Its Enemies

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  The world Nishitani's team built owes much of its texture to pop culture of the 1980s. The street gang the player fights throughout the game, the Mad Gear Gang, takes its name from a 1987 Capcom overhead racing game called Mad Gear, which was released outside Japan as Led Storm. Many of the individual enemies carry the names of rock musicians: Axl after Axl Rose, Slash after the guitarist Slash, Simons after Gene Simmons, Sid after Sid Vicious, Billy after Billy Idol, and Roxy after Roxy Music. The boss character Damnd takes his name from The Damned, and another is named after Poison, the band. One enemy, Abigail, is named after an album by King Diamond and wears similar facepaint. The hulking fighter Hugo Andore is modeled on wrestler Andre the Giant. The manga series Mad Bull 34 contributed to Haggar's physical appearance. One character choice generated lasting debate. Capcom noted in the arcade game's manual that the female enemy Poison was a "newhalf," a Japanese term the company used to explain why players would be fighting what appeared to be a woman. The arcade manual was not available to the general public during the machine's operation, and nothing in the game itself indicates this. The other female enemy, Roxy, was described in that same manual as cisgender. The continue screen, which became one of the game's most-remembered details, shows the player character tied to a chair with a lit bundle of dynamite on a nearby table. If the player chooses to continue, a knife drops from the ceiling and cuts the fuse.

• 4. Seven Composers, One Credit

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  Seven composers worked on the Final Fight soundtrack: Manami Matsumae, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, Harumi Fujita, Junko Tamiya, Yasuaki Fujita, Hiromitsu Takaoka, and Yoko Shimomura, the last of whom was making his first contribution to a Capcom game. The credits that appeared in the arcade release named only Sakaguchi, listed there as "Youkichan's Papa." The other six composers were not publicly confirmed until 2014, when the Clarice Disk imprint of City Connection released the Final Fight Original Sound Collection. That release compiled the original soundtracks from the three original Final Fight games and their ports, finally giving those collaborators a documented record. The Gamest reader poll of 1990 placed Final Fight at No. 4 in Best Video Game Music, a notable position given how little the public then knew about who had created it.

• 5. Port to Port

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  The Super Nintendo Entertainment System version launched as a platform launch title in Japan in 1990, reaching North America in 1991 and the PAL region in 1992. Hardware limits meant the SNES could show only two or three enemies on screen, against the arcade version's nine or ten. The port also cut two-player co-op, removed the entire Industrial Area level, and dropped Guy as a playable character. The English localization went further: the first two bosses were renamed from Damnd and Sodom to Thrasher and Katana, alcohol references were removed, the female enemies Poison and Roxy were replaced by male characters named Billy and Sid, and a blood effect was swapped for a generic explosion graphic. Some enemy characters with darker skin tones were given lighter skin tones in the localization. Toshio Kajino, credited as "Bull", handled the SNES soundtrack port. A revised edition called Final Fight Guy arrived in Japan in 1992, restoring Guy as a playable character by removing Cody, adding four difficulty settings, and introducing two new power-ups. An American version of Final Fight Guy appeared in June 1994 as a rental-only title exclusive to Blockbuster stores before receiving a limited wider release. The Sega CD version, developed by A Wave and published by Sega under license in 1993, restored the two-player mode, the Industrial Area, and all three characters, while adding voice acting, an arranged soundtrack, and an exclusive time attack mode. U.S. Gold released ports for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC for the European market in 1991, developed by Creative Materials. The X68000 version, released by Capcom exclusively in Japan on the 17th of July 1992, was a close conversion of the arcade game bundled with a CD featuring remixed music.

• 6. Commercial Success and Critical Standing

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  In Japan, Game Machine listed Final Fight as the second-most-successful table arcade cabinet of January 1990. It went on to top the annual Gamest charts as Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1990, then placed second in 1991 just below Street Fighter II. In the United States, the game topped the RePlay arcade charts as the highest-grossing new video game in February 1990, then held the top spot as the highest-grossing software conversion kit for eight months across the year. Weekly coin-drop earnings averaged $183.50 per kit during November and December of that year. The Super NES version sold 1.5 million cartridges worldwide, placing it among Capcom's best-selling games on the platform. In the February 1991 issue of Gamest, Final Fight took the No. 1 position as Best Game of 1990 in the 4th Annual Grand Prize. It also won Best Action Game that year, placed No. 2 in Best Direction, No. 4 in Best Video Game Music, No. 5 in Best Album, and No. 9 in Best Graphics. Mike Haggar was the cover character for that issue and topped the Top 50 Characters list. Guy placed second, Cody was seventh, Poison twenty-sixth, Sodom thirty-third, and Jessica fortieth. A 1991 Gamest reader poll ranked Final Fight the second-best arcade game of all time, behind Valkyrie no Densetsu. The total sales of the Final Fight series across home systems have reached 3.2 million units.

• 7. Legacy in the Franchise

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  The development team that built Final Fight went on to create the original Street Fighter II. Characters introduced in Final Fight later appeared as playable fighters in other Capcom titles, including the Street Fighter Alpha sub-series, linking what had started as a Street Fighter sequel back into the franchise it was meant to extend. The Game Boy Advance version, titled Final Fight One and released in 2001 by developer Sun-Tec, included Street Fighter Alpha 3 renditions of Cody and Guy as hidden playable characters, making that cross-franchise connection explicit within the game itself. Final Fight: Double Impact, released digitally in 2010 for Xbox 360 at 800 Microsoft Points and for PlayStation 3 at $9.99, bundled the arcade version with the arcade game Magic Sword and added an arranged soundtrack by Simon Viklund. The Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle in 2018 brought the arcade version to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Windows alongside six other Capcom arcade titles. The Super Famicom version of Final Fight serves as a key plot element in the manga Hi Score Girl and its Netflix anime adaptation, giving the game a cultural life far outside the arcade.