The three-way fight resumes. After street fighter 6 who signed a brilliant comeback in June, mortal kombat 1 scheduled to return to the arena on September 19 before tekken 8 It will go out with fists on January 26. The three star fighting game franchises of the 90s will offer players their latest modernized version, but also, they promise, a renaissance.
If we find traces of computer combat video games from the 70s (heavyweight champion in 1976 with its pixelated boxers facing each other), it is rather necessary to go back to the following decade and the explosion of arcades to see the first real fighters arrive. Then we find some related to martial arts and boxing, of which Street Fighter who arrived in 1987. Before him, Drill! it had already happened.
The 90s, fertile ground for fighting games
It was the 1990s that gave the games their letters of nobility. give them a beating When it was released in 1991, street fighter ii is the king of the arcade, but also of the sprawling home console, bringing with it a litany of new fighting games (Streets of Rage, TMNT Turtles in Times, Fatal Fury…)more or less good.
then disembark mortal Kombat (1992) who chooses to stand out by opting for the ultraviolence of combat. The difficulty of the games grows as fast as the number of titles, particularly to allow arcades to make players who can’t stand to lose stick around longer.
We will have to wait until 1994 to see tekken land with 3D. Katsuhiro Harada, its creator, then wants to compete virtuous fighter, the king of 3D fighting games. “When I started, the main goal was to catch up with Virtua Fighter,” he explains to technology and company.
And 30 years later, he’s about to launch tekken 8 (January 26, 2024) while virtuous fighter it’s been under the radar since 2012, six years after its fifth and final iteration. For this new work, the Japanese creator promises news. “This Tekken 8 is the episode that stands out the most from the rest of the games in the series. The fighting games you see on the market are mostly 2D whereas Tekken is a 3D game which means the characters can move freely in the 3D levels. It’s very important, because it’s one of the rare fighting games like that,” recalls Harada, as if to stand out from the competition that he knows is still going strong.
Renew without altering
street fighter 6 is betting on street fistfights around the world. But mortal kombat 1 promises fights in quite similar environments (it is true that with parallel fights) and also a story mode that wants strong. In the minds of the players, the return to the fore of the stars of the struggle It is, then, a new struggle between tenors to get their favors.
For him, the success of these games, which has not been denied for so long, is explained by a form of video game transmission. “Many players who played this sport 30 years ago are married and now have children. They broadcast because they enjoyed the game,” smiles the head of NetherRealm Studios.
tekken AND mortal Kombat over time they have also maintained their emblematic characters as an argument: the rivalries between the Mishima and Kazama families in tekken with always the forceful blows in the program; the multitude of characters in mortal Kombat among them the inescapable Johnny Cage (incarnation of Jean-Claude Van Damme), Liu Kang, Scorpion, Raiden, but also prestigious guests (Kratos from God of War, Alien, RoboCop, Rambo, Freddy Krueger…). Characters that return from one game to another also listening to the wishes of the community and serving as a common thread.
Keep up the fighting spirit
But for Harada, as for Boon, the games’ popularity is also due to their ability to renew themselves. “The players appreciate mortal Kombat, because we are not afraid to change”, argues Ed Boon. “mortal kombat 1 is completely different from mortal kombat 11 (the previous title released in 2019, editor’s note), with new gameplay, a new story and an enriched single player mode that will set us apart.”
And Harada should also go in this direction when it comes to modernizing while keeping the fundamentals. we meet in tekken 8 the characters use martial arts, but also separate superpowers and fighting techniques, alone or in duos. But the game will also use AI to offer new gameplay that can better adapt to your way of fighting.
And the next installment also winks at older gamers with the single-player Arcade Quest mode. “We wanted to restore the feeling of this Arcade culture and its community,” he confesses. “That culture has disappeared in the West for the last decade. Probably many people have not had the opportunity to experience it. So we wanted to give them a place in the game, the feeling of visiting a Japanese arcade of yesteryear and being able to say, ‘Oh, this particular situation, this community of players, I remember it.’”
If you could change your first tekken, Harada would finally do nothing. “There is always something I would like to change later. Back then, we didn’t have the same technology and we couldn’t really do everything we dreamed of. But we should not think about it and simply learn from the lessons of the precedents to make the sequel even better”, analyzes the project director.
while his mortal Kombat Often played the card of visual originality (only with the Fatalities, bloody and violent visualization of the blows), Ed Boon would do well to jump on the bandwagon to review his copy. “Despite my 30 years of experience creating these games, if I went back I would do them completely differently. But it’s simply because of the experience I’ve had for so long making these games,” laughs the man who still wishes his franchise was around 30 years from now. As is, but better.
Source: BFM TV
