These fights take place in a variety of mildly interactive backgrounds around the world, from in front of the White House to European palaces to villages in Thailand. The game features nine diverse characters who can be pitted against each other in one-on-one combat, eventually taking fighters to secret characters who aren’t initially selectable. The argument that Fighter’s History ripped off Street Fighter II makes a lot of sense when you play it. You can see what the fight was all about right now if you’ve subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. Tsujimoto, and say, “Are you sure you’re going to let this go? You can’t really let this go. “A lot of people would come up to people at Capcom, come up to Mr. They decided to sue Data East, makers of a game called Fighter’s History that had come out in 1993, the third year of SFII’s complete dominance of the sales charts.Īkira Nishitani, who had designed SFII, told Polygon in 2014 that Fighter’s History had crossed the line, almost feeling like a personal insult to Capcom. At a certain point, the studio heads at Capcom felt like they had to put their foot down. The game sold more than 15 million copies and became a phenomenon that other video game developers couldn’t help but notice.īut there’s influencing other games, and then there’s really influencing other games to the point where one has to wonder if they have any original ideas for themselves. The 1991 arcade game introduced ideas that became standard across the genre - getting to choose from a number of characters, using six buttons and eight joystick directions to create a multitude of combo attacks. Street Fighter IIis perhaps the most influential fighting game of all time.