fighting games!

i'm absolutely shite at them. but there's one reason for even a fumble-fingered, hand-becramped strugglebeast like myself to keep trying these damn things, hoping that this will be the time that my fingers finally fall into coordination and the moves feel smooth as butter. that reason is, of course, lizards.

so can we find every lizard* in** every fighting game***? i'm going to attempt.

in order to find every lizard, we'll have to go back to the first lizard, to the very beginning of fighting games. now i'm asking myself, what was the first fighting game? ever, in the history of all things?

turns out that's a debated question. the first two-player, one-on-one fighter of any kind was heavyweight champ, a 1976 arcade boxing game by sega. the characters aren't lizards, but they do include the first black man in videogames, and do manage to capture the feel of real people somehow. i instinctively feel like they could have done more detail with the pixels they had, but then, that's my modern gamer sensibility speaking, coming from the future in 2024 where we've got paint programs and whatnot. in those days you didn't draw sprites directly into a program, but had to hand-code each pixel to appear on the screen at its specific coordinates. "drawing" in such a medium, without the benefit of a tablet or even a mouse, is a difficult feat.

and yet there are no lizards. onwards we must go.

probably the first fighting game as we know them today was karate champ by technos japan and data east, released for arcades in 1984. this game introduced several of the conventions that are familiar to fighting games today, such as best-of-three matches and multiple stages.

multiple player characters, however, were still a ways away. it's easy to just make a karate gi man, clone him and swap the colours, and so fighting games continued on in this vein for a while, generally being karate games with no distinct characters. they couldn't even be bothered to have a lizard-headed man occasionally.

in fact, even the illustrious street fighter arose from this trend! you could fight against multiple characters, including recurring favourites like ken and sagat, but you were always stuck playing as ryu, the generic gi character.

it was a trend that would reemerge in the highly unsatisfying rise of the robots, in 1994, and never again.

anyway. after going through the entire 12 pages of hardcore gaming 101's pre-street fighter 2 fighting games, i haven't seen a single game that had a playable lizard.

honourable shout-outs do go out to a few games, such as dragon's eye, a 1981 quasi-RPG which has a rather nice dragon on the cover, and a fascinating little game called last apostle puppet show or reikai doushi, meaning "chinese exorcist".

crafted by little-known outfit "home data" and released for arcades in 1988, this is one of the oldest fighters out there and a unique one to boot. not only is this the first ever stop motion fighter, but it looks good even today. the animations are surprisingly smooth and the whole thing gives the feel of a polished product. plus it includes lots of little green guys.

unfortunately we've ascertained that just being green and scaly-looking isn't enough here, plus the game isn't particularly playable and doesn't have much to elevate it beyond the graphics. still, worth a shout out for being ahead of its time.

next up, tongue of the fatman, a 1989 DOS game with an anthropomorphic shark - certainly the first in a fighting game, and surprisingly not the last.

and yes, it is called tongue of the fatman.

it's a game that makes choices about what it wants to be like, and it makes them boldly. nothing wrong with that.

incidentally, this wasn't the only version of this game. there were versions made for the commodore 64 and MD/genesis, and the MD version actually has a different roster. there's a bat-person, a skeleton (which actually does have a vaguely draconic head, and seems to have a tail), a minotaur, and a spider-woman.

they all have appropriately gross-out backstories and, interestingly, different characters/personalities for their 2P colour versions. you can see them all here.

there's also hippodrome AKA fighting fantasy, a 1998 data east title which features an impressive-looking dragon as an opponent, as well as an honest-to-goodness lizardman. in fact the roster is quite a collection of creatures, from gran the gargoyle to daldnoa the scorpion man.

i'd be happy, nay, ecstatic to crown norfolk the lizardman as our very first fighting game lizard. if only the bosses were playable...

...wait. does that say "push 2P START button"? there's a possibility, a chance. i look up a playthrough hastily...

ah. alas, the 2P mode just gives us another human barbarian. very dull. his race is fighter, which absolutely makes sense.

and so we move onwards once more, to 1991.

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