After Street Fighter II popularized the genre, 2D fighting games have developed the habit of digging themselves into a hole where only the hardest of the hardcore would really follow them. That's why the genre went into obscurity around the turn of the millennium, and why the spark of live given to it by Street Fighter IV seems to have turned out as little more than a retro fad.

For any game to be popular, it should allow players to immediately enjoy the game regardless of skill level. That, concisely, is what is wrong with fighting games. Due to their complexity, fighters are no longer as easy to immediately and continually enjoy for first timers as they are for veterans. It shouldn't be required to spend hours in a practice mode to get the basics down, or to master the game just to have a good time playing it.

There are also dogmatic design philosophies that keep people away from the genre. Why do they need 720-degrees inputs or weird pretzel motions for special moves? What purpose does this serve? All it does is require players to carry around a dictionary of moves in their heads, for every character in every game. Fighting games no longer allow first timers to jump in and do the basic things that are involved in playing the game. As a result, it's no mystery why 2D fighting games have maneuvered themselves into a niche. For almost two decades, all titles being made are only targeting the hardcore fighting game audience, resulting in a lack of diversity in fighting game design.

But things were not always like they are today. Those pretzel motions? Those were originally hidden moves. They had controller motions which would not normally be performed in regular play for the novelty of the player having to look for the moves themselves. The advanced techniques that certain modern fans of the genre consider to define it? Those were once completely nonexistent. Move cancelling originated in Street Fighter II as a glitch. Extensive combos, also first available in Street Fighter II? That was also an accident. Hit detection and hitboxes were completely different in early fighters as well. Even hit levels and blocking were once not a part of the genre, and even after they were invented there were still games that did not have them. Diversity? Once there weren't any sacred cows in fighters. Designers tried many different approaches to the genre. After certain elements became popular there were still just as many alternatives as there were fighters with the more "modern" gameplay elements.

Then Street Fighter II happened. Most fighting game fans consider the template it popularized and standardized to be the definition of the genre, often not even realizing there were dozens of games before it. It's kind of difficult to imagine today, but SFII sold millions and millions and millions. It was one of the highest selling games of its time. Developers began attempting to cash in on this game and many fighters were made in a fairly brief period. There are about seventy five fighting games for the SNES alone, it being the dominant console during the genre's peak in popularity. Eventually the "point" became about things like comboing and other advanced techniques, for advanced players. Nobody else was really good enough to do them very well or even cared. What did attract people was the basic gameplay.

In a time when the genre was threatened to dry up completely, there is still a series that stood apart in general public reaction. That series is Super Smash Bros. It was among the highest selling series on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, and proved that the genre could still be popular, separate from the Street Fighter formula. Most interestingly of all, after many years, it is more popular than ever. That is something that no fighter has ever accomplished before. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat got less and less popular after they took off. Yet Smash Bros. accomplished the impossible in the genre and outlived its novelty.

So that brings us here. Why bother with this history of fighters that precede Street Fighter II? Other than general documentation purposes, to examine all of the influences that led to the creation and popularity of Street Fighter II. This is sort of like how the inspiration for Cave's games was Raiden, which eventually inspired the "bullet hell" genre of shooters birthed by Donpachi. Many of the games listed within are, honestly, quite bad. But each of them is significant in some way or another.

It will be necessary to define the term "fighting game" before going on. In this case, it involves two characters fighting each other, one-on-one, in a confined arena setup. There may be some exceptions of two-on-one or one-on-one-on-one, but any more characters (one-versus-many) becomes classified as "beat-em-up" like Double Dragon and Final Fight. Boxing and wrestling games (including Sumo) are recognized as separate genres, and for good reasons, so they are excluded. Competitive martial arts games and weapon fighting games like fencing will be covered, though.