It was not an auspicious beginning. The first video game featuring hand-to-hand combat hit arcades in 1976: Sega’s boxing sim Heavyweight Champ, starred two chunky monochrome pugilists in striped underpants. Players controlled the action by putting their hands in plastic boxing gloves and making thrusting movements.

Heavyweight Champ bombed, and so did its rivals. Atari’s 1977 arcade game Boxer would have used two analogue handles as controllers, but it was never released because in-house testers of the prototype cabinet kept wrenching off the handles. In 1979, another arcade machine, Warrior, featured vector-based graphics and two sword-fighting knights viewed from a top-down perspective, but the temperamental technology kept breaking down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Game on … Karate Champ.

It wasn’t until 1984 that we met the true godfather of the fighting game: Japanese arcade hit Karate Champ, which pitted two fighters against each other in a traditional karate tournament. The twin-joystick controls provided a range of kicks and punches, and the game introduced several familiar conventions including three-round fights and a timer. There were also bonus rounds, including one in which you had to punch a bull in the face. This was acceptable in the 80s.

Arriving a year later, Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu matched players against a diverse series of computer-controlled enemies, who each had their own weapons including throwing stars, chains and nunchucks, thereby introducing the idea of differently skilled competitors. (It was also the first game to employ energy gauges). It was one of the most successful games of the mid-80s.

Fighting in the living room

The rise of home computers in the early 80s saw a slew of intriguing new additions. Karateka was a stylish story-based fighting game released in 1984 for the Apple II, written by Jordan Mechner while he was still a Yale student (his dad provided the soundtrack). Mechner would expand on the game’s impressively smooth character animations for his next project, the global smash hit Prince of Persia.

A year later, Australian studio Beam Software launched Way of the Exploding Fist. Featuring an array of 18 moves based on Bruce Lee’s wing chun kung fu style, as well as bloodcurdling digitised screams, it was a massive hit on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The same year saw International Karate, a visually impressive Karate Champ clone by famed British coder Archer Maclean, followed in 1987 by International Karate+, which featured three characters, allowing two friends to gang up on the computer player like a computerised pub fight.

In 1987 we were also treated to the notorious Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, from London-based Palace Software, featuring semi-naked warriors going at each other with giant swords. The game was famous for two reasons: you could decapitate your opponent, and the box featured a Conan lookalike in a furry loincloth and Page 3 model Maria Whittaker in a skimpy bikini. It was the 80s, remember.

Big kicks and spine rips

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Street Fighter II, the most important fighting game ever made. Photograph: Capcom

With 1991 came the arrival of the most important fighting game ever made: Capcom’s Street Fighter II. Its 1987 coin-operated predecessor had been a minor release, most famous for the pressure-sensitive rubber pads that players actually had to punch to pull off moves (the lead designer of that game Takashi Nishiyama later joined SNK to create the Fatal Fury series of fighting games, beginning a company rivalry that would last two decades). But Street Fighter II brought together an international roster of fighters – from Japanese karate master Ryu to mystic yogi Dhalsim – and gave them all their own unique fighting styles and special moves, accessed through patterns of button presses and joystick rotations. Converted for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System a year later, the game sold more than 6m copies, ensuring Ryu’s battle cry of “Hadouken” would resound throughout playgrounds around the world – usually before an ill-advised attempt to do a flying hurricane kick.

Then Midway’s ultraviolent gorefest Mortal Kombat arrived, featuring digitised graphics based on footage of real-life actors. Like Street Fighter, it featured an array of weird characters and special attacks, but designers Ed Boon and John Tobias cleverly added “fatalities”, which also let you punch someone’s head off, rip their spine out or set them on fire.

This did not go unnoticed by moral campaigners, and Mortal Kombat was heavily cited in a 1993 congressional hearing on video-game violence. When the game came to consoles, Nintendo edited out all the gore for the Super Nintendo, while Sega kept it in for the Mega Drive. Unsurprisingly, the latter version outsold the former by a significant margin.

A vast number of similar titles seeking to cash in on the appeal of Street Fighter were released in the early 90s, the more imaginative (or desperate) among them replacing the fighters with dinosaurs (Primal Rage), robots (Rise of the Robots) or, of course, basketball players (Shaq-Fu).

Hit into a new dimension

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Tekken series that came out in the mid-90s went on to sell more than 45m units. Photograph: Namco Bandai

The mid-90s saw the arrival of 3D graphics technology, which meant a new era of swooping cameras, detailed environments and polygonal fighters. At the forefront was Virtua Fighter, conceived by Sega’s famous design director Yu Suzuki (Out Run, Super Hang-On). Released in the arcade in 1993, and then on the Saturn console, the game featured about 700 different moves based on real disciplines – a true fighting simulation.

Meanwhile, Sega’s arcade rival Namco was developing its own 3D fighter, Tekken, and Sony saw the game as the perfect system-seller for its new PlayStation console. Arriving on the machine in March 1995, it brought with it luscious visuals, cool characters, such as Nina Williams and Marshall Law, and a clever control system that assigned each of the PlayStation pad’s four buttons to a different limb. The Tekken series would go on to sell over 45m units.

Although Tekken’s rivalry with Virtua Fighter dominated the era, they did not battle alone. Capcom produced myriad Street Fighter spin-offs, including the goth-tinged Darkstalkers and the explosive Marvel vs Capcom series, while cult Japanese studios SNK and Arc System Works kept 2D alive with the King of Fighters and Guilty Gear titles respectively. Other titles took the genre in new directions, including Nintendo’s family-friendly riot Super Smash Bros, Namco’s mythological slayer Soulcalibur, bloody samurai sim Bushido Blade and the Grange Hill of fighting games, Rival Schools: United by Fate, still the only game in this genre to inspire the name of an emo punk band and their debut album.

Modern life is thuggish

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Esports tournaments are big, global events. Photograph: Red Bull Content Pool/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

One of the oldest genres in gaming may not have the impact it once did, but, like Sylvester Stallone at the end of Rocky II (and III and IV), it’s hanging in there. Street Fighter V is dragging fighting game fanatics back into dwindling arcades, but also killing it online, where a new generation of fans are competing in global tournaments. The pro scene is thriving, with big annual professional events such as the Evolution Championship Series, featuring classic brands such as Street Fighter, Tekken and Soulcalibur, attracting millions of views on Twitch and YouTube.

Like Stallone at the end of Rocky II, the fighting game is hanging on in there. And it's killing it online

After the success of Capcom’s Marvel tie-ins, comic book rival DC has entered the fighting universe with Injustice: Gods Among Us, a great big, bone-crunching scrapper filled with familiar heroes and super villains. The studio behind that game, NeverRealm Studios, has Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon as its creative director, and its latest title, Mortal Kombat 11, takes the censor-baiting fighting legend back to its provocative glory days. It isn’t the viscera-smeared new Fatal and Krushing Blow moves that are causing controversy, though: the storyline of one character, Jax, who goes back in time to destroy the transatlantic slave trade, and the redesign of female characters to make them less overtly sexualised, has led to accusations from some fans that the game has ceded to “social justice warrior” politics.

A genre once vilified for its irresponsibility is now vilified for the opposite. And that’s how you stay relevant in 2019.

• Black Mirror season 5 launches on Netflix on 5 June.