Virtua Fighter

Virtua Fighter is a fighting video game developed by Sega AM2 under Yu Suzuki, the game's director and producer. Sega released it in October 1993 on arcade cabinets with the Sega Model 1 board. The game pits eight fighters from different countries against each other. The characters are portrayed as ordinary people – among them a student, a racer, a cook, a fisherman, a ninja and a wrestler – and each has their own fighting style. Most of the styles bear the name of a real martial art, and only one is explicitly fictional. Sources disagree on whether the first game already used motion capture. English Wikipedia says in its article on the game that it did. The GameAnim website, on the other hand, writes that the first game was animated with a simplified skeleton and that motion capture only came with Virtua Fighter 2 from 1994; English Wikipedia also lists the second game among the first games to use this technique. Suzuki said that fast 3D graphics calculations were a serious problem during development. English Wikipedia credits the game with introducing and popularising polygonal 3D graphics in fighting games.

Martial arts in this work

Fact and fiction

The characters of the first game were given named real martial arts. Akira Yuki uses Bajiquan, Pai Chan Mizongquan, Sarah and Jacky Bryant Jeet Kune Do, the ninja Kage-Maru jujutsu, Jeffry McWild pankration and Wolf Hawkfield professional wrestling. The only explicitly fictional style is Lau Chan's Hu Yan Quan, called Tiger Swallow Fist in English. In its article on the second game, English Wikipedia states in summary that the fighting styles of the characters are only loosely based on real combat methods, so the names of the arts cannot be taken as a faithful depiction of their techniques.

People and martial arts

• Yu SuzukiDirector

Details

Developer

Sega AM2

Publisher

Sega

Platforms at release

Arcade

Characters and their fighting styles

• Akira Yuki — Bajiquan
• Pai Chan — Mizongyi (Lost Track Boxing)
• Lau Chan — Hu Yan Quan (fictional style)
• Jeffry McWild — Pankration
• Kage-Maru — Jujutsu (Classical Japanese Unarmed Combat)
• Sarah Bryant — Jeet Kune Do
• Jacky Bryant — Jeet Kune Do