Street Fighter

Street Fighter from 1987 laid the foundation for the entire fighting-game genre, even though today's player will find it unexpectedly raw and unbalanced. The player, as the fighter Ryu (or Ken for the second player), goes through a series of fights against characters from various corners of the world – from the Japanese wrestler Retsu through the Thai boxer Adon to the American wrestler Joe – to finally face the treacherous Sagat, a Muay Thai champion with a scar across his eye. Elements that later made the sequels famous – special moves like the Hadoken or Shoryuken, a choice of several characters, and the global travelling framework of a tournament – appear here for the first time, albeit in a rougher form.

The arcade version was controlled with unusual buttons sensitive to the force of the strike, meant to let the player distinguish a light, medium, or heavy attack based on how hard they hit them. This mechanism turned out to be impractical, unreliable, and prone to breaking down on arcade machines in game halls, and was therefore replaced in later versions and sequels with classic buttons for individual attack types. Even so, in the original Street Fighter it was a striking and, for its time, unique feature of the cabinet, thanks to which the game looked at first glance like a technological novelty.

The game also suffered from slow response, clunky controls, and a limited move set compared to what Street Fighter II brought four years later, which was the game that truly kicked off the genre's boom in arcades around the world and defined its rules for decades to come.

Why play it: Today the first Street Fighter mainly has historical value – it's worth trying for anyone who wants to see what the entire fighting-game branch grew out of, but as an experience in its own right it's more of a curiosity than an enjoyable game.