Yie Ar Kung-Fu

Long before Street Fighter II defined the modern fighting game, there was a game that was among the first to pit the player one-on-one against a lineup of diverse opponents. Yie Ar Kung-Fu by Konami is one of the founding cornerstones of the entire genre, and its port to the NES brought this revolution into living rooms.

The concept is thrillingly simple and remarkably visionary for its time. You control a martial arts master named Oolong, who must fight his way through a series of opponents, each with his own style, weapon, and tactics. One throws knives, another attacks with a chain, yet another is a giant wrestler. This idea of unique adversaries with different abilities became the foundation on which all the great fighting games would later be built. The player, meanwhile, combines various kicks and punches, including high jumps and jumping attacks, which for the time offered an unusually rich repertoire of movement.

In the mid-1980s Konami was among the most inventive studios in the gaming industry, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu is proof of that. The game originated in arcades, and its success carried it to a whole range of home platforms, including eight-bit computers and the NES. For many players it was their very first contact with a purely combat-focused game, one that was not about plowing through crowds of enemies but about face-to-face duels.

The cultural significance of Yie Ar Kung-Fu is therefore hard to overstate. It falls into an era when kung-fu and martial arts films were experiencing a worldwide boom, and the game cleverly rode that wave. Although later titles long ago surpassed it technically, its DNA lives on in every game where two fighters with their own moves face each other.

Today we see Yie Ar Kung-Fu above all as a historical landmark, a forerunner of an entire genre, preserved on the NES as testimony to what the very beginnings of fighting games looked like. Its simplicity is at the same time its strength: you grasp the rules in a few seconds, but the battles against a colorful gallery of opponents retain their charm to this day.

Why play: One of the founders of the fighting game genre, where opponents were first given their own unique styles, it is today a fascinating look back at the roots of an entire gaming category.