THE MAKING OF FX FIGHTER

IN THE MID-NINETIES, WHEN 3D FIGHTING GAMES HAD ALREADY TAKEN OVER ARCADES, THE GENRE WAS STILL HEAVILY UNDERREPRESENTED ON THE PC. THAT IS, UNTIL 1995 - THE YEAR ARGONAUT SOFTWARE'S FX FIGHTER MADE ITS DEBUT

- WORDS BY PAUL KAUTZ

The Nineties were a transformative time for fighting games. Prior to that, everything had been decidedly two-dimensional: Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and King Of Fighters all featured well-proportioned 2D sprites battling it out. Yes, there had been a few attempts to bring the world of martial arts into 3D rings, most notably Distinctive Software's 4D Sports Boxing in 1991, but nothing that made it into the mainstream. But then, in late-1993, Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter hit the arcades and showed the world what the fighting game of the future would look like.

On the PC of the Nineties, this beige work machine, a platform that was very limited due to the restrictive MS-DOS and hardware that was good for everything but fast games, the situation was of course much worse. Only once in a blue moon would you get a conversion of a popular fighting game. And if you were very lucky, the developers actually made an effort - such as with Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Budokan: The Martial Spirit and the first two Mortal Kombat games. PC-exclusive fighting games, however, were about as common as a McRib in a vegan fridge. Only very few developers were crazy enough to create a fast, fluid fighting game exclusively for the DOS platform. One of them was Diversions Entertainment with the very good One Must Fall 2097 in 1994 - and another one was Argonaut Software with FX Fighter. However, this is only true with a pinch of historical revisionism, as FX Fighter was actually intended to be released exclusively for the Super Nintendo, using the second generation of the Super FX chip originally developed by Argonaut for Star Fox. This game sported the working title