Fighter's History is Data East's attempt to jump on the fighting game craze of the early 90's. The game is infamously known for being the subject of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capcom_U.S.A._Inc._v._Data_East_Corp. a lawsuit], where Capcom accused Data East of plagiarizing Street Fighter II. Data East ended up winning the lawsuit on the grounds that the copied elements like mechanics, 6-button layout and character archetypes were a standard for the genre and cannot be copyrighted. The game would later go on to spawn several sequels improving on the original formula.
Several core gameplay bugs, oversights and lack of polish, alongside many unused assets, minor and major ones, imply that the game had a troubled development cycle and was released in an unfinished state.
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Unused Audio#
Track 75 in the sound test is an unused announcer clip of "JOKER!", very likely to be the early name of boss Clown - Which may just as likely explain why he is the only character without one in the final. The change of name was probably a very late decision, so they couldn't have had time to swap in a new clip. This does eventually get rectified for the SNES version.
Unused Graphics#
Character sprites#
What appears to be a boss-like character. Setting address 01005E4 to 0D reveals a rather buggy and unplayable character. However, the palette of this character appears to match up with these unused sprites. These are the only existing sprites left in the data, so the decision to not use this character must have been rather early in development.
Note that in the game's development bible, available in the Capcom vs. Data East lawsuit files, there is a mention of 10 playable characters and 4 unplayable bosses (in the released game, it's 9 playable characters and 2 bosses). It's highly likely that this was originally intended to be the time-traveling final boss, which was nicknamed "Genesis King" (創世王, Sōseiō) in the file.
The game's tileset also contains four frames of an unused character that remarkably looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 robot character from the 1984 film The Terminator. Much like the rest of the cast, one of his body parts seems to have been designed to be removed after taking damage, namely his undamaged head. The character's palette hasn't been properly found yet, although the address 01005E4 0E seems to give the correct colors for his shades of black (i. e. jacket, pants, robotic parts and sunglasses).
Note that in the game's development bible, an identical character named "Terminator" shows up as one of the four intended non-playable bosses, which supports the theory that the character above would have been the fourth and final boss.
Stage sprites#
Presumably early versions of background punks from Matlok's stage.
Special moves sprites#
Early version of Samchay's fireball.
These are sprites of Mizoguchi's Screaming Tiger Bazooka projectile, a special move he only got in a sequel, Fighter's History Dynamite (aka Karnov's Revenge). The fact that it's sprites exist in the original game implies that this special move was planned to be in the game, but got axed for one reason or another.
Miscellaneous sprites#
Near the end of the graphics data game contains sprites that depicts the entire cast as chibis, alongside weird Karnov cat. Every other game in a series also have chibi characters, which they use in staff roll or 1 coin clear screen. However, arcade Fighter's History doesn't have either of, unless there is a staff roll hidden within game's code? Either way, these chibi sprites can't be seen in normal gameplay.
A minor detail about Feilin's and Jean's chibi sprites is that their weak spots are made as separate sprites that are layered over characters. This allows weak spots to have their own color palettes and not be restricted by characters' main palettes.
References#
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The Fighter's History series | |
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Arcade |
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SNES |
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