Fighting games have been way popular pretty much ever since they burst upon the scene around the late 80s or the early 90s. Whether you’re more of a Street Fighter or a Mortal Kombat type, pumping quarters into arcade machines for hours to win that last rematch is a huge part of gaming, even more so in the 80s despite the recent comeback of arcades.

Aside from that, if you’re not quite devoted enough for competitive play, you can always pop in a Tekken game at a party and hope you’re lucky enough to button-mash your way to a victory. It’s no secret that fighting games are well-loved, but what are some mechanics that have helped or hindered the genre?

10 Changed The Genre: 3D Fighting

While 2D fighters ruled towards the beginning of fighting games’ reign over the arcade floor, after a while, especially in the era of the PS1 and N64 but even more so once the Xbox, Gamecube, and PS2 showed up, we suddenly got a rash of 3D fighters now that the hardware developers were creating for could handle it.

This added an extra degree of freedom, at the cost of having stricter limits to work in which would generally breed creativity. Now the player was able to sidestep, jump not only over attacks but also over and to the side of them, slide in circles around their opponent, and just generally be much much more slippery.

9 Outdated: 80,000 Hit Combos

While it’s fun to juggle your opponent for 12 years, there’s no greater video game hustle in the world than looking at a friend who wants to try a new fighting game and telling them “Oh yeah, I think I played that just a little bit when I was younger”, only to crush your opponent by not letting them hit the ground.

The only remedy to this is stun-locking your double-crossing friend with either a repetitive high-punch or endless sweeps and sinking to their level. Games like Killer Instinct are notorious for having combos that’ll string together like 80 hits, actually doing more damage than your opponent even has HP. This is pure evil.

8 Changed The Genre: Grabs

Back in the early days of fighters, like in the era where Mortal Kombat was introduced, you did have grabs, but they were pretty anticlimactic and usually consisted of the character rolling over and throwing their opponent.

That’s cool and all, but the future is now, and now we have grabs in which you can do actual wrestling moves on people, break bones, and just generally do stuff that’s probably not even humanly possible (if you’re playing as a human in the first place). Along with these really interestingly modified grabs, you can also occasionally reverse the grabs and move the momentum of the battle towards yourself.

7 Outdated: Locked Characters At Start

No one buys a fighting game so that they can play whatever half-baked attempt at a plot the writers have cooked up for the fighting game. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Arcade towers or visiting the various homes of your opponents is good enough, instead of writing a generally convoluted and confusing story that the players aren’t going to find memorable anyway.

Whether you’re playing a fighting game competitively or at a party, you really don’t want to have to sit around and unlock characters by playing the story, you wanna jump in and prove to your friends that you really did pretty much only play Mortal Kombat for most of the first half of your life.

6 Changed The Genre: Brawlers

One interesting change to the fighting game genre came with the advent of something that may or may not be a spin-off of the fighting game genre depending on who you ask. If you ask most fighting game fans, brawlers are entirely distinct from fighting games. Ask pretty much any outside observer, and yeah they’re slightly different but it’s really just more of the same.

Either way you slice it, there’s no doubt that these 2 genres are adjacent. These games are few and far between honestly, but the good ones are very good. If you’re struggling to figure out exactly what these are, look no further than Nintendo’s giant franchise Super Smash Bros. 

5 Outdated: Instakill Moves

While these aren’t always the most common mechanic to see in most fighting games, they definitely show up. Whether we’re talking about Kuma’s secret 1 hit KO move in Tekken or about Paul’s charge punch that obliterates half of your opponent’s health for no good reason in Tekken 3, these moves exist.

Some would argue that since the prep that goes into making these moves happen usually takes a while, it’s your fault for not seeing that they’ve been telegraphed before they happen and that they can turn the tide of a game in a pinch. That’s maybe true, but they still seem pretty cheap.

4 Changed The Genre: Tag Systems

Tag systems are a pretty recent addition to fighting games, and while they’re not in every fighting game you see, they’re really in almost the majority of fighting games to come out in recent memory.

Not only do these usually allow you to switch characters when you need a more effective counter to your opponent, but the character that’s inactive on your team can often jump in and sucker-punch your opponent, or team up with the character you’re currently playing, which can really serve you if you’re in a rut or stuck in a combo that your enemy somehow managed to pull off.

3 Outdated: Ineffective Joke Characters

While the obvious answer from the snarky fighting game fan is to get good, sometimes for people who aren’t familiar with fighting games in general but more commonly a specific fighting game, picking a bad character their first round can mean that they’ll get discouraged and not want to pick the game up again.

Adding joke characters who are particularly weak makes this a lot more common.

2 Changed The Genre: Finishers

Fighting games were pretty tame in the beginning, mostly being reminiscent of competitive beat-em-ups at their start.

This changed when Mortal Kombat added the ability to perform a Fatality, which is usually an extremely violent and gory move that you can perform once you’ve won both rounds of the fight. Not only did this influence tons of clones, but it added similar systems to other games, if not quite as gory.

1 Outdated: DLC Fests

Recent fighting games might be some of the worst offenders when it comes to having useless DLC option after useless DLC option, but the absolute worst is when it’s a legitimately really cool part of the game that you can’t access without forking out more than the $60 that you already paid just to own the game in the first place.

Cosmetic options like skins and taunts are annoying, because they really just bloat the game and make it feel cluttered like in MK9. But having to pay an extra $15-$20 just to unlock a character that should probably be in the game anyway isn’t just annoying, it’s actually insulting.

NEXT: 5 RTS Mechanics That Changed The Genre (& 5 That Are Outdated)