Fighting games: a video game genre that's puts players in the shoes of a variety of fighters. Men, women, cyborgs, supernatural beings, and aliens with different styles of martial arts, different weapons, different abilities, and various levels of skill from all over the world, or different realms and planets, gather compete in tournaments in order to achieve fame, fortune, glory, revenge, redemption, power, and enlightenment, as well as other reasons. The names of the games are many: Tekken, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, Soul Caliber, Samurai Shodown, Guilty Gear, Virtua Fighter, Darkstalkers, Dead or Alive, Killer Instinct, Super Smash Bros., the list goes on. Each one of these has its own flavor and play style yet they all have one rule: only one will make it on top. To most of the casual gaming crowd, fighting games are just like any other game they play on arcade cabinets and on consoles in their living rooms. To a majority of hardcore gamers, the fighting genre is a sport as evident in yearly EVO Championship events. Fueled by tsunamis of quarters and trash talk, the fighting game genre as a whole owes it all to one fighting franchise that made all this possible and it is anyone's guess as to how it would turn out if it never made its appearance in arcades: Street Fighter.
