The FGC Dark Ages Were VERY Real!

Eretzvaju mentioned!

Yeah, there was just little to no buzz with fighting games during that time even though fighting games were still being made. Even if there was any buzz, it was a far cry from what things were in the '90s.

I just subscribed bro. Keep up the good work.

my gosh i have vague memories playing evil zone on the ps1 demo disc

Yo Evil Zone was peak simplicity fighting game, proximity EVERYTHING.
I emailed Yukes about porting the game and the kindly told me it was out of their hands lol, probably because they were working on WWE games at the time.

I'm Filipino and I know that building lol

Rival Schools and Ergheiz were my favorites during this time period… but mainly because of their mini games haha

Oh boy, I just know this will be a good video 😂

Don't forget to hit that like button to support our friend James get more exposure!

Other FGC: you should do something about your superiority complex
Street Fighter Community: But I AM superior

I believe in SF supremacy.

How can you say you wouldnt want darkstalkers if it wasnt in arcsys style? Re engine is nuts and they could make a gorgeous darkstalkers game!

FGC Dark Ages meant that we were holding our breath for a Capcom made 2D fighting game based on an anime called History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi (great anime but the game passable at best)

We did get one release of CvS Pro, on the PlayStation. It launched for $19.99 and vanished off the earth almost immediately.

Hi, James! Long time watcher here. Great episode!

I'm just commenting since you saw Evil Zone. I recommend giving it a look. Its actually quite fun, IMO.

It's Japanese version is called Eretzvaju, and I prefer it more than the US version because of the intro and the voice acting is less 90's cringy dub. Anyway, yeah it has only an attack and a block button. Moves are done by tapping a direction + attack button. Generally speaking,

Forward + attack: projectile
Up + attack Forward moving strike (character dependent)
Down + attack: Throw. Changes to a ranged throw when outside normal throw distance
Back + attack: A slower projectile that stuns the opponent

Double tapping the attack button during these moves will change the move into an anti sidestep version. Theres also a launcher with down, down + attack, a rush move with forward, forward + attack, a jump attack that crossed up automatically when done close with up, up + attack, and you're super which is done via back, back + attack. Sidesteps are done via double tapping up or down, and you can maintain that sidestep by keeping that direction held down. There are different cinematic variations of the attack, all inspired by anime tropes (dodge left and right, from below camera angles, etc)

Where it shines, IMO, is the single player campaigns. Each character is basically an archetype for that genre, and their single player campaign and music reflects that. Each fight in single player is designed like a weekly episode of that anime or show, with narration and previews for the next episode just like the old cartoons / anime.

For example, Danzaiver (my main) is the stereotype for the 70s and 80s Japanese tokusatsu Space Sherriff shows. His alter ego, Sho Mikagami, is a hot blooded good guy who wears a jacket with a popped collar, has his morphing unit on his wrists, and uses laser guns and calls back up from his spaceship (a giant laser cannon). His super is him doing the space sheriff sword finishers from those shows, down to the windup and repeating the strike 3 times for dramatic effect.

The list goes on. Setsuna is a darker magical girl, and her music and campaign reflects that. Keiya's campaign is designed to be like a horror mystery show. Midori's campaign is designed like a shonen / martial arts show. Its all great. I hope you can give it a look.

And, yeah, I'm from the Philippines. I know EXACTLY what and where that building is :D. Its still up btw, only with less of that bootleg activity going on.

I think I never felt it because I was in south america playing KOF,tekken and Anime games.

Who can forget Fight Club the game?

Tekken Zaibatsu was what I usually frequented in the Dark Ages. Made friends that I still talk to as of today, and I first joined TZ in February 2005.

For me the dark age is now. Modern SF games have some things that the original SF games haven't. Modern SF games have a lot of normals that go forward. Some of those normal kicks or punches make the characters advance a little just by pressing them. In first SFII games not a single normal blow makes the character go forward. And when connects, even when blocked, every blow always moves you away from the oponent. Only specials go forward, or up.

And only specials can knock down opponents in classic SF. Normal blows can't, only sweep. All of these "target combos" in wich you only need to press the same button several times and the last blow knocks down the opponent are just cheap. Nothing like that exists in early SF games, only Guy's combo in Alpha series and to perform it you need to learn a quick combination of different buttons that are not so easy to perform. Well, from SFII' onwards because in the original SFII not even the specials knock you down.

And in first SF games every special has a purpose beyond extending combos. There are a lot of specials in SFV or SF6 that nobody ever uses in other situation than combo extenders.

Changing all that have turned SF games in a different thing. They are just about remembering long combos, when the first ones were all about pure skill and reactions and a precise use of the specials in different situations.

Kinda random, but I'm fairly sure Randy Lew is from Sacramento. I loved the old school FGC. It's when I came up.

Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 5, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, DOA4, KOF 2002, Virtua Fighter 5… its really just a “dark age” in the sense that it was harder to play offline due to smaller player base/community, in an era where offline was often the only way to play against others(depending on the title).

dark ages is period between arcades and rollback

James you are a treasure trove of FGC and gaming history. I am near my 40s and everything you said about the dark ages in '09 is the truth. The perfect storm for the dark ages of fighting games, arcades shutting down, no online and JP receiving more exclusive content than the US in fighters. It was so bad in those dark ages I would practice motion inputs on my Game Boy Pocket (which i still have!)

James if you ever write the book on anything FCG I would fly to get the book signed!

Capcom Dark Ages*

Fgs were fire

Great video, really struck a cord with this one.

Dude.....as an avid fighting game player, yeah, those were indeed the Dark Ages for sure. I came up in the real golden era of the genre. I'm 47 yrs young and MANY of my free time and hrs were spent in the arcades just testing myself. Won a lot and lost as well but the thrill of competition and sharing the knowledge was and is invaluable. The friendships....the rivalries...the venturing to new and unfamiliar territories to seek out the stronger players there....man what a thrill. These young bucks will NEVER know that exhilarating feel of SF2/CE/Turbo HF/ST, KI 1 and 2, Tekken 1,2,3 and 5 DR, MK 1,2 and 3/Ultimate, XMen vs Street Fighter, CVS 1 and 2....I can go on and on. Love hearing the reminiscing of what was. I'd love to wax poetic with you one day and just talk about the Great Old Days. And yeah, I know all about SRK and Tekken Zaibatsu as well lol. Just subscribed man.....just LOVE talking about it. Currently playing T8, SF6 and 5 and 4. Marvel 3....currently have some replays on my channel if you want to see. Good content as always James and I'm looking forward to EVO this weekend. Cheers man and....um....."Fighting games are something so great"😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎

Vs on PS1 gotta be the worst fighting game I ever played. It was rough in the PS1 streets 😂

One of the UK ps1 mags always sang the praises of Alpha 3, I thought they were crazy :)

Query, James: When exactly do you think the "Dark Ages" began?

You mention SFA3, which came out in 1998, but then you mention KoFXI, which wasn't until 2005. While I would agree that the latter was definitely on the Dark Age, the former was not. And by extension, the PSX fighters, crappy as the majority of them were, weren't part of the Dark Ages.

Indeed, I think you're misremembering history here. SFA3 on PSX was highly praised, since it was by far the best home port of the Alpha games while also being the biggest and most feature-rich. There's a reason why that version alone sold a million copies while SFA1/SFA2 sold maybe 50-60% of that of they were lucky.

Rather, it wa the hardcore crowd on alt.games.sf2 who didn't like the PSX port of SFA3, because it was very different to the arcade, in ways that only those hardcore players would care about but thr majority wouldn't give a shit about.

I also don't think it's fair to mention Capcom vs. SNK Pro , because I'm pretty sure no one in Japan played that either (for the record, my roomates and I got it for impoeet Dreamcast). That remains one of the most baffling releases of all time, because Pro came out in June of 2001, while the vastly superior CvS2 came out a mere 3 months later. Pretty sure even among alt.games.sf2 fare, the only ones who played and discussed Pro at all were Majestros and myself.

And of course, MvC2 came out in 2000 and was basically loved and played by many . Arcades as a whole were dying, sure, but MvC2 kept things going a little longer, as did CvS2, to a lesser extent.

So I would posit that the start of the Dark Ages wasn't with the early 2D-3D transition of the late 90s, which was more ties to the downturn of arcades generally (don't forget that the likes of Tekken 3 , TTT , and Soul Calibur, with the latter's incredible glow up on Dreamcast, came out in this time too), bit rather, with the final phase out of arcades post-CvS2. The decline might have started earlier, but there were sufficient big hits up until 2001 that the real dark age didn't kick in until much later (don't forget that MvC2 carried Evo for _years ; hell, MvC2 is the game that transitioned the B series into Evo!).

So IMO, you're looking at late 2002, maybe early 2003, as when the Dark Age began. That was when the PS2 was really hitting its stride (ironic, because PS2 got good to great ports of all fighters at the time, albeit some were JPN-only like you said; we did get Guilty Gear: Accent Core in the west, which I played and loved after only playing the original GGXX because I was one of three people on the planet who did not have a modded PS2, but by then the Dark Age had definitely settled in) and fighters had become kinda passe instead of big events, outside of maybe Soul Calibur II .

And of course, Capcom went dark during this time, only coming out with the soul-less (though otherwise not completely terrible) Capcom Fighting Jam . GG started being a thing during this time, and Tekken continued to roll along (for the record, MK was and still is irrelevant, as far as the FGC was concerned; but nearly every MK game during this period still sold around 2 million copies aside from Armaggedon ), and SNK was trying their hand with Atomiswave as their post-MVS system, but there was no single unifying game that drew people together and played like with MvC2 for years. Not until console SFIV dropped in early 2009 (since very few places outside JPN played the original arcade version which dropped in July 2008) did things pick back up. By that time we were in the PS3/X360 generation, a.k.a. when online was more mainstream and thus could start playing other more regularly.


SFIV was big not just because it was the return of SF but also because it arguably kicked off playing online "seriously". These are the factors that lead to the FGC blowing up in 2009.

I will say that one thing that one made the Dark Ages a little more barely was emulation and Kaillera netplay. Sure, it was laggy as all hell, but it was a godsend during that time frame

I really liked that SNES Justice League game when I was a kid 😅

My favorite "bad" ps1 fighting game is Destrega. It's an arena fighter but it's from a top-down perspective. There's 3 attacks + jump, and your 3 attacks change depending on how close you are to the opponent. When far away everyone shoots magic stuff at each other and then up close is physical attacks. There's built in RPS because certain buttons beat other buttons, like a weapon triangle in fire emblem lmao. The cool thing is that you have a magic meter that refills over time and you can spend that meter to shoot really big spells and do button combos to change how the spell acts, it's neat!

It's also really broken and easy to infinite people in the corner with close range attacks lmao oh well. The story mode is fully voice acted with some pretty funny performances though.

I remember those dark times.
2001-2009 there was no new Street Fighter feeling game for the longest time.
Capcom vs SNK2 and then Street Fighter 4.
Sure some could argue what about Capcom Fighting Jam or Street Fighter Anniversery Collection for Xbox with Online?
CFJ was so bland and generic I only rented it once.
The Online for Xbox SFAC was horrid to say the least.

I laugh every time I watch K&M try to breakdown the competitive format of the PS2 MK games.

SF was in the darkages after SF3 3RD STRIKE. I agree with James Chen on this topic. Capcom couldn't do anything except releasing sh.tty SF version over and over. This is where I left the fighting game arcade scene after spending my youth playing since the early 90s. This is pre EVO before there is such thing as EVO, developing carpal tunnel being the best player among friends and siblings.

HOLY SH.T, James! You even got the DC Justice League which created by Blizzard I had as a kid when my father bought the game. I was a beast at that game with all the characters on SUPER NES. Grew up playing SF, MK, KI and Tekken was such a nostalgic reminiscent of the old days.

Why is this man talking about the fgc dark ages like they ended?

Great commentary with Logan at Evo! You two are a great team!

What Dark Age?

"People need to stop re-writing history"

"Everyone stopped playing after evo"

James this is why no one takes you seriously, you either forget information or leave stuff out on purpose, we all know people continued to play in their arcade scenes in So-Cal, NY & Texas mainly as this is all the scene was back then it was people in arcades so to say people stopped playing until next evo is a straight up lie man.

It was a weird time to be a fighting game player to be honest. Everything was transitioning. Everything that was the foundation of fighting games were getting lost here and there. School yard rumors hardly was a thing because it was in forums, internet was so young that most people don't know how to use it, arcade scene in most places were dying and netplay was next to nothing. Tekken and MvC2 was strong from where I was but it wasn't strong enough to get new players in. My first Tekken tournament was just a small gathering of the same players in my place and it didn't feel like it was a tournament.

I still stand on my head canon that evo37 is the single most important moment the fgc have. If that didn't happen I don't believe the fgc would be where we are now

You missed arcade infinity and mike watson’s super arcade :3

I believe Maximilian and Sherry may have played there

Criticom is detestable, but Rise of the Robots makes it look like 3rd Strike.