Final Fight

Interactive environment

Final Fight was among the first side-scrolling beat 'em ups to feature interactive environmental objects, including barrels that explode when attacked, weapons such as knives and pipes that can be picked up and used, and food that restores the player's health.

Bonus rounds

Final Fight features two timed bonus levels. The first asks the player to smash up a car within the time limit, while in the second stage the player must smash glass. The car-smashing round also appeared in Street Fighter II.

Story summary

Jessica, the daughter of Metro City mayor Mike Haggar, has been kidnapped by a criminal gang known as Mad Gear. Haggar, a former pro wrestler, teams up with Cody (Jessica's boyfriend) and Guy (Cody's martial artist friend) to begin a rescue mission in which they must fight their way through the streets of Metro City and defeat every Mad Gear member they meet, until they finally meet the gang's big boss.

Character recurrences

Playable and non-playable characters from Final Fight went on to appear as selectable fighters in other Capcom games.

• Cody: Street Fighter Alpha 3, Super Street Fighter IV, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter V
• Guy: All three Street Fighter Alpha games, Super Street Fighter IV, Ultra Street Fighter IV
• Haggar: Marvel vs Capcom 3, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
• Sodom (enemy boss): All three Street Fighter Alpha games
• Abigail (enemy boss) Street Fighter V
• Rolento (enemy boss): Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter X Tekken, Ultra Street Fighter IV
• Poison (street-level enemy): Ultra Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter X Tekken, Street Fighter V
• Hugo (street-level enemy): Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter X Tekken

Main character profiles

Final Fight's attract mode features profiles of each of the three playable characters.

• Cody: "He has mastered the art of Ninjitsu and attacks with unequaled speed. He often catched his opponent off guard with his special 'Off-the-wall' jump."
• Guy: "He is a martial arts expert. He is especially good with knives. His girlfriend, Jessica, was kidnapped by the Mad gear gang."
• Haggar: "He is a former champion Street Fighter. He's the new Mayor of Metro City. He has mastered professional wrestling skills and is expert at the BACK DROP and the PILE DRIVER."

Mad Gear gang name

Mad Gear, the criminal gang whose members and leaders must be defeated in Final Fight, takes its name from a vertically-scrolling driving arcade game that was also released by Capcom in 1989.

Street Fighter '89

Final Fight had a working title of "Street Fighter '89", as it was built on the moderate success of Capcom's original Street Fighter title. Street Fighter's Ryu and Ken were to be the playable characters, but this plan was scrapped because Capcom believed the game would need a rougher and tougher cast of characters to appeal to players in the USA.

Double Dragon inspiration

Final Fight's gameplay was described as "essentially an extension of the Double Dragon concept," in a Digital Spy retrospective. Planner Akira Yasuda told a Capcom developer roundtable: "At the time side-scrolling action games such as Double Dragon and P.O.W.: Prisoners of War were popular. Personally, I liked shooting games ... But the market wasn't about shooting games at the time."

"Streets of Fire" inspiration

Final Fight was inspired by American action movies including Streets of Fire, a 1984 action film directed by Walter Hill. Planner Akira Yasuda said: "That was an influence... The company president at the time often told us to use movies for inspiration, so we used movies such as Streets of Fire and Hard Times". Like Final Fight, Streets of Fire's story features a character named Cody on a mission to rescue a kidnapped woman.

First home version for SNES

The first home conversion of Final Fight was for the Super NES, or Super Famicom in Japan, where the title first released in December 1990. Major features of the arcade original were missing from the Super NES version: there was no two-player mode and only Haggar and Cody were selectable. Guy was completely cut from the game. Stage 4 (the industrial area) was removed, fewer characters appeared on screen, and transition scenes between stages were also removed. Female enemies Poison and Roxy were swapped for male enemies. The game released in the USA in November 1991 and in Europe in December 1992.

US and European SNES cuts

Content was cut from the American and European releases of the SNES version of Final Fight. Female enemies "Roxy" and "Poison" were replaced with male enemies "Sid" and "Billy", alcohol references were removed, final boss Belger’s wheelchair was replaced with an office chair, and blood was replaced with explosion effects.

Final Fight: Guy

A second version of the game for the Super NES, Final Fight: Guy, addressed Guy's absence from the original release. It remained a single-player experience but replaced Cody with Guy, making both Guy and Haggar selectable. Final Fight: Guy also featured multiple ending sequences, with each difficulty setting leading to a different ending. The game released in Japan in March 1992 and in the USA much later, in June 1994, where it was only available to rent rather than to buy.

Sega CD version

A version of Final Fight for the Sega CD (known as Mega CD in Japan and Europe) was developed by Sega and released in 1993. This version restored content absent from the SNES version including two-player mode, ability to select any of the three main characters, and female enemies Poison and Ivy (although their clothes were redesigned to be less revealing). The Sega CD version also featured a new, CD-quality version of the original soundtrack, plus voiced intro and ending scenes. However, its color palette was muted in comparison to the colorful arcade version, due to the limitations of the Sega CD hardware.

Other home versions

Final Fight was ported to numerous home systems throughout the 1990s and beyond.

• A version for the Sharp X68000 computer system was released in Japan in summer 1992. This version is extremely close to the arcade original, thanks to hardware similarities between the X68000 and the CPS-1 arcade system.
• Versions for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC featured severe visual downgrades and content cuts.
• The Commodore Amiga version, published by U.S. Gold, is visually impressive in screenshots due to its use of sprites taken directly from the arcade version (albeit with a smaller color palette), but is less effective in play according to a Digital Foundry analysis. The Amiga version is missing many moves, runs at a low frame rate with frequent slowdown, and features no music.

Arcade version

Final Fight was created for Capcom's CP System arcade board, which became known as "CPS-1" after its successor systems were released. The CPS-1 had a video resolution of 384 × 224 pixels with up to 4,096 colors on screen and stereo sound. The game ran at 60 frames per second.

"Huge and cool" characters

Final Fight made an impact on first release with characters that were larger than in other side-scrolling beat 'em ups. This came from Capcom's internal concept of "huge and cool," meaning big things are cool. Planner Akira Yasuda said in a Capcom developer interview: "At the time large characters were impactful, so we wanted to do something with that."

Dragon Quest art inspiration

The cover illustration for the Final Fight arcade flyer, created by Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, was inspired by artwork from the NES role-playing game Dragon Quest. Yasuda wrote on Twitter that "he tried to copy the idea that the hero’s face isn’t clearly displayed because the player will be taking the place of the hero," according to Time Extension.

Soundtrack artists

Final Fight's soundtrack was composed by a team of seven artists including Yoko Shimomura, Manami Matsumae, and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.

Cornerstone title

Final Fight is considered an important title in the evolution of arcade video games. Digital Foundry's 2020 retrospective called it a "a cornerstone of the golden age of arcades and one of Capcom's finest and most important releases of all time."