Retro Fighting Games Online

The arcade boom of the early 1990s turned fighting games into the most competitive thing on any high street, and the home conversions in this collection are how most people first learned the combos. Everything here comes from the years when a match was decided by six buttons, a handful of special moves and whether you could read your opponent's habits fast enough - and all of it runs directly in this page.

Street Fighter II is the game that built the genre as we know it: eight distinct world warriors, motion inputs that had to be discovered rather than read, and a balance so unusually good that its revisions are still played competitively today. The collection follows the whole line through Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, the Alpha and EX series, and the crossovers X-Men vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter, where team tags and screen-filling supers took over.

Mortal Kombat, SNK and the PC originals

The other half of the story is Mortal Kombat, which answered Capcom's cartoon precision with digitised actors, a block button and finishing moves that triggered parliamentary debates on two continents. Mortal Kombat II, 3, Ultimate 3, Trilogy and Mortal Kombat 4 are all here, showing the series move from photographed sprites into polygons. Alongside them sit SNK's Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Samurai Shodown, plus Killer Instinct and its sequel with their enormous scripted combo chains.

The PC has its own champion in One Must Fall 2097, a shareware robot fighter with an upgrade system and a tournament mode that no arcade cabinet offered. Older landmarks complete the picture: Karateka, Budokan, The Way of the Exploding Fist and Pit Fighter show what the genre looked like before Street Fighter II reset every expectation.

Every match starts in your browser. Choose a game, wait a few seconds while it loads, and fight. Nothing is installed, no plugin is required, no account is created and no registration is asked for - the default keyboard layout is printed on each game page, and two players can share one keyboard.