Qi Xiao Quan

When you stumbled upon this game in the cluttered DOS menu of the chaotic nineties, you'd first think it was some weird boxing sim. It's not. Qi Xiao Quan is a fast, relentless beat-them-up where you settle matches between powerful fighters against the backdrop of some linear story. The developer isn't known even today, when you'd expect to track it down. Chinese work, plain and simple.

It's one-on-one combat — you stand across from your opponent on a small arena-type battlefield and trade blows, kicks, and special attacks. The fighters have different styles and speeds. You mash buttons, build energy for special moves, basically the classic formula of the eighties and nineties. The graphics are pure period piece — pixelated fighters in silhouette, animations stuttering just to exist. The sound from the speaker plays percussion-heavy music that in that sterile DOS audio mode sounds like it's blaring out of a building. But that's exactly what it was, not a transfer flaw.

Difficulty ramps up as you progress through the story. Early bouts are warmups — then the AI learns, remembers your patterns, starts blocking them. You need timing, man, not just button mashing. Controls are basic, but they match what the game demands. You never feel the game is dragging or weighing itself down — it's just there and it works.

Over the years, similar games, especially Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, became household names. Qi Xiao Quan borrowed their blueprint but stayed in the shadows — no Chinese marketing push, no collector's edition that would've turned it into a cult object. In retrogaming archives it remains a curiosity — proof that in the nineties everyone tried to make a fighting game, even knowing it would never be Final Fight.

These days you find it in an emulator, fire it up in your browser, and it plays smoother than we expected. It's not the pinnacle of the genre — it never was. But if you want to feel the atmosphere of an overlooked beat-them-up that nobody documented and nobody remembers, here it is. No hype, no restoration, just what survived.