Given that it was a fixture of every single leisure centre in Britain between 1989 and 1991, the first thing Final Fight conjures for me is the smell of chlorine. It’s quite strange, in fact, to play it now without the accompaniment of squeaking plimsolls, the shrill of a lifeguard’s whistle, or the sound of Coke cans thundering around the guts of a vending machine.In a nutshell, Final Fight is a bit like an interactive John Carpenter film. It’s a sideways scrolling beat ‘em up, set in the fictitious Metro City, which – like every other generically ruinous city featured in 1980s computer games – is supposed to be New York. There’s lots of doomy synth, and lots of broken buildings, underlit barrooms, and the obligatory subway trains drenched in graffiti. This is exploitation-era NY – the pre-Giuliani one - full of pimps, pushers and thugs, sliming around every corner. Everything looks dented and slightly filthy: just imagine a glossy, cyberpunk mash-up of Akira and Escape From New York, pebbled with the pop-culture kitsch of the day, and you're there. It's what computer games would look like if Billy Idol designed them.
Originally marked as the sequel to Street Fighter, Final Fight was more like Double Dragon with a load of growth hormones wedged up its arsehole. Instantly one of my favourite games ever, I remember it standing clearly astride the busy and unremarkable genre of sideways scrolling beat ‘em ups. There’s little that’s remarkable or unique about it, but it was a fantastic spit n’ polish job on a rather humdrum genre, very much the Ferrero Rocher of its day.
I was fascinated with Final Fight; I still am, in a way. I adored it. It was a standard bearer for the salad days of arcade games - fantastic, bemuscled things, that cast a long and withering shadow over anything your own computer could muster. Dutifully, someone like US Gold would always have an optimistic jab at porting them to your C64 (see left), but for all your hopes and dreams, they were never anything more that blotchy, cave-painting approximations of the beasts that had gobbled up all of your pocket money. The Mega CD version was supposedly the best effort, but I only had one friend who owned a Mega CD, and he was the subject of a ferocious custody battle: as I recall, it’d been bought by his dad to lassoo attention away from his chronic drinking, and even to me that seemed an uncomfortable trade-off. The SNES version was missing one of the main characters. The 8-bit versions... well, the less said about those, the better. They looked like a retard’s dalliance with neo-cubism.
No, if you wanted to experience the full, unfettered pomp and glory of Final Fight, you did it with a pocket full of twenty pence pieces, as God intended; anything less was like your mum promising you a McDonalds, only to spend forty minutes in the kitchen jabbing at a splodge of charred, spitting meat, and then bizarrely claiming that what she'd done was “even better.”
So what if Final Fight’s impossibly difficult? So what if there’s nary an original thought or concept contained within? And so what if it’s choc-full of weird and illogical non-sequiters, like phone boxes that crumple under a single punch, and turn into apples? Final Fight was a burly knee-trembler of a game, where progress was so prohibitively expensive that you were doomed to play only the first two levels, over and over again. But lordy-loo, what a compelling couple of levels they were. Like a peep show in the 1930s, that one glimpse was a damn site better than anything you were ever likely to see at home. It was thrilling.
The plot (and I use that word in the truest spirit of charity)... You have to rescue Jessica, the Mayor’s daughter, who - for reasons best known to the Japanese, and their ceaseless penchant for submissive women - has been tied up and stripped to her bra. To do this, you take your pick of three characters: Haggar, (Jessica’s dad, and the Mayor of Metro City), Cody (the all-American boy), and Guy (some Ninjitsu flounce, who’s managed to shoulder his way into just about every Capcom game ever since). They’re all notionally different – it’s your standard Three Bears formula, where one’s fast, one’s strong, and the other’s somewhere in-between – but there’s nothing strategic about it: it doesn’t really impact on the gameplay. You just kept hammering away until your pound was exhausted, and your dad was ushering you off to the car.
Final Fight bares a lot of Capcom’s early hallmarks – as well as its sublime looks, it’s shot through with their kitschy, eager, adorably Japanese take on Western culture. The street punks and villains have all got names like ‘Axl’, ‘Slash’, ‘Roxy’ and ‘Poison’ – everyone in Final Fight sounds like an escapee from the hair metal scene. God knows why... the Japanese have always had an fixation with Westernized notions of danger and threat, so I can only guess that somewhere in the Mothers-Against-Everything landscape of music and media in the late ‘80s, they assumed Guns N’ Roses to be the natural arbiters of sociological decline in the United States. It’s like the producers had 72 hours of the Clockwork Orange treatment, in front of MTV: what we’re left with is a sort of historical snapshot, an assembly of the pop culture Ne’er-do-Wells of the day. The first level of Final Fight would have made a fitting video for ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.
Aside from this assortment of glam rock villainy, you also have to contend with what is quite possibly the gayest collection of bosses ever assembled in a computer game. The undercurrent of homoeroticism surging through this game is so strong, it’s amazing the screen doesn’t bloom into lilac (about halfway through the game,they abandoned all pretense, bit the proverbial bullet, and named one of the bosses Sodom). The ‘Queer as a Bottle of Chips’ award surely goes to Edi E, the (quite literally) bent copper; hair sprouting from the brim of his unbuttoned shirt, and laughing garrulously as his bitches cheer him on, it really does seem like he’s lining you up for a bumming. He’s even got his cap at a jaunty angle. And if it’s not him, then it’s the professional wrestlers inexplicably roaming the subway level, where it’s spandex bear-hugs ahoy-hoy. The vacuum of irony in all of this is an absolute joy to behold: I half expected the final boss to be Barbra Streisand.
Another Capcom trademark has always been their predilection for inventive sub-games, and what’s also worth mentioning about Final Fight in this respect is its glorious bonus rounds – none of that tedious kicking-an-elf Golden Axe crap here, instead you’re granted half a minute to beat the mortal shit out of someone’s BMW with a crowbar. Few games have ever offered a more cathartic 30 seconds' gameplay.
In 1991, Sega stripped the Final Fight concept down to its pig-iron fundamentals, and rebuilt it as Streets of Rage II: it’s a longer and more immersive game, and it’s also a good deal more forgiving. In this sense, it’s arguably a much more accomplished affair, at least in terms of what it sets out to do. Somehow, though, it misses the bombast – the larger than life punch - of Final Fight. It lacks, in a weird and almost indefinable sense, its bollocks. Alongside a striding beast like Final Fight, SoRII can’t help but feel a little… well… puny. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game in its own right, but Final Fight it ain’t... and Final Fight was what it really wanted to be.
So ubiquitous was this game, and so tantalisingly did it curtail what you could reasonably achieve with a quid, that it’s easy to attribute a little too much fascination and mythology to what was, ultimately, a rather simple beat ‘em up. Years later, I found playing Final Fight on an emulator to be a sad and unremarkable experience; after the giddy thrill of punching through those first two levels, pressing the ‘5’ key every few minutes for extra credits revealed a game that wasn’t built to be completed – I quickly came to realise, therfore, that Final Fight was a necessarily brief experience. Part of the Feng Shui of every swimming baths in the land, it wasn't there to be mastered: it was there for a restorative ten minute smacking after failing your 100m badge. It was there to be played with puckered fingertips and damp hair, on a Saturday morning. It was there to alleviate the boredom of those God-awful, 30-strong birthday parties you were delivered to every other weekend, up until you were about 12. And in that sense, there was nothing to touch it.
So next time you’re in a leisure centre - one of those disintegrating ones that’s been steadfastly deprived of council funding – just keep your eyes peeled for a dull, square footprint, stamped into the lino. It may have gone the way of public payphones and Seabrooks crisps - its old neighbours - but that space marks the spot where Final Fight once stood... the one thing that made swimming lessons halfway bearable.
