Chaos Theater Redux: Final Fight

Chaos Theater Redux is a Features series that follows up on topics previously discussed during the podcast’s 2011-2017 run. 

Some types of games are like comfort food, and for me that includes beat ‘em ups. You show me some rough looking men or women fighting their way through waves of enemies in blighted metropolitan slums, and I call that a good time. The year 1989 saw the release of two of my favorite arcade beat ‘em ups of all time: Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both games spawned sequels and fandoms that are still going strong. Final Fight’s story is as simple as it gets – the Mad Gear gang has overrun Metro City and kidnapped Mayor Mike Haggar’s daughter, Jessica. Playing as Haggar, Cody or Guy, you punch your way through every punk in the city to perform a daring rescue. 

The original arcade game has been ported multiple times across three decades, and it also spawned two SNES-exclusive sequels, the chibi style Mighty Final Fight on the NES, the Sega Saturn fighting game Final Fight Revenge and a PS2 reimagining titled Final Fight Streetwise. The original Final Fight is a game I have played countless times over the last 33 years, and I recently interviewed video game writer Darren Hupke about Final Fight, which is the subject of a new book he’s writing. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

MAHQ: How and when did you first encounter Final Fight, and what stuck out to you about the game? 

DARREN HUPKE: With my oldest friend in either the third or fourth grade. I just walked over to his house after chatting with him on the bus ride home from school. We lived in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. Him and his younger brother had a Super NES, whereas my brother and I were a Sega Genesis household, and I was always envious of the other games that were out there. They had a copy of Final Fight and we just hung out and played video games. I just loved it. I think the beat ‘em up genre is like pizza, in my opinion. There’s never really like a bad one – there’s always a good amount of fun to be had.

MAHQ: You mentioned being a Genesis household. Did you ever have the Sega CD port of Final Fight or no?

HUPKE: I own that now as an adult and I have it out of my shelf in the living room right now. I do love that port, and that  same friend who I played Final Fight with, we started a band years later and it was not good. We had a drum machine and I played guitar and we were into punk music. We had this whole gimmick where all of our songs were going to be about video games. We had a Metro City song and I ripped the audio intro from the Sega CD version to introduce the song.

MAHQ: We know that beat ‘em ups started to decline in popularity right around the same time that fighting games were on the rise. And of course Final Fight has deep connections to Street Fighter and was originally solicited as Street Fighter ‘89. Given that Final Fight has kind of died as an independent franchise, do you think that its characters crossing over into Street Fighter is its most tangible legacy?

HUPKE: Unfortunately it is. I do love that the DNA has just been there for years. Everyone from the Final Fight team moved on and their next project was Street Fighter II, and I think they just carried the DNA of what they created and were careful to sprinkle that in. The arcade version has a cheesy setup and ridiculous concept, but it’s really fun to play. The sequels never really captured me the same way as the original, though I still enjoy them. I picked up Street Fighter 6, even though I’m not a big fighting game fan as an adult. The world tour mode being anchored in Metro City and getting to see the characters and the Haggar statue was definitely a cool nod not just to Street Fighter history, but also Final Fight history.

MAHQ: Final Fight had a moment in the early 90s with the SNES sequels and Mighty Final Fight on NES. Then the series kind of petered out with the not well received Streetwise in the PS2 generation. Do you have any theories as to why Final Fight didn’t stick around outside of Street Fighter?

HUPKE: I think Capcom was growing, and generationally, while they kept to some of their core IP, they also always challenged themselves to make something new. And sometimes the generational changes didn’t allow their classic stuff to adapt in the same way. They made the Mega Man games and then the X series in the 16-bit era, and that was able to survive into the 32-bit era. I think translating those types of games into new experiences forced them to invent whole new series like Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter and Resident Evil. I think there’s still ways they could do [Final Fight]. I would love a Koei Tecmo Warriors spinoff like Persona 5 Strikers or Hyrule Warriors. Just give me a massive, open environment where I can just beat up hundreds of Metro City thugs.

MAHQ: In the last few years, we’ve seen a mini renaissance of the beat ‘em up genre. Some of the classic series like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon received new retro-inspired entries, and you have the continued presence of things like River City and Kunio-kun. Do you think that this could be a moment for Final Fight to return in a way that’s not just more ports of the arcade original?

HUPKE: Those are all great examples and the indie game spirit a lot of these developers bring to these games like Streets of Rage 4. That’s fandom love collaborating with the rights holders and it’s rad to see. I feel like, maybe internally, the folks who were involved with Final Fight at the start have moved on and out of Capcom, so I wonder if there’s anyone left internally who has the same emotional attachment to look out for either fan projects or fan interest. I’ve always been a huge comic fan and Udon has published Street Fighter comics for a long time. They’ve done backup stories or cameo appearances of the Final Fight characters, and I’d always dream of pitching and writing a Final Fight comic series. Last year, they produced a standalone Final Fight comic series, and I’m hoping that it was successful enough that they’ll continue on.

MAHQ: What made you want to write this book that you’re working on about Final Fight?

HUPKE: I’ve done a couple books in the 32 Bit Library series, and I had just wrapped the fourth volume of that series. It’s full catalogs from the original PlayStation library by publisher, so the first volume covered Capcom, volume two was Namco’s games, volume three was every Konami game and then volume four was a multi-publisher affair with Square, Atlus, Enix and Working Designs. So the four of them together in a big cool RPG-heavy book. It’s been really fun to put together, and while I was completely in the groove and could have easily continued to do more, I just thought creatively it would be nice to take a break and try something different. I’ve had a few different ideas of wanting to put together a Final Fight project or a different type of book. I originally was going to put it together as almost like an in-game or in-world type of feel, as if there was like a nameless or an unknown detective and you were reading through a case file essentially. So you would read about the history and plotlines of all the games, as if they were like written documents about somebody monitoring and observing what had happened throughout the the events of all the games, and then there would be fun interviews and things with characters in games that I would have come up with myself. As I was doing the visuals and layouts for it, something in me just clicked that it wasn’t coming along the way I wanted it to. I just took all of that research and effort and just converted it into more of a series retrospective. I like the idea of doing that not just for Final Fight 1, which always gets a lot of coverage and you just don’t hear a lot about the history of Final Fight 2 or 3, or just the series itself in general. 

MAHQ: I’ve read gaming history books from people like Jeremy Parish, and I know that for people documenting game history, a big problem is tracking down any kind of primary sources from the 80s and 90s, or even sometimes finding out who worked on these games because they all used pseudonyms. So what kind of challenges have you encountered, if any, in trying to dig up information about the Final Fight games? 

HUPKE: It’s been exactly that. The era of the 80s and early 90s with their pseudonyms and pen names. And that makes it difficult to actually match who was who in the development process and so I’m primarily digging through old magazine previews and scans from monthly magazines to read about, just the context from that vantage point. Luckily there have been some official interviews that Capcom did, and usually when they speak about the history of Street Fighter II, there’s always a conversation around Final Fight as well. So I found a good number of interviews about the origins of the series itself from those original developers. I’m digging into Final Fight 3 right now, and there are no end game credits or any credits in the U.S. manual for the game either. There’s just literally no names attached to it, so that has also been a little bit frustrating. 

MAHQ: Why don’t you tell me about some of the other writing projects that you’re working on right now?

HUPKE: There’s the 32 Bit Library series of books I mentioned before. Along with the Final Fight book I also am working on a zine project. The Final Fight book was meant to be the palate cleansing in-between project of my big book, and so I’ve convinced myself to make a little thing called Retro Game Zine. I mentioned before that I like to listen to punk music, and back then it was common to have Xerox-style paper zines that were easy to put together and distribute. Each issue is just talking about one game, with one article about the history of the game and one that’s a personal essay that lets me flex the creative writing muscles as well. And there will be some visual aspects like box art, screenshots maybe toys or merchandise – unique relics related to the game. I thought of the idea on a Saturday and started writing that afternoon and was in this creative fever; by that evening, I wrote 3,000 words and was finished. I decided I might as well make a Kickstarter for this, so I threw up the page for it and that was super motivating. I’m also working on an anthology, collecting and compiling a bunch of essays and personal stories from as many folks as I can. Whether it’s humorous or heartfelt or talking about overcoming a challenge, it’s when people’s connections to a game became greater than whatever was going on in their lives.

MAHQ: Is there anything else you wanted to say about Final Fight? 

HUPKE: Play it, enjoy it and talk about it online and tag Capcom’s social media handles. Any of that interest can get somebody’s attention to help do something more or do something new with it. Or we can help petition Capcom to let me write an official comic or book about it, and that would be even better because then I could have my fingerprints on the series officially.