Totally Studly
I have an affectionate fascination with video games that look fictitious. Whenever a TV show, movie, or even cartoon wants to depict a legally distinct video game for their characters to play, they always show something that looks familiar but is entirely wrong. It’s like the uncanny valley of video games.
It shows a charming unfamiliarity with the medium. However, when it happens in an actual game, you realize that couldn’t be possible. Someone who has to be familiar with other games made this. Looking like an accident was, in fact, an accident.
1990’s Pit-Fighter has an excuse. It was one of the first attempts at using digital images of actors in a video game, a technique that would be made popular by 1992’s Mortal Kombat. There is also an excuse for it being about as much fun as eating a bowl of glass. It was released before Street Fighter II came along and demonstrated how fighting games should be made. On the other hand, I’m not sure what its excuse is for looking like a tournament held at the local neighborhood sex dungeon. Someone in 1990 thought Pit-Fighter looked cool, and they were tragically wrong.
Awesomely done
Pit-Fighter is about an underground fighting tournament. A tale as old as time. What makes it stand apart is its hairless, baby-oil-slathered protagonists. You’ve got three choices: a kickboxer, a karate guy, and a wrestleman who looks like he pooped himself. They’re macho in the way that bodybuilders are macho. That is to say, not at all, but I wouldn’t say that to their face.
Meanwhile, your enemies are a bunch of leather daddies and one woman who has decided to fight in thigh-high stilettos. The big bad boss is literally this big dude in a leather mask and bondage harness. I’m not one to kink-shame, but I feel that Pit-Fighter must have confused the development of a lot of young teenagers.
You fight your way through 10 rounds. This doesn’t last long, but Atari Games made sure to create it in a way that necessitated pumping in a few quarters throughout its playtime. You only have one health bar for the entire game, so unless you can somehow manage to never get hit, you’re likely going to need to slot a few more coins if you want to give Big Daddy Masochist a spanking at the end.
Confusingly erotic
A lot of Pit-Fighter’s actual mechanical issues are related to the timeframe it was released in. 1990 was pretty early for its digitized graphics. As such, there is absolutely no artistic flow to anything. There are few frames of animation, so there’s a jerky quality to everything. It uses a lot of sprite scaling to make things more dynamic, but it just makes things even more sickly and fake-looking. I never really liked the method of digitizing actors for games, even when it was done well in games like Mortal Kombat, but they had to start somewhere.
The whole product is just so viciously ugly. There are levels where cars are parked in the arena (for some reason), and you can jump on them and crinkle their hood. However, these are very plainly drawn and not digitized pictures, and boy, can you tell. They look like they were ripped from Top Gear and clash against the more realistic crowd and fighters.
Meanwhile, Pit-Fighter was a pre-Street Fighter II fighting game, so fun had yet to be incorporated into the genre. In many ways, it reminds me of 1989’s Street Smart, but somehow even tackier. It’s a three-button setup, and all this oily muscle bashing takes place on a 2.5D area. You can combine buttons to create fancier moves like grabs, but there’s so little reason to do so. It’s extremely difficult to hit an enemy without them immediately hitting you back, and likewise, they have no defense against you. You sort of just chase them around the arena and hope that you deal more damage than you take.
Leather daddy
And then there’s Mad Miles, who looks like someone who won a bet and forced the developers to put them in. Unlike some of the other beef mountains you fight against, this guy looks like my dad could take him in a fight. I think maybe he’s supposed to make up for that by being kind of crazy, but that never comes across in the game. Instead, he just has a mustache that says, “My ex-wife won custody of the children.” The way he flops on the ground, I kind of feel sorry for him. He also only turns up in one fight, which makes him feel like an accident. Or a secret mode, like when you beat up the car in Final Fight. He’s not threatening, he’s just not welcome in this BDSM dungeon.
Then, once you finally climb a mountain of shaved cattle, you fight the biggest bottom to frequent this particular establishment. Pit-Fighter isn’t the only piece of media to think that wearing nothing but boxers and a leather harness is a sign of toughness, but that is absolutely not what it communicates to me. Especially not when partnered with a leather mask.
If you’re playing multi-player, you have to fight all your teammates to decide who gets to top the competition. I’m not sure why this is necessary, aside from the fact that maybe they didn’t want to palette-swap the leather daddy to make things fair. So the losers of this match pumped in all those quarters and don’t get to end the day as king of the S&M club. That’s a confusing sort of disappointment.
Brutality bonus
Just to top this whole, writhing container of oiled flesh, Pit-Fighter also has an awful fascination with money. It’s as if Smash T.V. wasn’t exaggerating the depraved depths of human greed. Instead, your fighter gets to stand on a wooden skid as money is piled beneath them. Then at the end, you get the typical view of scantily clad women clinging to your leather beef sack.
Pit-Fighter is just a hilarious and unfortunate amalgam of all the worst parts of ‘80s style. All those embarrassing things that people once thought were cool are stuffed into this game. Because the internet came along and has told us all what those leather harnesses are actually for, Pit-Fighter just looks like a cluster of uncomfortable eroticism.
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