WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Prize Fighter

Developer: Digital Pictures Publisher: Sega Sports Released: 1993

Say what you want about the limitations of full motion video games, you have to give Tom Zito and the group that would become Digital Pictures a lot of credit for pushing those limitations further than I’m sure anyone thought possible back in the early 90s.

Early FMV games were simply what we would call today quick-time-events. In 1983’s Dragon’s Lair, the arcade game that popularized FMV games in North America, you simply had to press a button or direction at the right moment during video playback in order to move on to the next clip and see what new tangle Dirk the Daring would get into.

Later on companies like American Laser Games would popularize the FMV shooting gallery in arcades with games like Mad Dog McCree and Who Shot Johnny Rock? But, again, super linear games.

Director James Riley and the group behind the Hasbro NEMO project’s Night Trap tackled the linearity issue by giving players the ability to access multiple streams of video which ran simultaneously and included more subtle changes to the story based on player input.

Prize Fighter represents a further evolution of the FMV genre and, in my opinion, one of the most exciting at the time. Considering the accepted limits of using full motion video in a game in the early nineties, the idea utilizing it in the creation of a first person fighting game seemed crazy. How could that ever work?

Pretty damn well, actually.

This is a Digital Pictures game, so story is major focus, and Prize Fighter hits all the beats. A main character who is an underdog? Check. Sleazy gangster asking you to throw a fight? Check. Oh, and of course we have a little kid whose boxer father died in the ring. The little guy hasn’t walked without crutches since that day.

The goal is to fight and beat four other fighters - Honeyboy Hernandez, Mega Joe Falco, T. Rex Hawkins and the champ, Nuke “The Duke” Johnson. Each fight takes place from the point of view of your character, The Kid. This is done through a series of clips of the fighter you’re facing dancing around and throwing punches. If you happen to be dodging or blocking (shown by two digitized boxer’s arms covering up the camera) you can avoid damage.

There are eight different possible punches you can throw based on which button you press and if you do so in combination with a direction on the D-Pad. You’ve got left and right jabs, hooks to the head, hooks to the body, and uppercuts. Just like with the block, punches thrown are represented with digitized boxer arms overlaying the video.

It’s surprisingly effective. Sure, missed punches look a bit odd as they float past a boxer who takes no notice of them, but if and when your punches land they result in a quick, satisfying clip of your opponent suffering the hit.

The whole game is an exercise in clever transitions between video clips. Besides the cutaways to the hits, every other video clip is only a few seconds long, always beginning and ending with your opponent coming in for a clinch, covering the camera for an instant of complete darkness while a new video starts up. It’s kind of brilliant, really.

There’s an RPG element as well. If you manage to win a fight, you get a few skill points that you’re able to distribute to your left and right punches, as well as your stamina. And while there are only four fighters, you can challenge them to a new bout if you want to grind up your abilities.

But that first fight can be a bear. Maybe it’s just because I know absolutely nothing about boxing, but I find it almost impossible to figure out when the opposing boxers have left themselves open for a hit, and which punch that should be. Luckily the game features an assist mode that will pop little arrows on the screen to show you when and which punch to throw. It only stays on screen for the first round of each fight, though.

Another aspect of Prize Fighter that I absolutely love is the decision to go film entirely in black and white. From an artistic standpoint, this works beautifully as an homage to Martin Scorsese’s wonderful film Raging Bull. From a technical standpoint, it also nicely sidesteps the limited color palette of the Genesis, which was a consistent problem for full-motion video games on the platform.

Speaking of Raging Bull, all of the boxers in Prize Fighter are hollywood stunt doubles. One of them, Jimmy Nickerson, was actually a stunt double in both Rocky and Raging Bull. The three other stunt guys have credits to the their names such as Terminator 2, Sin City, Lethal Weapon and The Fate of the Furious. Oh, and of course the great Michael Buffer appears as himself, the best ring announcer in history.

Prize Fighter has always been one of my favourite FMV games. The concept just seemed impossible when I first heard about it, and it was pulled off so well. Definitely a game worth playing.