Sega‘s Virtua Fighter was the first arcade fighting game to feature full 3D graphics, and was initially released in October 1993. It was a product of Sega‘s AM2 R&D team, a development group within Sega headed by Yu Suzuki, using the Sega Model 1 arcade board.

Virtua Fighter – on the face of it – is a very simple game: ten fighters; choose one and fight the rest to win the tournament. Or: play against a friend in versus mode.

Aside from the crowd-drawing 3D graphics, Virtua Fighter also had nuanced gameplay, even if – at times – it felt a bit like fighting in low gravity. Jumping is quite a slow and deliberate process in this game… But! It is possible for Virtua Fighter to explode into a frenzy of action that is still quite impressive today. And, after your second win in a row: expect no further mercy from the fighter AI!

Virtua Fighter was a big hit in arcades when it first came out and it went on to become one of Sega‘s best-selling arcade games of all-time. It’s been converted to other systems too, with the Sega 32X version version being notable as the best, because it was developed by the same team who made the arcade version, AM2! 🙂

More: Virtua Fighter on Wikipedia