Everybody was Kung-Fu fighting
Fighting is the most ancient form of conflict resolution and asserting dominance among animals and humans alike. During peaceful times, over the centuries, it has evolved into cultivated sports in civilized cultures. Inflicting physical damage or rendering an opponent incapable of combat has also developed into a myriad of martial art disciplines.
It’s no surprise that the earliest video games wanted to emulate these activities as much as the state of the art allowed it at that time. The earliest documented fighting game dates back to 1976. It was made by SEGA with the title Heavyweight Champ. A boxing game designed with a special arcade cabinet housing two boxing glove-shaped controllers on levers. It was a rude interpretation of the real-life sport, but during that era it was considered an advanced technology. Adapting existing sports into video games played a key role in discovering the possibilities of video games.
Another game that followed suit was a hit classic with a similar name called Karate Champ. It was developed by Technōs Japan in 1984, released at the dawn of the ‘karate’ era, the same year when Karate Kid hit the cinemas. Being the first complex martial arts fighting game, the commercial success was granted. It featured a novel 2 joystick per player gameplay that allowed players to execute 24 moves. The developers later went on to make another arcade fame, Double Dragon in1987. This date marked the birth of another legendary series, which was created by an iconic figure of this genre:
Takashi Nishiyama, originally planning to be a journalist, became a game designer by chance. His first notable work was Moon Patrol, the first game that featured parallax scrolling. He then contributed to other fighting games such as KungFu Master, which was a scrolling beat ’em up with the first instance of boss fights. The success of the game inspired another soon-to-be-famous company to poach him. The company was Capcom. While working there, he made another fighting game called Trojan. These games laid the foundation for the archetype of the 1v1 fighting game genre. His ideas later crystallized in a game that became a worldwide phenomenon: Street Fighter.
He combined some elements of his games as well as took inspiration from Karate Master and blended it into a complete gaming experience that captivated gamers for generations to come. It focused on “boss fights”, had compelling backstories for the characters with all kinds of martial arts backgrounds, a variety of special moves, and even bonus stages. Capcom’s and Takashi’s most interesting approach however in my opinion was not the game itself but the controls they came up with for the arcade cabinet. Instead of the usual buttons, it had two, big pressure-sensitive rubber pads, one for punches and one for kicks. The pneumatic system registered how hard the pads were pushed and could differentiate between weak, medium and strong attacks for all types of hits. It was a fresh and experimental approach by Takashi who wanted to overcome the limitations of the arcade sticks and it also happened to fall in line with the desire of the company to enter the league of deluxe arcade cabinets among Namco and SEGA. It didn’t work out as they planned though, users were complaining that the pads were hurting their hands and it was too tiresome. In the end, they switched to a six button version with each different strength attack assigned to a different switch. Maybe if Capcom and Takashi had tested different sizes and stiffnesses for the pads on the arcade (which was made by Atari), a better result would have occurred, and the whole evolution of gaming controls would have shown a different landscape.
Takashi and this game laid the foundation and showed the blueprint for all fighting games that came after it. Later, he joined SNK to work on the NEO GEO home console and many more fighting games. His name has been cemented as one of the top pioneers of the combat game genre. But more importantly, he was one of the first to experiment with different input controls for games. Later on, other companies had also tried pressure sensitivity with mixed results, most notably Namco’s Negcon and the DualShock 2/3 controllers for Playstation which both had pressure-sensitive buttons. The travel distance of these smaller inputs were too short for precise control, analog triggers are a lot more suitable for this task.
Kickstart my heart
In 2022, when we were slowly running out of funding, we had to come up with a quick way to achieve market validation for the controller. From the moment we had working prototypes, I started contacting game studios and indie developers left and right to get our controller test units sent to them for testing. Skateboarding simulators, dragon simulators, boxing games, fighting games…whatever we thought could be a suitable candidate to showcase the product. There was only one slight problem: studios and developers had zero incentive to port our hardware to their games. I appreciate every one of them who was kind enough to test it, but pretty much that’s all they could do. There’s no one to blame because there was simply nothing in it for them. Games aren’t made with this kind of control scheme in mind, and the “if they won’t, then we will” mentality unfortunately doesn’t work in these cases. We couldn’t just port our controller to games, as that would have required us to get the source code. We tried the next best thing to alter the games: mods. We had some success, but the results were limited and far from ideal—crude workarounds with too many compromises. It’s hard to admit, but it was, and somewhat still is, the Achilles’ heel of the whole project. Nonetheless, with time ticking, we had to come up with a solution fast.
It turned out during testing that the special wrist analog inputs of the Gemini controller, though not intentionally, were very well suited for air/space navigation. Drones, for example, use four directional inputs: pitch, roll, yaw, and altitude. The pitch, roll, and yaw axis movements of the left half of the gamepad perfectly correspond with the way a drone moves in the air. Complemented with the Z-axis of the thumbstick, the full range of motion is achieved with only one hand. You couldn’t ask for a more intuitive control for flying a drone. It was also a lucky coincidence that air and space flight simulator games have very advanced hardware configuration options to accommodate custom hardware like flight sticks, throttles, etc. So, out of necessity and pressure from diminishing funds, we put all our eggs in one basket and focused on these games. We started a crowdfunding campaign emphasizing the advantages of a controller for this genre. The original 1.0 Gemini prototype had only two shoulder buttons and triggers, so we made a 2.0 version that would feature a lot more buttons (24, to be exact), meeting the requirements for these simulators.
Even though we spent a lot of time preparing the campaign, setting it up from Hungary was troublesome. We had to establish a U.S. company to run it on Kickstarter. Long story short, we had to cancel it around halftime, as the goal wouldn’t have been reached. Of course, I wanted it to succeed, but the failure turned out to be a blessing. I later found out there would have been a conflict between the U.S. subsidiary and our investor, a Hungarian state-owned venture capital firm (some of the funds were EU-granted). In other words, it would have violated specific regulations unbeknownst to us, and if we had succeeded with the campaign, it would have bitten us in the ass. Closing the U.S. firm was a lot harder than opening it. We even had to hire a company just to help with the legal administration.
If there’s any lesson to be learned from this, it’s maybe that we shouldn’t have rushed things and should have taken more time to build hype for the campaign and gain a bit more in-depth knowledge of this game genre. The general trust of backers on Kickstarter has also diminished after a few questionable hardware campaigns, like the Ouya or the Grifta controller. But the concept—a multi-axis, compact, handheld controller for air/flight sims—is still very valid, and nothing proves it more than an American company releasing a gamepad specifically for this purpose. It’s called the Yawman Arrow. Why is their product a success and ours isn’t? To pinpoint the differences, they sure have a lot more insight into the flight simulator business, and their gamepad was designed from the start for these games only.
That’s all folks, I hope you enjoyed the reminiscence of the past, the next post will catch up with the present day actualities of the development.
Stay tuned…
