

Jaleco’s Rival Turf! was a bland version of Final Fight that got by for having the two-player co-op that Final Fight was sadly missing. Let’s throw out some redundancies so we can get crap like Tuff E Nuff on the list. The SNES has four Street Fighter games, four Mortal Kombat games, and three Fatal Fury games. A shame, since Art of Fighting 2 would have been a contender. Two rules for the list are as follows: First, no Japanese-exclusive games. To celebrate the fighting game genre’s early days, I’ve put together a list of the 15 best fighters on the SNES. Hell, make a fighting game centered around a popular rapping basketball player from the Orlando Magic! Nothing was off the table. Perhaps it was best to depict the characters as cartoon animals, claymated creatures, or crude beings made out of CG balls. Maybe they’d throw in some digitized actors and a little extra violence. The SNES life cycle also happened to play out at a time when developers were trying to figure out how to evolve Street Fighter II’s foundation.

Street Fighter without either cutting apart the engine (the former) or adding extra hardware (the latter). The PlayStation and Saturn could not properly support the likes of X-Men vs. By the time the SNES was winding down, fighters had advanced enough that the next generation of gaming hardware had trouble adapting them. At the time, the 16-bit consoles were able to make decent ports of those early fighting games and, because of the design of its controllers, the SNES generally supported that genre better than the Genesis.Įverything lined up. The SNES was released in late 1990 and Street Fighter II: The World Warrior hit arcades in early 1991. It’s really amazing how perfect the timing was between the rise of the fighting game genre and the dawn of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
