When we think of Jackie Chan, we typically think of his many famed martial arts Hollywood blockbusters like Rumble in The Bronx, or even his earlier Asian movies like The Drunken Master! What we don’t typically think of to associate Chan with is video games.
Jackie Chan’s Fists of Fire, was one of those more obscure arcade titles from the mid 90′s, a time when the classic arcades of America were being flooded with more games than arcades could possibly store, and it was a time when the classic arcade was taking a backseat to state of the art home console rivals like the Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo 64.
While Chan’s Fists of Fire arcade martial arts brawler didn’t live up to the fame and fortune of other competing fighting series like that of Street Fighter, who didn’t want to play as one of the world’s most famed martial arts figures in a fighting game that seemed ultra realistic for its time.
The developers of Fists of Fire used digitized images of real human actors, including Jackie Chan himself, who himself actually played a hand in the game’s development.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t the first Jackie Chan fighting game, but rather Fists of Fire was actually the upgraded version of a previous Chan labeled brawler called “Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan.” Both game hit the arcade scene in North America back in 1995, the same year Rumble in The Bronx launched to fans of crowded movie theaters.
Unlike the previous version of the game, Chan’s Fists of Fire offered the ability to play as all 3 versions of Chan himself right from the start of the game, a feature you had to unlock in the older version.
Developers did an awesome job depicting Chan in both game titles, and had improved upon the concept of featuring real human characters in video games, a concept that until that time had remained quite primitive in the world of game development.
Pit Fighter was among the earliest attempts at introducing real human characters into video games, and later titles like Street Fighter The Movie Arcade, and Mortal Kombat as well both played a hand in bringing realism to modern gaming platforms.
