[hanasu]

If you think fighting games don't involve skill try beating an experienced Street Fighter 2 player having never played the game. When you lose, and lament that you 'simply haven't memorized the combos' go home and look them up. After you've realized that there's only one or two major combos to learn for each character in that game, come back and I promise you'll still lose. There's much more to it than that.

Most importantly, arcade games by their nature are finite. The limits of whatever storage medium used as well as the inability to rewrite or update them easily means that they exist in a vacuum. Once you've 'explored' the levels or found the 'secrets' they cease to be new. There are no more secrets. The strategy to beat single-player games never changes.

However the person you're playing against in a fighting game is always going to be different. Even if they play the same character as another person they will play them differently. They will have different skill levels and unique weak points to attack. No round of a fighting game is ever exactly the same. This is why fighting games are beautiful. They turn a static game into something timeless. There are still weekly Street Fighter 2 tournaments all over the world. When was the last time you competed with tens of other friends in say, Qbert 25+ years later?

[Noos]

I doubt you played Street Fighter 2 in the arcades when it first came out, then. This was a game where it was possible to redizzy people simply by spamming jab, or one where moves often did insane damage. SF really only became balanced around Super Street Fighter Turbo in the arcades, and a lot of people who play fighting games now don't realize how bad or frustrating a lot of that generation was.

[hanasu]

World Warrior is a bad competitive game. No doubt. Champion Edition is only slightly better. But that doesn't really take away from my point - a random person walking up to the game is not going to know how to do the CE Dictator dizzy/redizzies for example, nor know how to play lockdown defense with CE Guile to prevent them.

And it's not as simple as just 'memorizing' the combos if you never play well enough to get yourself in a position to land them. There's still a journey there both outside the game to learn and inside the game to break down the patterns in your opponent's play that will never be present in a single-player game. That's what keeps fighting games interesting and new 20+ years later for me.

[emodendroket]

I agree with the thrust of your post, but you're underselling how much time and energy people can devote to discovering absolutely perfect runs of single-player games.

[hanasu]

That's fair - although I was mainly referring to the era of arcade games referred to in the original blog post, and not to console speedruns and so forth that came later and cater more towards the 'perfect run' style of play. In the late 1970s/early 1980s there really weren't a lot of games that have 'perfect' runs. You simply can play the majority of them forever once you learn to play well enough since they repeat the same levels over and over. There are some exceptions like Donkey Kong and Pac-man that have killscreens, sure, but personally I don't find that 'beating the system' to play the same levels over and over to be very enjoyable. Since I'm not spending my allowance on the game, I want the game itself to be interesting rather than just long.

I do enjoy some games of this type like Robotron that have enough variation in the random patterns of the enemies to still feel fresh. I also love games like Pole Position or Outrun that have well-defined endings and force you to play 'perfectly' like you describe. However most games of this earlier time period are unfortunately just not designed that way.