Fighter Maker

At first blush, Fighter Maker might seem equivocal in name. Despite what its title might imply, Agetec’s 1999 PlayStation offering does not have a create-a-character mode where players can design the look of their fighter from the feet up; instead, one must choose from twenty-odd stock bodies. Moreover, you do not actually make a fighting game; instead, you design a single fighter's move-set and logic, the data filling up an entire memory card. But don't let the arguably false advertising of the title deter you—Fighter Maker is a landmark PS1 game.

The depth of character design in Fighter Maker unequivocally boggles the mind. In building your fighter, you can choose from more than twenty fighting styles ranging from Taekwondo to Pit Fighting. Among these are two different types of Jujitsu, multiple varieties of Karate, and three different types of professional wrestling. It is your task to assign strikes, throws, poses, and counters by style, and the possible combinations are staggering. How about a guy who mixes kickboxing strikes and superhero throws? How about a gal who blends high-flying lucha-libre holds with annoying Eddy Gordo-styled Capoeira strikes? With Fighter Maker, you can make it happen. You can also designate the probability of a fighter using a particular move in any given situation, and the degree of detail here could potentially confound the neurotypical. Much of the fun of Fighter Maker involves mashing up fighting styles and then watching the logic take on all comers, seeing how far the strategies you've developed can advance your character against the in-built logics of the CPU. 

And if that's not deep enough, Fighter Maker allows you to actually animate moves. Players who are detail-driven and pathologically patient can go in and build moves and taunts frame-by-frame. This level of customization was almost unheard of at the time of the game's release. Indeed, such a robust move editor would not be found in a fighting game until the "Move Craft" add-on was introduced to Fire Pro Wrestling World in 2020. Fighter Maker was ahead of its time by more than two decades. In all honesty, the sheer time-sink of the frame-by-frame animation probably turned off more people than it drew in back in the late 90s. Admittedly, your present correspondent really only uses the move editor to make minimal changes to the pro wrestling moves such that they all have botched landings where the victim is dropped awkwardly on his/her/their head, neck, or face (see image). 

Sure, Fighter Maker likely would have been better if it gave you the ability to edit fighter attire. The available body options are themselves rather banal, the characters mostly looking like knock-offs from established fighting game franchises of the time. There's a kickboxer who looks like Joe Higashi from Fatal Fury. There's an army guy with a haircut reminiscent of Guile or Paul Phoenix from Street Fighter and Tekken, respectively. There's also an army lady who looks like Sonya Blade of Mortal Kombat. There's an African-American man in a natty 70s-style suit who channels Tiger, Eddy Gordo's alternative skin in Tekken. (Alas, there is no tiger-headed rip-off of King from Tekken.) There's also Street Fighter EX's Skullomania, licensed directly from Capcom. And the default body type is an Asian guy in Kung Fu gear who blends all the stereotypical traits of a Ryu or a Liu Kang or, for that matter, a Bruce Lee. It's all quite predictable. But as you delve deeper into the software, the generic who's-who becomes less of a deficiency. For in the process of assigning and editing moves, your character's personality starts to emerge. In time, this body you’ve animated with life starts to grow on you. For instance, your correspondent gave the Guile-like guy a bunch of botched piledrivers and powerbombs, and what emerged was a reckless, irresponsible hotshot whom your correspondent sort of fell in love with. What’s more, the fighting styles you create are not locked to one body, so you can apply the move-set saved on your memory card to any character. That means you can see Joe Higashi or Eddy Gordo or Bruce Lee botch piledrivers, if that interests you.

You can edit your fighter's profile in detail, 
but none of this shows up in actual gameplay.

The only real downside to Fighter Maker is the fact that, with just the two memory card slots, you can only have a pair of custom characters going at any one time. If you're playing through the one-player mode (which is just six straightforward fights sans story), it'll be your choice of those two saved fighting styles versus the default logic of the stock characters. And if you want your two custom characters to face off in a simulated fight, it's more than a little tricky. First, you'll have to have two controllers hooked up. Then you'll have to go into VS mode and use the separate controllers to pick the player 1 and player 2 characters and manually set each to "CPU." Even then, there are sometimes bugs: your correspondent tried the above method on his PS3 and, in several cases, the player 2 AI was unresponsive, as if no one was playing the character. Truth be told, the PS3 is the best way to experience this game at present. With the virtual memory card function, you can create dozens of memory cards, each of which contains one of your custom logics. It must have become very expensive for old-timers playing this game back in 1999 on PS1, having to buy physical memory cards every time inspiration struck regarding ideas for a new character. 

All told, Fighter Maker epitomizes ingenious software that was way ahead of the curve. And though the learning curve is steep, especially when developing logic and animating moves, the effort is worth it when you see your unique brainchild kicking ass against the CPU. Fighter Maker marks one of the best examples of the true power of the PlayStation 1 compared to its console contemporaries. Fighter Maker shows just how far down the rabbit hole a disc-based system could take a gamer—it may have even taken the average gamer too far down, at least for 1999. But now in 2022 (or whenever you are reading this), where neuroatypicality is celebrated, you should take the time to go down that rabbit hole and give Fighter Maker the appreciation it deserves.