Karate Champ

Karate Champ is the game that invented the one-on-one fighting genre. Before Street Fighter, before Fighter's History, there was this: two karateka on a plain dojo mat, a referee who awards points for clean technique, and the first-ever library of fighting moves mapped to a controller - forty-odd moves from a pair of joysticks, in 1984.

The control scheme is its legend: the left joystick picks your stance and move type, the right one executes direction, and together they produce the kicks, sweeps, jumps and throws that every fighting game since has inherited. The match structure is pure tournament karate - first to two points, judged by technique quality, with bonus rounds (bull charging, brick breaking, object defense) between bouts. The US release made it a two-player versus phenomenon and its roster of moves was directly cited by Street Fighter's creators as the founding template. It looks primitive; it is actually the genome.

• ▸The original 1-vs-1 fighting game - the genre's direct ancestor
• ▸A forty-plus move library from dual 4-way joysticks
• ▸Tournament scoring: technique quality judged, not health bars
• ▸The famous bonus rounds: bull charge, brick break, object defense