Between the latest Entries of classic series, brand new games, and improved versions of older fighters, there has never been a better time to be a member of the fighting game community (FGC).

Fighting is a major element in nearly all video games, but the ‘fighting’ genre cranks the connection between game and player up to 10. Fighting games have been around for nearly the entire history of the medium, and they have certainly had their ups and downs, their defining eras and dark ages. The fighting game community, and the games themselves, are very special to me, but I’ll take it a step further; I think this might be a new golden age (or Renaissance, if you prefer) for the genre.

All Your Friends Are Here

While Street Fighter 2 is where it started for me at my local Aladdin’s Castle, games like Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Primal Rage, and more flooded other arcades, giving me and my friends increasingly bloody and ridiculous ways to spend our days off school. But with the closure of the old arcade, and no nearby solution, I had to turn to consoles and then computers.

Game developers have been porting games for a long time, and fighting games have gotten in on that action just like everyone else. The team at Netherealm has generally done a great job of making sure their games were accessible as the years went on, Killer Instinct came back from the dead in 2013 with a new entry, with older versions (like the arcade versions I played) included in special editions of KI 2013, Rare Replay, etc). Virtua Fighter just came back, you can play Power Stone again, and I’ve lost track of how many versions of Street Fighter 2 I have.

Things have slowly gotten better and better, with more and more classics being brought forward for oldheads and newbies alike. Capcom has been crushing it lately with the Marvel vs Capcom Collection and the just-released Capcom Fighting Collection 2, and they deserve credit for that (particularly because they’ve been wanting to bring some of these games forward for years) but accessibility on modern hardware isn’t the only thing having me shouting from the rooftops.

With rollback netcode now the industry standard, I don’t have to rely on a local arcade to play with good players. Oh, your only friend who likes Guilty Gear lives in Britain and you are stuck in the US? No problem! Enjoy this buttery smooth connection, courtesy of the sorcerers over at Arc System Works. This type of accessibility and technological advancement is key to the survival of even niche fighting games, colloquially called “Discord fighters,” which have developed dedicated micro-communities on dedicated Discord servers that endure despite having no widespread ‘arcade’ presence. 

Speaking of Discord: nowadays if you love a fighting game, there is probably a Discord server for it. Sites like Dustloop and SuperCombo aggregate tons of information about some of the biggest and best fighting games, but Discords are where a lot of the action happens. For Guilty Gear enjoyers like myself, communities have loads of servers, including some completely dedicated to single characters, making it easy to find information on combos, setups, specific character matchups, and everything else you could want, and quite often, some of the best players in the world will be in there, too, so you can ask questions and get deep, insightful answers, all while connecting with people you can play games with whenever you like.

You don’t need to search the internet for great information anymore, however, as developers have also included some of the best teaching and practicing tools ever in modern games. Training modes, complete with hitboxes and frame data have been added to games that never had them originally (I love you, Marvel vs Capcom training mode), and a full-on arcade-crawling teaching mode is built into Tekken 8, letting you choose a character and ease into the incredibly deep well of Tekken, like a friend might. 

Replay takeover lets you see if you could have escaped that seemingly hopeless situation Kazuya put you in. Ghosts let you play eerily accurate versions of your friends, the best players in the world, and everyone in-between. Street Fighter 6 has a very detailed frame-data reader in training mode, letting you get very deep and nerdy with how you learn about characters and moves.

While all these things are legitimately fantastic, it also makes me happy thinking about how much further we can go. I’d love to get an enhanced version of Street Fighter III: Third Strike that isn’t trapped on 360 and PS3 (or just a port of Third Strike Online). Accessibility options like Modern and Dynamic control schemes in Street Fighter 6, teaching modes and ghosts from Tekken 8, and other advancements can be adopted by other studios and become standard in new games. These additions can inspire all-new modes, systems, and functionality that I can’t even imagine yet. A rising tide lifts all boats, afterall.

Like any so-called ‘golden age,’ things aren’t perfect. There are unforced errors in balancing from time to time, like the mess the Tekken 8 community has been dealing with lately, with incredibly powerful moves being changed from ‘whiff this and prepare to die’ to ‘abuse this powerful move, because it’s safe anyway.’ But since we’re not playing on an arcade cabinet (most of us aren’t, anyway), community feedback is heard, and updates often fix the most egregious imbalances (not always… some games get relegated to the ‘kusoge’ or ‘party game’ category if they lose enough competitive cache with the community). 

Some modernized fighting game collections choose inferior versions to use as the porting base, losing access to characters, game modes, and more. Weird sex pests and abusers have been outed within the fighting game community. But the community comes together, closes ranks, protects each other, and ousts the offenders. Fan-made mods restore cut content or even completely rework games like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite to create Infinite & Beyond, and the gaming community goes the extra mile to keep preservation efforts alive. The fighting game community, just like any good fighting game protagonist, doesn’t rest on its laurels… How can it? The grind of self-improvement is all there is.

What’s Next?

I could go on, but it’s after 11:30p, my daughter woke me up early, I spent two hours cooking, more than that editing Into The Skybox, and I could use a break. The point is that the future is bright for us parkway pugilists. I’m excited about the future of Guilty Gear: Strive (it even has the Dual Rulers anime coming out), 2XKO is still on the way, and I’m sure Capcom will announce Fighting Collection 3 before too long, but for now I’m happy to play Power Stone with my friend in New York, Dragon Ball FighterZ with people back home in California, Guilty Gear: Strive with my British Potemkin pal (who’s an absolute legend, by the way), and GranBlue Fantasy Versus Rising with an Australian, all from the comfort of my home office in Houston. You should join me for a game sometime. 

Man… what a world.

Editor’s note: And just yesterday, Sony announced Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a 4v4 Marvel tag-team fighting game by Arc System Works! 2026 cannot get here fast enough.