Along with these categories came cliches that still rear their ugly heads today while at the time were all too obvious for anyone who was familiar with these early systems.
A few of them include
Good and Evil
Ask anyone who has experience of the real world and they will tell you that there is no such thing as purely good or evil instead of there being many differing grey areas. In video games (both arcade and home console) it was more clear cut Evil consisted of ugly bastards and monsters. You can bet your arse that if you were fighting an evil bad guy in a game they were not going to be the best looking person in existence. They could have a weight issue that marked them as different or a nice scared face (think of hawk the slayer movie or any from the era to get an idea) they could be a big monster/dragon/robot something that could be personified as not human or someone that looked less than the ideal of beauty got the bad guy treatment in games. Even cripples and the handicapped were marked as different (surprisingly a lot of bullying back in those days as well) as the final boss from the beat em up Final Fight saw him kicking your ass from the sitting position of a wheelchair. The good guys on the other hand represented what we all aspired to in terms of looks and physical abilities so roll out the perfectly toned muscular chiseled jaw perfection of the main male protagonists. examples include Haggar' Cody and Guy (Final Fight) Rastan (Rastan Saga). equally the women as well who always seemed to be getting themselves kidnapped for our chiseled jaw hero to rescue were never less than the perfect ideal woman (ok games back then were aimed mostly at the young male audience) but could equally (as long as they showed more flesh of course) be just as easily another choice of player to use in games such as the valkyrie from Golden Axe the female ninja from Ninja Warriors or the multitude of skimpy clothed combattants from the many 1 on 1 beat en ups of the time. Games from the late 70s to late 90s sent a clear message if you're an ugly fucker or physically disabled in any way you are the bad guy.Last Remaining Hope
Earth for some reason always seemed to struggle to mount any sort of tactical defense against invasions in the game world (especially from ugly aliens). Much preferring instead to send a lone warrior or 2 against an entire military war machine from another planet. which to me at least seemed to have about as much chance of winning as I would using a spoon against the entire united states armed forces. This lone warrior bullshit was the mainstay of a lot of shoot em ups usually a lone spaceship that had technology more advanced than all the other ships in the fleet. Without the foresight to actually mass produce the fucker so as to stand any chance against an alien invasion. The lone warrior would also translate well to the more typical run and gun games such as Contra or Midnight resistance as well as the mystical heroes of role playing games at the time (just exchange new advanced tech for magical evil ugly dude destroying sword instead. One of the more annoying aspects of the game Rtype is that at the defeat of the final boss our lone hero is flying out of the enemy territory just having single handedly saved the entire human population only to be escorted home by exact replicas of the new advanced technology fighter he was flying (i don't know about you but if i was the pilot i would be more than a little pissed off by that revelation)The Princess is in Another Castle
Lets not kid ourselves it wasn't just Princess Peach or Daisy or whatever pseudonym she was going under to avoid paying tax. Bitches in games of that era were getting themselves kidnapped with alarming regularity. One might have thought they might want to invest in a personal alarm or possibly a gun but noooooooooo thankfully they always had a musclebound chiseled jaw hero to rescue them (sisters were deffo not fucking doing it for themselves in games back then) from gods reanimating the corpses of dead soldiers to rescue their fucking daughters in Altered Beast to gangs of thugs gut punching Billy Joes woman in Double Dragon before carting her off or Mike Haggars daughter getting kidnapped coz daddy was tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime in Final Fight even poor Mickey Mouse had to rescue his bitch of a girlfriend in Castle of Illusion. It seemed for a woman in video games there was only one sure fire way to avoid getting kidnapped and that was............
Bitches in Skimpy Outfits
As a woman in video game land you had 2 choices. Either get kidnapped or get your kit off and fight. Now exactly why the hell a womans fighting ability in a game was directly proportional to exactly how much flesh she had to bare was a mystery only to those programmers locked up for days on end creating games from lines of code in dark rooms in front of a computer (ohhhh ok i think i might have figured it out). It seemed the more revealing the outfit a woman had back then the better her chances of actually starring in the game. from the bikini wearing valkyrie of golden axe to the characters in final fight 2 or streets of rage less was definitely more. The multitude of 1 on 1 fighting games such as street fighter 2 (the first had no women probably locked up somewhere by ugly dudes waiting to be rescued) samurai showdown, fatal fury or king of fighters the tits got bigger and the dresses got smaller. unlike the previous cliches that have almost (but not quite) faded into sexist misogynistic history. the female character in skimpy outfit just went from strength to strength with each new technological gaming breakthrough. thanks to new graphical innovations tits now have a nice bounce in fighting games as in the Dead or Alive series.There are of course enough cliches in games of your to do a second write up on such as why it s socially acceptable in fighting games to get your food out of a dustbin .. But the above is just a few select examples i could be arsed to write with the time i had to write them with.
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