When Taito launched the F3 arcade platform in 1992, they needed a killer app – a game that would show the world the amazing 2D capabilities of the platform. Enter Riding Fight, one of the first few games released on the F3 hardware that showed the potential of the platform early on before the development teams had a firm grasp on what the F3 could and couldn’t do.

Riding Fight was released to the gaming public just as the fighting game boom of the early 1990’s was underway. Street Fighter 2 and Fatal Fury released the year prior, but other developers were still playing catch up to the new genre craze so side-scrolling beat-em-ups were still quite popular at this time in game centers across the world. 

Sadly, there is no sales data or even archived critical reviews from when Riding Fight was released in 1992. There isn’t even a Wiki page for this game! About all we do know about Riding Fight is that it was released on the first run of Taito F3 integrated PCBs, so there is no cartridge version of the game. My guess is that the game is quite rare given I’ve only once come across a dedicated PCB for it in my many years of following retro arcade games and hardware.  We can also guess that the game sold poorly and, to my knowledge, never saw a release outside of Japan. Riding Fight was also not ported to any home consoles of the day, nor has it been included in any classic Taito game compilations that have been released over the years. It’s obscure even in the emulation scene.

So, what makes this obscurity worth your time? Well…

Riding Fight is a strange genre mashup between a futuristic racer, like F-Zero (actually, it looks a lot like F-Zero), and Final Fight. The tie to F-Zero is immediately apparent as the game looks like it was designed on a turbo-charged Super Nintendo with its Mode 7-like presentation. The main hook here is that rather than scroll horizontally like most brawlers, Riding Fight puts the player on a hoverboard and scrolls the screen toward the background automatically like a racing game. You still have the ability to move in all cardinal directions in order to defeat the bad guys, but the screen scrolls automatically.

Other than the odd, racing game like presentation, Riding Fight is about as standard of an arcade brawler as the rest of them. You have a short auto combo as you mash the attack button, you have a jump button and one jumping attack (that slams your hoverboard into enemies – and is oddly satisfying), and you have a special attack you can use to get a swarm of enemies off of you and deal big damage. The power of the special attack depends on the amount of meter you’ve built in a gauge that sits under your life bar at the top of the screen. If full, the special attack lasts longer and does max damage. Additionally, if you get in close you have one throw you can perform to quickly dispatch a foe.

Enemies are of standard brawler variety, in that there are only a couple enemy types with different color pallets that denote different levels of strength. At the end of each stage, you have to defeat a boss that rides in on some ostentatiously large tank. In these one-on-one battles the game ditches the hoverboard, the scrolling stops, and the fight plays out like a standard beat-em-up boss battle.

Really, the gameplay is all quite standard and uninteresting. Hit detection is solid, though, and hit-box placement makes sense unlike the squishy feel of more popular brawlers of the day like Konami’s TMNT series. Despite the “game feel” being on point, there just isn’t much going on here to interest players already tired of the shallow gameplay of most beat-em-ups…except for the graphics.

Riding Fight is less about engaging gameplay and more about presenting the player with a 2D graphical experience that was only rivaled by Sega’s Super Scailer arcade titles like Galactic Force or Space Harrier. Sprites scale smoothly as you move around the screen, and some bosses tower over you when they are close to the camera (screen) and get gradually smaller the further from the screen they move. Background layers scroll smoothly at a rock-solid frame rate, and performance across the board is stellar even when the screen is full of huge, scaling, and rotating sprite work. It’s all very impressive, even 30 years later. Sound design is a mixed bag, though - effects are fine, but the music is horribly repetitive with short loops and little variety.

While Riding Fight is unique in its main graphical hook, it's not the first game to do an on-rails, F-Zero style brawler. Konami's TMNT games have a few auto-scrolling sections, and the SNES port of Turtles in Time takes advantage of the hardware's signature Mode 7 layer scaling to produce an effect in a late game stage (Neon Night Riders) that is not unlike Riding Fight. 

Riding Fight is a mediocre game at best. Its only interesting hook is its F-Zero like presentation, which is mostly unique. But, because it’s a solid game that feels good to play, I still say it’s worth a shot if you like quirky arcade games and/or beat-em-ups. If you want to give the game a shot, you have two options: play it on the multi-arcade emulator Mame or you can play it on actual F3 hardware if you have a multi-game kit. You could try to source an actual PCB, but because so few of these boards are in circulation, there is no way to estimate value. The one board I've seen in my research is from a private collector and they estimate the board to be worth around $1000 as a loose PCB.

At the end of the day, playing Riding Fight at least once will give you something interesting to talk about with your gamer friends, as I guarantee they’ve never heard about the game. That’s definitely worth a few credits of your play time.

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