The image, of course, is instantly recognisable. There he is on screen, in that familiar jumping stance, his face beneath a bowl of black hair, his shorts in that classic combination of yellow and black. This is Bruce Lee, the martial arts legend, appearing in the forthcoming fighting sim, EA Sports UFC. The star of Enter the Dragon will be available immediately to those who pre-order the title, or he can be unlocked by completing the game at Pro difficulty. Playable across four weight classes, gamers will be able to test Lee's formative mixed martial arts approach against contemporary UFC stars.
EA's marketeers knew that gaming news sites would go nuts for this and they was right – the announcement was everywhere this week. Despite the fact that this complex icon of action cinema died over 40 years ago, his legacy lives on in games. Arguably, it started in 1984, with the launch of Datasoft's platform adventure, Bruce Lee, on 8bit machines like the Apple II, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The plot, which had the eponymous hero fighting through a wizard's temple to secure the secret of immortality, had little to do with Lee or his movies, but it was released at a time in which home video was making the actor's films easily available to a new generation of fans. And already there was an obvious synergy between Lee's highly choreographed, hyper-kinetic approach to action sequences and the potential of video games to explore and simulate combat.
Big bosses, dirty fighting
In that game, the fighting was restricted to punches and flying kicks, but in Japan a new genre of fighting sims was emerging that would explore martial arts in much more depth. Irem's seminal 1984 beat-'em-up Kung Fu Master made no reference to Lee – indeed, its Japanese title is Spartan X, which is exactly what Jackie Chan's movie Wheels on Meals was known as in Japan. However, the structure of the game – which has the player fighting through several floors of an enemy stronghold – is clearly a reference to Lee's final movie Game of Death, in which his character must battle different boss characters on five levels of a pagoda. Indeed, the whole concept of Game of Death, that a series of seemingly indestructible martial arts proponents all have a weakness that must be discovered and exploited, pretty much set the 'end-of-level boss' structure of beat-'em-up video games for the following 40 years.
Lee is there too in Konami's 1985 fighting game, Yie Ar Kung Fu, which features a lone fighter, Oolong, facing down a range of differently armed enemies. The cabinet art for the coin-op machine features an unmistakably traced image of Lee performing a high kick, while the concept of various enemies coming at the protagonist with authentic weapons, from nunchaku to tonfa sticks, again parallels Lee's movies, in which he sought to bring variety, accuracy and legacy, into his action sequences. 1985 also saw the excellent home computer fighting sim, Way of the Exploding Fist, a monicker that conjures Lee's movie titles and his philosophy of directing inner energy into points of combustive power. The game even used a sample of Lee's high-pitched combat yelp in its loading sequence.
Street fighters
But it is the modern fighting game genre that has drawn most from Bruce Lee's fighting style and iconography. In the Street Fighter series, Fei-Long employs Lee's Jeet Kune Do fighting style and wears his familiar black kung fu trousers and slip-on canvas shoes. Capcom's series also draws on the mystique and almost magical power that Lee portrayed in his movies and martial arts demonstrations; the supernatural moves such as the hadoken are effectively exaggerations of Lee staples like the "one-inch punch". Meanwhile, in SNK's World Heroes series, Kim Dragon is a martial arts movie star, clearly based on Lee, who feels he needs to prove his skill in a real-life tournament. Maxi from Soul Calibur and Jann Lee from Dead or Alive also draw from the Lee mythos in their clothing, fighting styles and attitude.
However, it is Martial Law in the Tekken series that really exemplifies the profound influence Lee has had on fighting game designers. Throughout the series, Law always has at least one outfit drawn from a Lee movie, including the legendary yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death, which was similarly appropriated by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill. Law also uses a number of throws and finishing moves drawn from Lee's action sequences, and even has a son, Forest, who carries on his legacy – a clear reference to Lee's own son, Brandon.
In Tekken too, we see the same fetishisation of martial arts lore and mythology that Lee's appeal seemed to invoke among Western viewers. The characters are ridiculous international caricatures, defined mostly by fighting styles that border on fantasy; they are figures of weird comedy and incongruity as well as violence.
Indeed, this is something most fighting games pull from Lee's canon – the idea that a plot can just be a group of disparate people meeting up for a fighting tournament. Every martial arts game ever made owes something to Enter The Dragon, Lee's multicultural beat-'em-up, with its clandestine fight club, exotic locations, and the central conceit that everyone present has a past to escape and an ulterior motive to fight through. Lee's films, like the best fighting games, combine tension, threat and humour; blaxploitation star Jim Kelly, granite-faced military veteran Chuck Norris and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, all provided interesting, almost comedic combatants hinting at the bizarre rosters to come in titles like Street Fighter, Tekken and Fatal Fury.
Legacy of Lee
There have, of course, been other semi-official tie-ins. The passable movie conversion, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story; the terrible Xbox brawler, Bruce Lee: Quest for the Dragon; the decent Game Boy Advance side-scroller, Bruce Lee Return of the Legend. But none of these really explored the legacy, atmosphere and style of Lee's movies like the truly great fighting games. To 1970s audiences in the West, Bruce Lee symbolised the 'otherness' of Asia and this is something the likes of Street Fighter, Soul Calibur and Tekken exploit and explore with their own characters, their own themes.
Bruce Lee's addition to UFC is interesting because it paints the actor not as some cult chopsocky star, but as a serious proponent and originator of mixed martial arts. Lee's style took in everything from austere classical systems to street fighting – so of course he should be here, going up against athletes he no doubt inspired.
Really, this shows how adaptable this pop culture legend is and how, like all true icons, Lee can be molded and re-interpreted to fit the tastes and concerns of each new generation.
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