Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition Enters The Ring

Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition Enters The Ring

Eyes on the Prize.

When you look back at the full-motion video-based games of the 1990s, you can’t help but be impressed by their diversity. Modern-day FMV adventures tend to cluster toward the “narrative adventure” end of the design spectrum, but FMV’s heyday saw the tech—which combined prerecorded footage with real-time interactive elements—deployed across a remarkable array of genres. That was especially true of developer Digital Pictures, whose most famous games couldn’t have been more different from one another. At one end, you had Night Trap, a real-time story-based adventure based around surveillance and camera feeds leading to many possible outcomes and endings; at the other, you had Sewer Shark, a linear tube shooter whose most challenging decision was to force you to ask yourself, “Do I make little pew-pew-pew noises while I play or nah?” And then there’s Prize Fighter, one of the most interesting applications of FMV ever concocted.

The thing about FMV was that it didn’t easily lend itself to true interactivity, since all the video had to be filmed and encoded in advance, then played back as it existed. That’s great for, say, a forced-scrolling shooter where the background flies past at a steady clip, or for a story-based game where you make choices that shift you into a new (but predetermined) dialogue path. It’s less great for an action game, especially a detailed action game where you input rapid commands that result in big, splashy, immediate reactions. You know. Like a boxing game, where your opponent hits you with a flurry of punches, dances around the ring, and takes the occasional massive blow to the face when you actually manage to land a punch.

And yet, Prize Fighter for Sega CD did precisely that. Inspired by the award-winning film Raging Bull, Prize Fighter put you in the shoes of an aspiring pugilist who faced off against four rival boxers on the road to the championship… and it all played out through FMV. It was an awfully ambitious approach to a boxing game—like a real-life, noir-style take on Punch-Out!!

When you stop and really dissect the way Prize Fighter worked, it combined principles from several early FMV-based games and created a sense of seamless interactivity with some clever masking tricks. Each boxing match consisted of a pre-taped video of a rival boxer performing moves, with each video sequence pulled at random from a pool of potential segments. Your rival occasionally moved in for a clench, which allowed a new video segment to load in. And when you managed to slip a punch past their guard, the screen cut quickly to a video snippet of the other boxer eating glove leather… which was very dramatic and cinematic, but also a handy way of slipping some interactive visual feedback into a format not really designed for it!

Ah, but where’s the fun in our spoiling the interactive movie magic? What made Prize Fighter so appealing was the way that it managed to bring FMV into a genre that seems poorly suited for pre-baked video content and somehoew made it work. And not just work, but work with style! That style is on full display more impressively than ever with Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition for PlayStation 5. Heavyweight Edition is not simply some emulated ISO dump of a 30-year-old game—it is a massive, substantial rebuild of the original. It plays the same, but it looks far more impressive than anyone could have anticipated back in the 16-bit days. The action in the original Prize Fighter played out through a tiny window that took up about a quarter of the total screen real estate, ran at a frame rate so low you could practically see the refresh rate, and reduced the lush black-and-white film to a grainy impression of the real world. Even the canceled remake for Sega Saturn struggled with the limited video bandwidth of ’90s game tech. Prize Fighter used to play like boxing via webcam—impressive at the time, but tough to go back to.

But displaying full-frame, full-motion, full-resolution video? That’s child’s play for PlayStation 5. And unlike the CG-rendered FMV that became the dominant format during the 32-bit era, which would have to be completely recreated from the ground up to meet modern visual standards, Digital Pictures shot Prize Fighter on real Betacam tape. Which means that, in theory, Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition could include a high-definition transfer of the original tape elements—right?

Well, no need to deal in the theoretical, because that’s exactly what Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition does. Gone are the pixellated postage stamps of pugilism. Now the action in Prize Fighter spans nearly the entirety of a widescreen modern television, with the detail to match. This allows the quality and depth of the original media to shine through for the first time: not only the sweat and slobber of its fearless fighters, but also the hazy atmosphere and moody lighting of the film elements. If the original Prize Fighter hinted at film noir, Heavyweight Edition brings it to life so vividly you halfway expect to see De Niro jump into action at the sound of the bell.

Despite this radical visual glow-up, Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition plays the same as ever. Players duke it out through multiple rounds against four opponents, blocking and jabbing and generally trying to outfight their rival… a task made easier by the on-screen QTE prompts that appear on screen. Let’s keep it real, though: they hadn’t invented the term “QTE” back when Prize Fighter first shipped. This is a game designed to play like a super fast-paced take on Dragon’s Lair, combined with Nintendo’s 1970s version of Wild Gunman—the one where you took aim at filmstrips of desperadoes and banditos. But none of those games looked as lush as Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition. It’s a new-school overhaul for an old-school video game, a truly one-of-a-kind production.

Preorders begin today for PlayStation 5 ($29.99) and run through October 4. Don’t be a washout! Punch your way to victory with this rare physical release of a remastered classic.