Street Fighter 1 (1987) gave us Mike, the Black American boxer (an enduring trope), while Pit-Fighter (1990) gave us South Side Jim. But it gets better, don’t worry.įrom their inception, fighting games have continued to draw upon cultural and gender diversity when it comes to character selection. Games were an extension of belief systems around American race relations. Still depending on popular stereotypes of the time-facilitated by the mainstream co-opting of hip-hop culture and a Reagan’s race-based conservative War on Drugs-the creation and upholding of “value systems and hierarchies of one constituency,” as Murray wrote, still holds true. These beat-em-ups, from Quartet to Crime Fighters and others like Streets of Rage (1991) reframed Blackness from the tracks and fields to the streets and alleyways, which was not really a positive leap. In the same year of 1989, however, Ghostbusters 2 for the Gameboy and Konami’s Crime Fighters for the arcade gave you the choice of picking a Black character whilst not being restricted to the second player slot meaning you could finally be Black and the first player. This was a passive form of using Black characters to facilitate Black inner-city settings. They were somewhat accessories in framing urban culture. These black and brown enemies only help to legitimize the setting of the inner-city through stereotypes and race based caricatures. In Final Fight (1989), you don't get to pick a Black character, but darker people are present as enemies throughout the rough pixelated streets of the Capcom title-so this didn't really count. These games also highlight another setting, like sports, that mainstream video games often showcased Black characters in-the inner city.
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Video games are complex systems of visual culture that "create and uphold value systems and hierarchies of one constituency"-often the dominant class at the expense of another, says Soraya Murray in her book On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space, published in 2017.
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As a Black queer gaymer, the only time I ever saw myself on the screen was through character creation, but that’s just cheating in the context of this story. People of color have often been portrayed in popular media as stereotypes and tropes that speak to an underlying structure of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of systemic oppression. Similar to other mediums, such as film, music, and literature Black culture has been, and is, integral to grappling with our collective understanding of video game history.
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From the 8-bit days to the 4k Ray Tracing present, Black video game characters have occupied various positions from the precarious period of early sports games in the ’70s, which included titles like Heavyweight Champ and the nameless grayscale sprites, to Spider-Man: Miles Morales as the poster child for a new gaming generation today, Black representation has come a long way. Black history permeates all facets of our lives-and video games are no exception.