Ancient Web: Diskman Traced Two Taiwanese DOS Fighters to Their Creators

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

One kid with a 386SX computer liked an obscure fighting game enough to build a website about it. Years later, that site helped him find the people who had made it.

Read Super Fighter Versus Sango Fighter

The author, Brandon Cobb, tells the story in an illustrated feature on Diskman Presents. His two favorites were Super Fighter, developed by Taiwan's C&E, and Sango Fighter, released by Panda Entertainment. Both offered a different answer to the early-1990s fighting-game craze for people playing on DOS PCs rather than arcade cabinets.

Cobb recalls first encountering Super Fighter through dial-up bulletin board circulation in Santee, California. Sango Fighter, drawing on the generals of China's Three Kingdoms period, followed. These are personal memories, not sales statistics, and that distinction is part of the article's appeal.

The fan page became a detective story

According to Cobb's account, the Unofficial Super Fighter Website went online on August 3, 1998, when he was sixteen. The goal was unusually specific: find the game's developers and thank them.

In 2001, former C&E character designer Joseph Chang found the page after searching for his own name. The site had been translated into Chinese by fellow supporter Gilbert Cheung. Chang connected Cobb with programmer Jon Cheng, and eventually Cobb reached C&E president John Kuo. Cobb says Kuo allowed the site to become the official Super Fighter website and later gave him the game rights.

That was the foundation for Cobb's Super Fighter Team, established in 2004 to make games for older systems.

The second half of the feature becomes a more complicated oral history. Through interviews with former developers, Cobb reconstructs the tangled relationship between C&E and Panda, a dispute over code used in Sango Fighter, and claims of unauthorized overseas distribution. Those accounts are explicitly attributed to the participants; they are not presented as court findings independently verified here.

There are screenshots of the fighters, named developers, recollections about working without a debugger, and details about abandoned ports. It is the kind of history that rarely survives in official game manuals.

Diskman Presents describes its mission as detailed research into obscure games and obsolete technology, with HTML proudly hand-coded in MS-DOS Editor. In this case, the old personal-web instinct to contact somebody directly produced something more valuable than another review.

Explore the original Diskman feature and its screenshots.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.