In an era of attitude and martial art prowess, the 90s saw an increasing audience hungry for the blood, gore and fist-fighting that was part and parcel of the human condition. The properties and ideas that revelled in this concept also faced the fiercest competition, and while the victors still profit to this day, the loser’s stories still echo. In 1993 as the boon of competitive fighters was taking off, a franchise tried to cement Sega as the more mature alternative, in the competitive realm of Eternal Champions.

An immortal being known as the Eternal Champion has plucked nine fighters throughout history who have all had the makings of great potential, only for their lives to be snatched short from them. From the Salem Witch trials to seven years into our future, a unique cast of characters. Only one of them can have a second chance and the only way they can prove their worth is through hand-to-hand battles to the death, in often spectacularly gruesome fashion.

Eternal Champions offers a lot, all while keeping the verisimilitude of reality (one that helps ground the premise nicely). The player “downloads” the character’s biographies, and in certain modes they can customise the parameters customisable like the X-men’s Danger Room. The sprite work is cool with some animations and a whole lot of parallax scrolling to keep things looking pretty, and of course, the kills are as graphic as ever. This alone wouldn’t make Eternal Champions a very good fighter, without a roster of characters to back it up, and Eternal Champions goes all in crafting colourful combatants complete with their backstories and motivators for entering the tournament. With a cast including mercenary biochemists, modern-day Ninjas, and 1920s mobsters, they all feel they leapt off of comics and the cartoons of the era.

Despite only having a few buttons and a d-pad for movement, each wrestler has an impressive arsenal of moves, requiring an extra degree of finesse, that I am unable to pull off. Its crowning feature is its Mortal-Kombat-inspired stage fatalities, called Overkills, where a character will be violently into the background if the player can land a skillful combination of button presses. While mastering these moves was beyond my reach, the graphic and gory details of these moves have since been well-documented, for the morbidly curious.

Ultimately, a lot of effort has been put in to keep the character of Eternal Champions as alive as you’d expect from such interesting characters as these, which is more than could be said from other contenders. The game’s difficulty and challenge feel a step up from other rivals on the same console, and the sawtooth synthesised sound of the Yamaha YM2612 always gave games like this one an edge. With more entries in the curious franchise, Eternal Champions will therefore live on in infamy.

If you want more positive reviews delivered to the e-mail box of your choice, you can click on that little text bubble at the bottom of the screen. Do you agree or disagree? or have a suggestion for another pop-culture artefact that needs a positive light shone on it? Leave a comment in the comment box below! But remember to keep it positive!