I'd beg to differ for that progression. Double Dragon and Final Fight are brawl games. A better progression might be Karateka -> International Karate -> Street Fighter
Yie Ar Kung Fu played more like Street Fighter than those two.
Change Street Fighter 2 to Streets of Rage 2
Street Fighter 1 had no impact whatsoever, and I could never understand street Fighter 2's popularity.
Well, it invented the genre of the fighting game, which is basically endlessly complex
The fighting game genre was invented years before Street Fighter 1. Like I say they were underwhelming.
There's a world of difference between SFII and its successors on one hand and all the efforts that came before on the other.
I agree, but SFII was incremental improvement. It wasn't like it created the fighter genre. There were load of fighting games around before and during SFII hit the scene. Of course it was the most popular but the point i'm making is that, historically, it was nothing new.
But... it was. It's like trying to argue that Super Mario Brothers was nothing special because there were already a bunch of games where you controlled a guy and jumped on enemies. While it may have been derivative in some sense it was such a huge leap in sophistication that it turned a marginal genre into a huge craze.
I felt the same about Super Mario Bros. At the time it was just nothing new.
Well I don't know what to tell you man. No work of art is entirely original.