Pit Fighter. The greatest fighting game ever made. Welcome to a very special Classic Game Room today. And a very hot Classic Game Room today. It's really hot outside.

The Church Arcade here in Duquesne, just down the river from Pittsburgh. So not only am I going to finally get to review the Pit Fighter arcade machine, but I'm going to take you through an arcade in a church, in an old church. It's one of the things we have a lot of in Pittsburgh, old churches, and they're turned into things like concert venues and breweries, and now the Church Arcade. So let's go check it out before I melt because it's like a thousand degrees out here.

Sit-ups! Kicking! Jump rope! Bah! Whatever that's happening. What's this thing? That stuff! Look at this! Yeah! Pit Fighter!

I'm already drenched in sweat. They're doing an air conditioning reboot here before they open. And while I dry myself off, grab some water, I'm gonna turn this video over to someone special that you haven't seen in a while. I'm gonna turn this video over to Atari Fanboy Mark. So take it away.

Thank you, Producer Mark. Yo, what's the time? It's time to play Pit Fighter from Atari. That's right, Atari Fanboy Mark approves and so do you.

Atari Fanboy Mark is very happy that Producer Mark thought to put the hat in the beer cooler. So it's nice and cool. And you know what else is cool? Pit Fighter. Best fighting game ever made. Better than Street Fighter 2, better than Mortal Kombat, Pit Fighter.

You know why? Because back in the 90s when I played games in arcades like Pocket Change in Ross Park Mall in Pittsburgh—glasses keep sliding down my face—there was always a line.

For Street Fighter 2. And there was always a line for Mortal Kombat, whatever Mortal Kombat was out there. I was a Street Fighter guy when I could get on the machine. But there was always a line.

And you know what Atari Fanboy Mark hates, in addition to Nintendo? Waiting in line.

You know what never had a line? Pit Fighter. You wanna know why?

Because the simpletons who played Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 couldn't appreciate the genius of Pit Fighter.

The brilliance of Pit Fighter. The best fighting game ever made. Come on.

Unlike Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, Pit Fighter is a three-player game. So you can beat the crap out of two of your friends while some lady stabs you in the back and smashes you in the head with a chair.

The controls are pretty simple. You've got punch, kick, and defile. It says start and jump, but really it's the defile button. You defile your enemies more than anything in Pit Fighter.

Great. And normally you have to pay extra for a lot of these moves.

Yeah, all you Street Fighter 2 pussies can die from dehydration while you're waiting in line while Atari Fanboy Mark has the time of his life playing 1990's Pit Fighter!

From Atari. Those who don't like Pit Fighter don't understand Pit Fighter.

If Lionheart was a movie, that movie would—wait, it is a movie. If Lionheart was a game, that game would be Pit Fighter!

Pit Fighter? I hardly know her. Don't you throw a warehouse crate at me?

Studley with the MC Hammer pants and everything. Ooh, grudge match. Don't get in between me and Angel. I'll kick your ass.

So those of you who are roughly my age, you know, a thousand years old, give or take a few, you remember the days when people would just wait around this giant—would wait in this giant line that stretched into the hallway of the mall, like all the way to JCPenney, to play Street Fighter.

And Mortal Kombat 2 or whatever. I forget which ones were out at the time, but it doesn't matter. The old games were always shoved into the back of the arcade, like Pit Fighter and like Pac-Man and stuff. Before they were retro cool, they were just relegated to the back of the arcade, which was dark and smelled like smoke and weed. So obviously the best part of the arcade.

And to be honest, Pit Fighter doesn't really have a whole lot in common with traditional fighting games like Street Fighter 2, Marvel vs. Capcom, whatever.

It's more like Double Dragon. If Double Dragon was confined to a crappy warehouse filled with drunks, forklifts, and gambling. So basically the best game ever made.

There's people behind me literally getting their engagement pictures. How awesome is that?

Keeping on loads of cash that I'm going to spend on Angel later, buying her a nice meal of some kind. Taco Bell.

Pit Fighter reminds me a lot of another great arcade game that you're probably familiar with called Rampage. Also a three-player game and a total button-mashing quarter muncher. Like, that's Pit Fighter in a nutshell. It eats quarters.

And you mash buttons and scream at it. What's not to love?

Sure, you can memorize all your Street Fighter 2 special moves and Mortal Kombat fatalities, or you can just shank somebody wearing sweatpants. Look at that. Your sweatpants will not protect you from my knife.

Here's the other thing Street Fighter 2 doesn't give you.

It doesn't give you the chance to meet beautiful ladies of the night. Like this girl over here. What's her name? It's gonna be—hello, where are you? Hello, come out, where are you? What's your name?

She has pushed me to trying to talk to you. There she is. Who are you? What's your phone number? Come here.

What? Stop! Southside Gym, go away. Go back to the South Side. I'm here to talk to some girls.

It's like an off-brand 6000 SUX.

You know, Angel, you might not be my kind of girl. A little too much hairspray. That was 1990 after all.

Ooh, Southside Gym is back for more punishment. And you've changed your sweatpants. Awesomely done.

Got a forklift, got a pallet. Better than Street Fighter in every way. Even the graphics are better.

There can be only one! I will have the Quickening! Yes!

I am the new champion. I get the ladies too. Nice.

There's three playable characters: Buzz, Ty, and Kato. Ty is my man, the kickboxer. His special move is the best special move. Hit all three buttons at the same time. He does like a spin kick.

Took me a little while to get back into the flow of the gameplay, but it plays almost exactly like Double Dragon.

Don't throw a motorcycle at me.

Attack people from an angle, punch and kick, defend, push them into the crowd, throw barrels at them, use your spin kick.

And notice in the background, none of the degenerates watching the fight are scrolling through bullshit on their phones. They're focused on the match. Because it's Pit Fighter. They know how lucky they are to be there.

I am the man who will fight for your honor. I'll be the hero that you're looking for.

Ow! Now I'm fighting CC Rider.

So what are you waiting for? Get two of your friends and go play Pit Fighter. Preferably at the Church Arcade, which as you can see is quite something.

Ooh. Alright. Now this—this could be interesting. And not necessarily in a good way.

So thanks again to the Church Arcade for hooking this up. I think we'll be seeing a lot more from there. And hey, congratulations to the people who are getting married there in the background.

Nothing says I love you like more Pit Fighter.

Fighter is the greatest game ever made that's not Consuming Ninja.

I'm here with one of the lucky individuals who gets to run this place, and I'm gonna have him explain what went into the Church Arcade and what this place is all about.

I'm Mike, one of the guys lucky enough to be involved with this place. I'm generally the pinball guy around here, but we've had this place now for almost a year or a little over a year, I think.

You know, came in, really redid all the floors, did a whole bunch of power work, etc., to make sure that we had everything in place that it could be open to the folks in public and, you know, just a good happy place for everyone to be. And it's really taken by storm.

You know, we originally had started with a place to, you know, get together and have a couple of games, maybe run the occasional tournament with some friends of ours, and then we found into a, you know, a very large building that we were like, we could do even more with this.

And that's kind of, you know, every time we seem to be done, we're not done, right?

So, in a nutshell, what is the mission statement of the Church Arcade?

Boy, I don't know. These weren't here, and then magically within, you know, three, four weeks, they were here, you know.

Like how many wedding receptions took place in here and, like, cookie tables? So it had to be like thousands of cookie tables.

We've actually had one lady who asked, could we come back and rent the place out so that we can renew our vows here now that it's an arcade, because this is where we got married 30 years ago.

We're like, yeah. Yeah, sure. Why not?

There's—I saw a game hiding back in the corner there that wasn't on last time I was here. Which one was that?

It's a special game.

The special game.

Yeah, am I allowed to show that? Can I peek over? It's hiding there.

Here, do you want me to move this one out, or can you get to it?

There it is. It's one of, I don't know, single digits or maybe a dozen known yellow Computer Spaces. I guess they made 1,500 of them. Yellow's the rare variant. I think there's like somewhere between eight and twelve that are known to exist.

The boards do work in it. The monitor is in vertical collapse. When we took the monitor and tried to, like, look at it, because we of course—one of the other Mikes here, he's a monitor guru, absolute wizard—when we took it to go look at it, it's all vacuum tubes because it's that old of a black-and-white TV.

And we said, maybe this will be a future project.

I don't think she's even punching or attempting to punch. It's like they spent $20 on the artwork for this. Right? I love that.

You got a sweet headband though. You gotta respect that headband. And look at the boots. She's rocking the boots.

Yeah, man. So the confessional booths, we were always thinking of, you know, like, I mean, that's where usually it was you and a priest hanging out, talking about whatever. So for each one of our confessionals, we've now put in a cocktail game, right?

So if you come on in here, we have some, you know, decor of the era. We have a different cocktail machine at each one of our different confessionals. So you can just kind of get out.

It's also—it works a lot for folks that might be, like, sensitive to noise and stuff. Because if you can hear, even though it's loud out there, it's much quieter.

Yeah, it kind of just, you know, this is a nice place to take a break. A lot of times I see folks, you know, playing these games. Like, a lot of people look for a Dig Dug. I love Dig Dug.

But a lot of times it's just, you know, people are coming in here, maybe they want to check their phone, they want to take a phone call, or they just want to get away for a minute or two.

A lot of times I'll see, like, parents come in here and just kind of take a break for a quick second and kinda go from there.

How did you guys decide upon a church for the arcade?

Honestly, we were just looking for a building and it just happened. It was, you know, right time, right place, you know, right amount, and we just kind of jumped into it.

And we never were really seeking out a church, but I can say that now that we have a church, we couldn't imagine it anything else. You know, it's an incredible use of the space. I love it.

Just the way it works and the way we have, like, the uplighting now, especially at nighttime, it just brings it all together, you know, with the glow of the monitors, the glow of the architecture and everything else.

Well, thank—we couldn't be more excited.

There it is. Southside Jim will pay for his sins, and his sins are wearing green sweatpants.

Spend my money on—in 1990, I'm thinking about a Sega Genesis—and then I can play some more Pit Fighter on it.

Get the motorcycle. Yeah! Pit Fighter! Yeah! What's this? Street Fighter 2. What a piece of trash! Who wants to play that? Pit Fighter!

This is where you tell Dig Dug all of your secrets.

My secret is I'm not very good at Dig Dug.