Urban Champion

Urban Champion is a fighting video game developed and published by Nintendo, first released for the Family Computer and Nintendo VS. System arcade hardware in Japan in 1984 before reaching North American and European Nintendo Entertainment System owners in 1986. It pits two street fighters against each other on a single city block, where players punch and dodge to push their opponent back across the screen toward a manhole, avoiding falling flowerpots dropped from above and an occasional passing police officer that ends the round. Urban Champion is considered Nintendo's earliest entry in the fighting game genre, a line the company would not return to until Joy Mech Fight in 1993. Contemporary and retrospective reviews were largely negative, criticizing the game's simplistic mechanics and shallow gameplay, and it is frequently cited among the weaker titles Nintendo published for the NES, despite later reappearing on the Nintendo e-Reader and the 3DS Virtual Console.