Many rappers, particularly the lyrically inclined, often liken their styles to martial arts anyway. How does Fight for NY fit the paradigm of battle emceeing, when the point of the game is to beat each other into hamburger? Well, within the extreme nature of the combat the game plays more like an urbanized Enter the Dragon or Master of the Flying Guillotine blended with amateur mixed-martial arts. Conceived in the South Bronx, New York, hip-hop was used as an alternative from the omnipresent criminality of the street, with battle emceeing being used as an alternative from the use of guns, and even fists, to solve civil disputes. This tradition of verbal combat would last for generations, with even a young Cassius Clay using the Dirty Dozen’s format to launch a barrage towards Sonny Liston in a famous interview, and it would become a perfect fit for hip-hop, especially when the shift of focus went from the DJ to the emcee.
During down time, the dozens would crack jokes to one another, usually at each other’s emotional expense in an extreme sense. Those “defected” slaves were sold by the dozens. The Dozens was conceptualized from American Slavery, where slaves were sold one at a time unless they were suffering from some kind of ailment illness, missing limbs, etc. But to understand the parallels, one has to understand the very roots of battle emceeing itself, which unfortunately means bringing up the one event in American history that everyone would like to forget… briefly, but still.īattle emceeing is rooted in the “Yo Mama” back-and-forths, which were known in African-American communities as the Dirty Dozens, or just “the Dozens”. But if the player digs a little deeper, the game, in and of itself, is a portrait of battle emceeing taken to a physical extreme, both figuratively and literally. That sounds more loaded than anyone would actually realize because, on the surface, it looks like one of the worst examples of “rapper” tripe that was coming out pretty regularly during that time, with the profane dialogue, the excessive bling, a story with a script that plays out like gangster rap fan fiction, and an amount of product placement that would make a militantly conscious rapper lose his mind. While Def Jam: Fight for NY wasn’t the greatest fighter ever made, not even during the dry spell of fighters in the mid-2000s, it does arguably give the most respect to the art of hip-hop out of any game ever made. But instead of resting on their laurels, EA and AKI would use the wrestling template to create one of the most appropriately urban and influentially hip-hop fighting games ever made. The assets of the canceled WCW game were transferred over to what would be known as Def Jam: Vendetta, which was successful enough to warrant a sequel.
The deal fell apart, due to Vince McMahon’s purchase of WCW in March of 2001, and a faiedl attempt to revive the brand later in the year, causing the project to be nearly scrapped entirely. AKI was responsible for the two WCW licensed games for the Nintendo 64, WCW/nWo World Tour and the critically acclaimed WCW/nWo Revenge, as well as the acclaimed WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and No Mercy.
The project seemed promising enough, with Japanese developer, AKI, manning the construction of the game’s mechanics. Publisher, Electronic Arts, initially meant for the Def Jam: Vendetta to be a follow-up to its last 2 wrestling projects, WCW: Mayhem and Backstage Assault. The background of this often forgotten gem stems from its predecessor, Vendetta, a game that, for all intents and purposes, shouldn’t have happened. Video games are weird, and none come any weirder than the hip-hop-influenced fighter, Def Jam: Fight for NY.