There I was in 1997, sixteen years old and standing in Funcoland with twenty bucks my grandma had given me for good grades, trying to decide between another copy of Mario Kart 64 (my brother had somehow scratched our first one beyond repair) or taking a chance on this weird-looking fighting game I’d never heard of. The guy working there – couldn’t have been much older than me, wearing a Doom t-shirt and looking like he lived on Mountain Dew and pizza rolls – sees me staring at the wall of used N64 games and goes, “Dude, you gotta try War Gods. It’s like if Mortal Kombat had a baby with complete insanity.”
That was honestly the best sales pitch I’d heard all week, so home came this black cartridge with possibly the most generic name in gaming history. War Gods. I mean, come on. Sounds like something you’d find in a dollar store toy aisle next to “Army Mans” and “Space Guys.” But I’d learned to trust the recommendations from the gaming store employees – these were the people who’d told me about GoldenEye before it became the thing everyone had to own.
First time I booted it up in my basement game room (okay, it was just the basement with a TV and my N64 setup, but I called it my game room), I knew I was in for something special. Not necessarily good special, mind you, but definitely special. Midway had clearly looked at the mid-90s fighting game scene and said, “You know what this needs? More ridiculous characters and physics that make absolutely no sense.”
This was during that weird transitional period where everyone was trying to figure out 3D fighting games. Tekken 3 wouldn’t hit PlayStation for another year, Virtua Fighter was doing its technical precision thing that impressed journalists but confused kids like me, and Street Fighter was still mostly stuck in 2D land. War Gods felt like Midway’s attempt to grab some of that 3D fighting game money while keeping the blood-and-guts sensibility that made Mortal Kombat famous.
The story made about as much sense as you’d expect from a mid-90s fighting game. Something about ancient warriors and magical meteor ore – basically an excuse to throw together the most random collection of fighters imaginable. You had Grox, who looked like someone had asked a heavy metal fan to design the ultimate warrior and they’d just kept adding spikes until they ran out of polygons. Vallah was your standard Viking-but-make-it-extreme character. Then there was Exor, a robot that appeared to have been designed by someone who’d watched every B-grade sci-fi movie ever made while eating way too much sugar.
What made War Gods actually interesting, though, was how it handled the transition from 2D to 3D fighting. Instead of completely reinventing everything like Tekken did, Midway basically took the Mortal Kombat formula – special move inputs, combo systems, over-the-top finishing moves – and awkwardly shoved it into three-dimensional space. Should it have worked? Probably not. Did it somehow work anyway? Sort of, yeah.
Playing it on N64 was an experience that’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there. The graphics were chunky in that specific mid-90s way where everything looked like it had been carved out of digital clay by someone wearing oven mitts. Character animations had this weird stop-motion quality, like watching action figures being moved around by invisible hands. But there was something endearing about how earnest the whole thing was. Nobody was phoning it in here – this was genuine effort applied to genuinely ridiculous ideas.
I’d played the arcade version a few times at Chuck E. Cheese (don’t judge me, they had decent games), but having it at home meant I could actually learn the fighting system without hemorrhaging quarters. That’s when you started to appreciate what Midway had accomplished here. Each character genuinely felt different to play, not just in terms of special moves but in basic movement and strategy.
Grox was all about power and grabbing – made sense for someone built like a walking tank covered in medieval weaponry. Vallah combined strength with surprising mobility, perfect for the whole barbarian warrior thing he had going on. The robot characters moved with mechanical precision but couldn’t flow between moves the way the organic fighters could. These weren’t just cosmetic differences – the character designs actually influenced how you had to play them.
The fatalities in this game were completely unhinged. Mortal Kombat was violent, sure, but War Gods took violence and cranked it past eleven into some kind of cartoon physics nightmare. Grox could literally tear people in half with his bare hands. Vallah had this finishing move where he’d grab you, spin you around like a lasso, and launch you into orbit. It was so absurdly over-the-top that it looped back around to being hilarious instead of shocking. My friends and I would sit there laughing at how ridiculous it all was.
The single-player campaign followed that classic arcade pattern of reasonable difficulty that suddenly becomes controller-throwing impossible around the halfway point. But that was part of the appeal – these games weren’t designed to be beaten in one sitting. They were built to keep you coming back, learning new combinations, figuring out better strategies, getting just a little further each time. I probably spent more time in training mode than actually playing matches, just trying to master Exor’s more complex moves.
What I loved most about War Gods was its complete lack of self-consciousness. It knew it was weird. It embraced the silly premise and ran with it at full speed. While other fighting games were trying to be either ultra-serious like Virtua Fighter or ultra-shocking like Mortal Kombat, War Gods found this perfect middle ground where it could be violent and ridiculous simultaneously.
The N64 controller actually worked pretty well for it, which was surprising given how many fighting games struggled with that weird three-pronged design. The C-buttons mapped nicely to different attack types, and the analog stick gave you more precise movement than the arcade version’s digital controls. Not perfect, but functional enough that you could pull off the more complex combos consistently.
Looking back now, War Gods feels like a perfect time capsule from that experimental period in the mid-90s when everyone was still figuring out what 3D fighting games could be. It wasn’t the most polished example of the genre – that would be Tekken 3 when it finally arrived. It certainly wasn’t the most popular – Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat owned that territory. But it had more personality than most games managed, and sometimes that matters more than technical perfection.
My copy is still sitting in my collection downstairs, right between WWF War Zone and WCW vs. nWo World Tour. Every once in a while I’ll fire it up just to remember what gaming felt like when developers were willing to throw completely crazy ideas at the wall and see what stuck. War Gods deserves to be remembered as more than just a footnote in fighting game history – it was Midway at their most creative and unrestrained.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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