Boss Fight - The Greatest Boss of All Time

To end this year's Boss Fight feature I wanted to talk about the greatest boss in arcade game history. This meant I had to trawl through blog posts and forum threads from all around the internet to get an answer. As you can imagine there is a lot of contention over who is the greatest boss to have appeared in an arcade game, especially as arcade games tended to be so hard that most people only ever saw the first few bosses of any given game. But, after a considerably amount of crowd sourcing, I found the following candidates:

• The Giger-esque alien, Dobkeratops from R-Type
• The sometimes dead, sometimes alive Geese Howard from Fatal Fury/King of Fighters 
• The robotic head of General Akhboob from Total Carnage
• The toughest old bloke in video game history, Heihachi Mishima from the Tekken
• One of the trippiest boss encounters ever, Xiga from Radiant Silvergun

But the name that appeared at or near the top time and time again was none other than Capcom's king of the criminal underworld, M. Bison from Street Fighter.

In the Street Fighter universe, M Bison is the head of the Shadaloo crime syndicate, who are based on a small island off the coast of Thailand. He dresses in the bright red uniform of Shadaloo's private military, complete with cape, which in early games he casts off before fighting. As well as being a crime boss he possesses "psycho power", which among other things allows him to turn his whole body into a flaming torpedo.

The first time I saw Bison in action it was in an arcade in my home town. Some guy I didn't know had beaten a load of people in one-on-ones using Guile and finished off his 20p by beating all of the computer opponents — all except Bison, who's combination of head stomps, double knee presses, somersault skull dives and psycho crushes quickly ended the player insurrection and left a 16 year-old me awe struck. At the time, nobody was talking about performing combos in Street Fighter 2. Instead most player matches focused on well-time special moves. Seeing Bison in action was the first indication I ever saw that moves could be strung together in fluid sequences. It would be years later before I got good enough at Street Fighter to be able to regularly beat Bison and even today, I'd need a good couple of goes with my main, Blanka, before I'd been up to the task.

So why is he such a great boss? For a start, his appearance was both striking and evocative; few people would deny the similarities between Bison's uniform and that of Nazi SS officers. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, his popularity is linked to the popularity of Street Fighter itself, plus the vast number of spin-offs and sequels the franchise has had, meaning even if you didn't face him in the original Street Fighter 2 in 1991, you've probably faced off against him in another game since.

Rather than show a game footage of such a popular boss in action, I thought instead I would show the fight between M Bison and both Ryu and Ken, from the animated Street Fighter movie, which does a pretty good job of demonstrating how much of a bad ass Bison is supposed to be.

And that does it for my boss fight feature. There are loads of bosses I could talk about, not least the candidates listed at the beginning of this post, but I want to begin a new monthly feature next year, so I'm ending it here. Thanks for reading.

MTW