‘They should be called Bruce-’em-ups’ – how Bruce Lee shaped fighting games
‘He had this disorder that filled him with too much energy,” recalled Robert of his older brother, Bruce Lee, the martial arts movie superstar nicknamed Never Sits Still by his friends and family. Speaking with writer Matthew Polly for his definitive 2018 biography, Robert continued: “Bruce was like a wild horse that had been tied up.”
This quote doubles as a perfect description for the dazzling way in which Lee – who died 50 years ago at 32 from cerebral oedema – fought onscreen. A demonic whirlwind of flying kicks, vengeful, air-popping nunchucks, feral animal noises (something Lee invented to unsettle his opponents) and double-fisted punches that hit enemies with the elegance of a championship fencer, Lee cemented martial arts in the global mainstream. And despite his short life, he smashed through the barrier that previously held back so many Asian actors in Hollywood.
With a stare like a tiger’s and a rapid close-combat style, Lee was an electric screen presence. His philosophy – Jeet Kune Do – prioritised a fluid and formless approach to fighting (“Be like water, my friend”), inspiring scores of action movie directors as well as Ultimate Fighting Championship fighters such as Conor McGregor and Royce Gracie.
However, one area of Lee’s legacy barely gets a mention in Polly’s biography: namely, his enormous impact on the world of gaming. “So many of the big gaming studios owe the Bruce Lee estate a ton of money,” Polly half jokes.
“Before Bruce Lee, you only saw lumbering punches in on-screen fights, but after him all the movies were filled with kicks and holds,” he says. “Even
Batman started to fight like Bruce Lee. When the developers at the big Japanese and American gaming studios were growing up, they were all studying these Bruce Lee movies. So when gaming really took off in the 1980s, he was an obvious reference point. You know, I’m not sure the gaming industry wants to fully admit to the levels it has ripped off Bruce Lee.”
It is hard to disagree. The accepted father of beat ’em ups is the 1984 arcade classic Kung-Fu Master. It openly mirrored Lee’s posthumously released 1978 film Game of Death in the way it forced players to ascend a gloomy tower and fight through floor after floor of snarling bosses. Early tournament-style fighting games, including Karate Champ, Street Fighter and Yie Ar Kung-Fu, were reflections of the oneon-one, fight-to-the-death tournament that villainous drug smuggler Han hosted in Enter the Dragon.
Every major beat-’em-up title also had a character that replicated Lee’s tenacious spirit, with Street Fighter II’s Fei Long, Mortal Kombat’s Liu Kang, Dead or Alive’s Jann Lee and Tekken’s Marshall Law all moulded in his image. Critics say studios used different names to avoid the copyright fees, but there is also a feeling of homage. “Bruce has largely been used as a familiar landmark on the map into a fighting game,” says Ryan Hart, a professional British gamer who holds the record for the greatest number of consecutive opponents on Street Fighter V. “New users always have him as a familiar face to lean on as a go-to character when playing for the first time. Many fighting games include a Bruce Lee clone, but that was because he was such an influential figure in the combat world.”
As fighting games moved past linear one-on-one battles, Lee’s fighting style, and the way he smoothly dispatched huge crowds of bad guys, was also brought to mind by Renegade, Double Dragon, Final Fight, and Streets of Rage; all experiences where the lead heroes are regularly outnumbered, the path continuously shifts, and you feel forever pushed into a corner. In these games, you succeed only after discovering a weakness in your opponent – just as Lee does in Game of Death, when he targets 2.18 m (7ft 2in) giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s sensitive eyes in their David v Goliath battle.
“You always get a sense that Lee’s character is in survival mode, moving almost on instinct alone, thinking two steps ahead about how he is going to take down each opponent, and creating space for himself so he doesn’t get overrun,” says Dave Cook, the author of Go Straight, a book that dissects the history of beat-’em-up games. “He has a lightning-fast ability to deflect or block incoming attacks with his feet. The beat-’em-up genre forces you to approach every battle this way, using every move at your disposal to thin out large crowds of enemies … It is not an exaggeration to say that Bruce Lee’s skills and movies have influenced gaming since the very first beat ’em up.”
There have been attempts to give
Brue Lee his own official gaming adventure, but 1993’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story on the SNES and 2002’s Quest of The Dragon were both panned by critics for failing to replicate the whizz of his real-life blows. Terrence Masson directed the latter game, a launch title on the original Xbox created in conjunction with the Bruce Lee Estate. He worked with Lee’s former student Taky Kimura to motion-capture authentic Jeet Kune Do moves, but he admits it was a tricky task.
“Bruce Lee’s application of this style is so blindingly fast, so when Taky did the moves, we really struggled to capture them at the right frame rate. I had to get Taky to slow down the kicks altogether,” Masson reflects. “Bruce Lee was never manic or wild; he is always focused and, despite being in the centre, he also feels very peripheral too; backfisting someone behind him while smiling at the opponent in front of him. I think our game showed just how uniquely original Bruce Lee was, in that we totally failed to capture his style in the gameplay. It just couldn’t be replicated with the technology back then.
“I remember our game being terrible. I needed a team that was three times bigger. If I were the Estate, then Quest of the Dragon would have left a bad taste in my mouth. It is one of my biggest regrets.”
A modern developer inspired by Bruce Lee is Danilo Barbosa, the creator behind indie game Two Strike in which ancient Japanese warriors battle to the death in landscapes that feel more like immersive paintings. He also cites Sifu as a recent game that channels Bruce Lee’s ability to deal with vast crowds of minions with an artistic yet vicious breed of fighting. “My favourite version of Bruce Lee is in Tekken, with Marshall Law and his lightning-fast punches and roundhouse kicks,” he says.
“Even now, in 2023, we still see a lot of action games trying to give the experience of being a great martial artist, which I’m sure are all being made by game developers that fell in love with Bruce Lee’s movies and the elation they felt while watching them. If we’re being honest, the beat-’em-up gaming genre should have probably been called the Bruce ’em up.”
As a sort of invincible James Bond character, the raw charisma that Lee brought to Enter The Dragon, which was released just weeks after Lee died and made more than $400m at the box office, inspired generations to start practising techniques like the praying mantis, sticky hands, and the one-inch punch. He became an enduring source of pride for a country that felt continuously disrespected, particularly by America and its Chinese Exclusion Act. “Bruce did more for the Chinese psyche than any dozen politicians or martyrs,” said Robert Clouse, the film’s director, in an interview in Polly’s autobiography. A fitting tribute, according to Polly, would be to make a next-gen action-adventure game that truly honours the Bruce Lee movies.
Polly says Lee deserves to be framed as a “forefather” of gaming, too. He might not have lived long enough to play as himself with a joypad, but that doesn’t change the transformative effect he had on game developers throughout history. To paraphrase the martial arts legend himself, it’s clear that without Bruce Lee, gaming would have lacked so much emotive content.
“Bruce’s first movie was literally called The Big Boss,” the biographer concludes. “The plot is the whole structure of gaming, period: you fight a bunch of losers and progress to the big boss. This writing was all Bruce’s idea; he fought for it.
“When you watched Superman, you knew Christopher Reeve couldn’t fight or fly, right? But pretty much everything Bruce did on screen, he could do in real life. He was a superhero who just happened to act, not the other way around. The people who make the magical into reality will always be inspiring, especially to video games developers. Now, Bruce deserves a great next-gen game based on his life. At the very least, I hope we start to frame him as one of the forefathers of gaming.”
The plot is the whole structure of gaming ... you fight a bunch of losers and progress to the big boss. This writing was all Bruce’s idea
tic violence, according to the UN. Efforts to tackle the issue under the last government, from legislation to shelters, were imperfect but offered women some hope. Those efforts have now been dismantled by the Taliban.
“The mechanism to respond to domestic violence is totally eradicated; women have no choice but to bear the violence or kill themselves,” said Akbar.
Warnings about female suicides are only intensifying as the Taliban tighten controls on every aspect of women’s lives, most recently banning beauty salons.
When Latifa woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by family and doctors, she was told that her cousin had disappeared after learning of her suicide attempt. She worries that he might return and says if he does she will try to kill herself again.
“If he comes back and my family tries to force me [into marriage] again, I will … make sure I don’t survive,” she said.
Medics in Herat province, which recorded the highest numbers of female suicides and attempted suicides, described a system overwhelmed, withonly 25 mental health beds for a population of millions.
Herat has recorded high levels of gender violence and female suicide for many years. Even so, medical need has soared since the Taliban took power. “Patients do not get the hospitalisation time and counselling they need,” one health worker said. “Many times, we put two patients in one bed.”
In May, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, and the chair of the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls, Dorothy EstradaTanck,
said they were “alarmed about widespread mental health issues and accounts of escalating suicides among women and girls”.
Some see suicide as the only remaining form of defiance possible in a country where authorities are seeking to remove women from public life entirely.
“They don’t have much room for expressing their protests and disagreements,” said Julie Billaud, an anthropology professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the author of Kabul Carnival, a book about gender politics in postwar Afghanistan. “The despair is settling in. Perhaps that [suicide] is the last attempt by those who have left no power to say something and be heard.”
* Names have been changed for the safety of interviewees
The Guardian is publishing this article in partnership with Zan Times, an Afghan women-led investigative newsroom that is fundraising to continue its work, and the Fuller Project, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to the coverage of women’s issues around the world. Sign up for the Fuller Project’s newsletter, and follow the organisation on Twitter or LinkedIn.
rista in Ithaca, added: “They wanted to burn the union to the ground here.”
After nearly four years as a barista, Quinn Craig led the effort to unionize a Starbucks in San Antonio, Texas. “As soon as we filed our petition, I started preparing to get fired. I knew that it was coming,” said Craig, who often wore a cap saying “Scary Union Organizer”. “I saw that Starbucks was firing lead organizers in stores all across the country. By the time we won our election, we saw 30 or 40 worker-organizers fired across the country.”
The San Antonio organizing drive was fueled by dismay with constantly changing work schedules and what workers said was systematic understaffing, which made their jobs far more stressful. “We also wanted to advocate for a better benefits system,” Craig said. “More than half the people at our store didn’t qualify for all the benefits that Starbucks is bragging about.”
On 23 June 2022, the San Antonio workers voted 10 to 6 to unionize. Soon after, workers said, Starbucks began reducing their weekly hours and pay – a move many saw as punishment for unionizing and a stratagem to get them to quit.
On the first anniversary of their union victory, the store’s workers walked out, protesting what they said was understaffing. That same day, Craig was fired. “They fired me on the oneyear anniversary of our store winning a union election,” Craig said. “They fired the lead organizer on the day we were celebrating. That’s villainous. They’re not sneaky about their retaliatory actions.” To explain the firing, Starbucks said Craig had failed to secure the store’s cash or set the security alarm before the walkout. “I called the manager to say we were walking out,” Craig said. “Her response was ‘OK’ and [she] hung up” – without giving any instructions.
Alleging unlawful retaliation, Craig has asked the NLRB for reinstatement. Craig says Starbucks’ tactics – the firings, closings and reduced hours – “have really had a chilling effect. I personally saw several stores in my region lose interest in unionizing. Without all the union-busting, we could have had double the number of stores in my region organized.”
Many baristas say one Starbucks strategy in particular has discouraged workers from unionizing. In May 2022, Schultz announced that Starbucks would give certain raises and benefits to workers at its more than 9,000 non-union stores, but not offer those raises and benefits to its unionized workers. Starbucks insists it would be illegal to impose any raises or benefits on its unionized stores without first negotiating about them, but the NLRB’s general counsel asserts that this policy constitutes unlawful discrimination against Starbucks’ unionized workers. Under this policy, Starbucks has given its non-union workers, but not its unionized ones, a more relaxed dress code, increased training, faster sick leave accrual and, most important, credit card tipping. (Workers at the first few Starbucks stores to unionize had asked early on for credit card tipping.)
Baristas say credit card tipping can boost pay by $5 an hour, often meaning a 30% pay increase. Starbucks’ refusal to give many raises and benefits, including credit card tipping, to workers at its unionized stores has fueled decertification efforts at more than a dozen stores. Decertification is a process to vote out the union. Pointing to the denial of credit card tipping, San Francisco State’s Logan said: “Starbucks is offering the workers a $5-anhour bribe to vote out the union.”
Federal law prohibits companies from aiding decertification efforts. Starbucks has referred workers interested in decertification to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a group long funded by rightwing billionaires, including the Koch brothers. But the coffee company says it hasn’t joined in that foundation’s efforts to assist decertification petitions. The NLRB has blocked several of the decertification petitions because it says Starbucks had failed to bargain in good faith, preventing workers from getting a fair shot at reaching a first contract. Starbucks has criticized the labor board for not giving its workers a free choice to decertify the union – a claim many workers ridicule, saying that Starbucks, with its aggressive union-busting, hasn’t given its workers a free choice on whether to unionize.
Labor experts have long proposed ways to revamp the NLRA so that it truly discourages illegal actions by antiunion employers. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act), which President Biden backs, but Senate Republicans have blocked, calls for substantial fines against companies that fire pro-union workers or commit other illegal actions.
“Unless Starbucks is made to pay a real price for its illegal conduct, there will be no reason for it not to violate the law,” Logan said. “I would like to see a discussion of having criminal penalties for CEOs whose companies engage in egregious unlawful practices.”
Many labor leaders say that to prevent years of delay before negotiating a first contract – that is, if one is ever negotiated – the NLRA should provide for compulsory arbitration if the two sides fail to reach a first contract within a few months. The Pro Act calls for mandatory arbitration. Some labor experts look to Alberta, Canada, as a model; there, if the two sides fail to reach a first contract within 90 days after bargaining begins, the dispute goes to a neutral arbitrator who determines the contract’s provisions.
But every time Democrats have pushed to amend the NLRA to make it easier to unionize, Republicans have used filibusters to block the legislation. That happened under presidents Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden.
Short of overhauling the NLRA, union supporters say the NLRB should obtain a nationwide injunction to order Starbucks to cease and desist from firing pro-union baristas. The NLRB’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, has repeatedly sought such an injunction, but judges have thus far failed to grant it, evidently not convinced that Starbucks is systematically taking illegal actions.
Starbucks baristas applauded a NLRB decision from last Friday that some labor experts say could go far to discourage companies like Starbucks from violating the law when battling against unionization. Under the board’s decision, if a majority of workers sign cards saying they want to unionize and the employer insists on holding a union vote and then is found by the NLRB to have broken the law in fighting unionization, the labor board will order the company to grant union recognition based on the signed cards.
But labor experts fear that conservative, corporate-friendly federal judges may overturn the NLRB’s decision.
With labor leaders complaining that Starbucks’ illegalities continue unabated, many pro-union workers are pushing for more militant action to get Starbucks to stop the firings and negotiate a first contract. Some have called for more strikes or civil disobedience outside Starbucks cafes or a nationwide consumer boycott – or a combination of all three strategies.
Despite Starbucks’ aggressive tactics, many workers remain optimistic. “They’re doing everything they can to crush our organizing effort. What they’re doing is terrible, closing stories and firings,” said Casey Moore, a union spokesperson and fired Buffalo barista. “But every day we still have stores filing for elections and workers emerging with new energy.”
Starbucks has figured out an ingenious plan to get around labor law
Former barista Jaz Brisack
Another charge the Romanian authorities are pressing against Tate also surfaced in Shea’s first film: two women give detailed accounts alleging rape, which they reported to the police in the UK. The Crown Prosecution Service didn’t pursue the allegations despite the fact that,as Shea recaps, “part of the evidence submitted to the police were text messages and voice notes where Andrew Tate appeared to be discussing the rape”.
If it sounds like Tate was already hiding in plain sight, that first film “didn’t even scratch the surface”, Shea says. “I have this sensation of trying to explain to people how important this is. And I can never quite convince people. Hopefully this next documentary goes some way towards answering that.”
Tate lacks the dimension and complexity of a compelling villain. “This is a guy who pretends to be a character in The Matrix. His right-hand man pretends to be a wizard,” Shea says. “They are all wearing tight-fitting shirts. I’ve asked his fans, do you ever think this is all a bit cringe?” Yet the phenomenon of his success does throw up questions that are increasingly urgent: how did he acquire this global reach and popularity with his cartoon toxic misogyny and narcissistic Taliban-lite delusions of domination? Where is the money coming from and where is it going? What are the consequences for women who get close enough to him or his followers to experience his worldview first-hand? Where does this end?
It doesn’t seem long since Tate was a Luton kickboxer who got thrown out of Big Brother after a video surfaced of him hitting his girlfriend; in fact, that was 2016, which is an age in the life of an influencer, but it was only after TikTok took off, in 2018, that Tate went global. “The speed and relentlessness with which TikTok shows you new things is unprecedented,” Shea says. “It’s not like other social media. You could be an adolescent boy and you’d be seeing Andrew Tate videos within hours, where he’s saying things like, ‘Women who choose not to have children are miserable bitches’ or ‘Virgins are the only women worth marrying’.”
Tate was kicked off all the major platforms last year for infringement of their various hate-speech policies, although Elon Musk has since let him back on to X (Twitter). It doesn’t make any difference because, Shea says: “It’s not him who’s posting his videos – it’s his army of followers.”
TikTok alone didn’t make Tate, however: it was also “audience capture”, Shea explains, “where the feedback from an audience makes the person creating the content increasingly extreme. It explains a lot of what’s happening in this world. You could say that it explains Trump, to a degree, Andrew Tate as well. They reflect back a tantrum that we’re all having inside.”
Having amassed his army of followers, between 2018 and 2022, “Many of them get filtered to buy his app, The Real World, which used to be called Hustlers University, which promises to teach you to become wealthy: it turns out one of the strategies to becoming wealthy is to share content of Andrew Tate with a sign-up link for Hustlers University.”
Tate weaves together everything, from Covid to feminism, to illustrate why young men are the victims of the Matrix – his theory that the world is controlled by a conspiracy of politicians and mainstream media. “A common refrain of the Tate supporters is that they don’t teach you how to make money in school because they don’t want you to know. They would rather teach you bullshit about biology and English literature. Tate’s message is: ‘I hold the key to teaching you how to do that, but you have to buy my courses.’ So he has weaponised the hyper-capitalised American dream and reframed it as somehow rebellious. This is very similar to Trump as well.”
The reason I never took Tate seriously is that toxic masculinity arguments are so riven with contradictions. The message is one of self-discipline, the gym, self-denial, physical endurance and almost monastic self-abnegation – yet the big prize at the end, the thing it’s all in the service of, is tits and cars.
That is not even the half of it, Shea says, rattling through the logical failings of the creed: “Traditional masculine men are stoic and don’t have emotions, but they also somehow whine constantly about how the world is stacked against them. Men are protectors of women, but then if the women who are making these allegations against Tate are correct, then who protects women from men like Andrew Tate? Family courts are unfair towards men because women often get custody of children, but that’s exactly because of the traditional gender roles that they themselves are espousing. It makes no sense, but it doesn’t need to make sense.”
Examining Tate’s nonsense gives you the creeping sense that he is enjoying how irrational and contradictory it is. He knows that winds the “libtards” up more than anything: people who brazenly don’t make sense. He is trying to choke us on our own indignation. Besides, reason and ridicule do not deter Tate’s followers; the rule of law makes no dent on them.
“This is the thing people need to understand: followers don’t have a political interest in Andrew Tate – they see him as a spiritual leader, as a messiah. He saved them from the depths of their insecurity and brought them out of whatever it is that they were struggling with. I’ve asked, ‘What threshold of evidence would you accept that Andrew Tate has potentially committed these crimes, if it was presented to you?’ and they said nothing bar Andrew Tate himself saying, ‘I did these things.’ And that’s an incredible amount of power for one person to have over your mind.”
Shea tells me about female teachers who have lost control of their classrooms because boys are asking what they are doing teaching when they should be in the kitchen. He has been in touch with women who say their boyfriends have become abusive after following Tate. He tells me that counter-terrorism experts have warned of a huge increase in the number of referrals about Tate followers, but misogynist extremism doesn’t reach the threshold for antiextremist action unless it’s connected to the “incel” [involuntarily celibate] movement. Can this possibly be right, I ask, that we don’t fear misogynist, extremist violence, unless those misogynists aren’t getting laid? “Yes,” Shea says. “That is what I’m saying.”
He reveals that they have uncovered in this forthcoming, second film that Tate’s organisation has been training men to groom women, peddling an ideology that centres on enslaving them. “This isn’t just, ‘Oh, women should stay in the kitchen and the gender pay gap is a lie.’ This is advocating the subjugation of an entire gender into slavery. If you imagined an extremist group with a similar ideology aimed towards an ethnic group, you would think this was one of the most dangerous extremist groups in the world.” Tate’s representatives describe these as “false accusations” that “insult the massive community that considers Andrew Tate a life-changing, positive force”, adding that Tate “will not stand idly by while the media attempts to drag his name through the mud”. In Tate’s corner, seemingly promoting him as a free speech warrior, are two of the richest men on Earth: Elon Musk (on X) and Peter Thiel (on Rumble). It is incredibly dark.
I wonder about something else: Tate seems quite fixated on Shea, making videos about him, whipping up mobs. Does Shea think Tate needs him, as a kind of Clark Kent nemesis to his super-villain? “I can tell you the people around Andrew Tate are very aware of the history of mythology and comparative mythology. They are very aware of this idea of a hero and an antihero as part of crafting him into a mythological being. But funny you should say that, because he thinks I need him. In fact, he just messaged me recently.” He reads out the message from Tate: “‘The entire world is interested in me. You are not unique. I don’t care what you publish. Neither does anybody else, unless I speak to you. I’m your only chance for relevancy.’ And, of course, he’s right. Because that’s why you’re here today.”
• Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World? is on BBC Three at 9pm on 31 August, then available on BBC iPlayer, with an Australia screening to be confirmed
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Followers see him as a spiritual leader. He saved them from the depths of their insecurity
in well-understood contexts.
What about the things we do – such as developing a new cancer drug or finding a life partner – that don’t come with an instruction manual? To make progress in untrodden territory, you have no choice but to experiment, and experiments always bring the risk of failure. But these failures, specifically new failures in new territory, bring useful information, so they’re valuable. (Sure, they’re still disappointing, but they’re necessary.) I call these “intelligent failures”.
Intelligent failures are to be welcomed, because they point us forward towards eventual success. They shut down one path and force us to seek another. The category encompasses wildly different phenomena, ranging from, say, a tedious blind date to the failed clinical trial of a promising new treatment. People who design clinical trials minimise the risks as much as possible. But there is no way to ensure it all works out before the trial is launched. The same can be said of that blind date.
Many of today’s medical miracles – such as open-heart surgery to repair diseased vessels and valves – were once the impossible dreams of pioneers. Without their willingness to tolerate and learn from intelligent failures along the way, most of the life-saving advances we now take for granted would not exist. As cardiologist Dr James Forrester wrote: “In medicine, we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.” But the truth of Forrester’s statement does little on its own to make it easy for the rest of us to navigate failure’s painful side effects.
Fortunately, failing well can be learned. We can replace fear and shame with curiosity and growth. To facilitate this shift, it helps to recognise the human tendency to play in order not to lose, which holds us back from new challenges – and choose instead to play to win. Playing to win comes with the risk of failing, but it also brings rewarding experiences and novel accomplishments.
I’m not advocating that we embrace stupid mistakes or shrug our shoulders at preventable accidents. Failing well is about increasing the frequency of intelligent failure where the upside more than compensates for the downside. Take the blind date that falls short. Perhaps a friend, for reasons you both thought sensible at the time, thought you’d like each other. You agreed to meet for a coffee, only to discover that your friend was wrong. Was the failed date a waste? No, it was research, with minimal risk and definitive results.
Fear too often inhibits us from taking the smart risks that are essential to our discovery – of friends, spouses, hobbies and career moves alike. Embracing failure becomes intellectually and emotionally feasible once you understand the need to limit it to right-sized, thoughtful, goal-driven experiments in new territory. This is what inventors, scientists, chefs and entrepreneurs do for a living. But the rest of us can do it too, to live fuller, more adventurous lives.
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