Jabril GoodnerJensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, took to the stage at CES 2025 to talk about the powerful new technology and products the company has been building.
During that presentation, a brief clip was shown of the new Virtua Fighter project, where they teased a pre-choreographed fight demonstration showcasing the power and fluidity of the game’s engine.
The clip highlights hyper-realistic visuals of two fighters in a simple old town, fighting, blocking, and swaying in a way that looks like something straight out of a classic Bruce Lee film. Though this demo is part of the “Virtua Fighter Project,” it’s important to note that the video is a demonstration of the engine’s capabilities and not a one-to-one reflection of what the final gameplay will look like. While everyone wishes the gameplay could be as fluid as this, it may not quite reach that level. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see.
Fighting games have a lot of systems and patterns of gameplay that fans have come to expect from the genre over the years, many of which the Virtua Fighter franchise is responsible for introducing. As the first 3D fighting game, it debuted in 1993, paving the way for titles like Tekken.
We did see a bit of gameplay from the actual game in their official trailer during the 2024 Game Awards. It utilized the same fighting stage that was featured in the more recent CES 2025 preview. The only difference was the fight shown, which, even though it was only a few seconds, looked more like what we’ve come to expect from the Virtua Fighter series — still featuring incredible graphics, incredible movement, and great animations, though perhaps not as realistic or cinematic as the CES preview. Either way, it’s awesome to see that Virtua Fighter is significant enough to the NVIDIA team to be celebrated alongside all their achievements and major plans in the realm of artificial intelligence and computing.
The future looks bright for fighting games, a genre that was often thought to be too niche or too difficult for casual players to enjoy. It’s been more than 10 years since we’ve had a proper new Virtua Fighter game, but clearly, SEGA, NVIDIA, and the Virtua Fighter team see that there’s still room for the franchise in a future filled with quantum computing, AI chips, and whatever else our new high-tech world has in store for us. Fighting games are still in.