Art of Fighting was released in the arcades in 1992. Called Ryuko no Ken in Japan, the game featured two modes of play: the standard vs. mode and a single player story mode. In the story mode, you could select either Ryo Sakazaki or Robert Garcia who were searching for clues to where Yuri Sakazaki was, who had been kidnapped. This involved fighting against several different opponents, each one having different fighting styles.

Whilst not a great game and certainly not one in the same league as Street Fighter II, Art of Fighting did bring many new ideas to the table including a zoom in/zoom out feature, the ability to dash forwards and backwards and the spirit gauge system -whenever you did a special move, the spirit gauge depletes. It means you cannot constantly spam projectiles, and the gauge can be recharged by holding down one of the attack buttons.

Initially released for the Neo Geo, the game has been ported to many different formats over the years. During the '90s ports were released for the Neo Geo CD, PC Engine, SEGA Genesis and Super Nintendo. It was also available on the Playstation 2 (as part of Art of Fighting Anthology) and the Nintendo Wii (it's one of the games included on SNK Arcade Classics). It was also released for the PC, Playstation 4, Switch and Xbox One as an Arcade Archives downloadable game.