Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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A playthrough of Domark's 1991 fighting game for PCs running Dos, Pit Fighter.

This video shows the game running on multiple system configurations:

0:00 Entire game played as Ty (386DX/33, VGA, Adlib)

26:14 Intro + First Match (286/16, EGA, PC Speaker)

32:42 Intro + First Match (286/6, CGA, PC Speaker)

Please note that the game "requires" an IBM PC 100% compatible system (meaning at minimum an 8086 or 8088 CPU) with a CGA adapter installed. An IBM AT-class machine (a 286 running at 6 or 8 megahertz) is recommended by the box label.

Pit Fighter for the PC appears to be an Oxford Mobius-developed port of Teque's Amiga adaptation. It was released alongside the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST, and Sega Genesis versions in November 1991.

I don't know how Pit Fighter played on the Amiga, but the Dos version is a classic example of a game designed to appeal through screenshots above all else. In magazines and on the back of the box, it looked like a fair approximation of the arcade game. By the time you realized it was garbage, they'd already taken your money. Oh well.

The system requirements are -ridiculously misleading- bald-faced lies, and the recommended specs net you four colors, two frames per second, and glaucoma. On a machine that's fast enough to run it at an acceptable speed, the game still looks like a slideshow thanks to the number of animation frames left on the cutting room floor.

The controls were designed for a single-button joystick, which may have been typical on the Amiga and Atari ST, but God does it feel awful. To do anything but walk, you have to press Fire while holding the joystick in a given direction. To jump kick, hold up-right and hit fire. To punch, hold left. To do your special move (good luck!), hold up-left. And so on. It's as terrible as it sounds, and it gets even worse when you switch to the keyboard. Instead of having each move mapped to its own key, the keyboard controls mimic the joystick setup. Because simultaneously hitting the Q key and the space bar is a totally intuitive way to make your character jump, don't you think?

It's playable, but only in the most literal sense of the word.

The PCs of 1991 weren't ideally suited for arcade-style action, but they were capable of a whole lot better than this. For any poor kid out there who had to make the best of Pit Fighter for the SNES, I hope that seeing this brings you some solace.

Or, if you want to get all hoity-toity about it, a hilariously mean-spirited cackle.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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