When I first played Sealost Interactive’s The Thrill of the Fight, it felt like the closest thing I’d come across to real boxing in the video game medium. Rather than controlling boxers with analog sticks and shoulder buttons on a console like with EA’s Fight Night, Thrill of the Fight lets me use my real footwork. I can weave, roll, jab and hook as I outbox computer opponents in VR.
The Thrill of the Fight 2, which is currently in early access, takes things even further, and allows you to fight real people online. I have plenty of questions for the developer, Ian Fitz. First, however, I’m invited to fight him in the virtual world he’s created.
He’s a fan of orange, it seems – his gloves, shorts, and shoes are all in that color, with some gray stripes – while I’m in black shorts with green trim, gray gloves, and black and white shoes. From outside the ring, the head of marketing and entertainment at Halfbrick Studios (Sue Swinburne) watches us in a spectator mode. Halfbrick are essential to the game: Fitz’s work on Thrill 2 “had a rocky start” and wasn’t going as well as he hoped until he started working with Halfbrick at the beginning of 2023.
We touch gloves, but neither of us throw a punch. We’re both waiting and watching, moving slightly all the while. I throw a jab to the head that misses, and then a jab to the body that seems to land. He immediately responds with a three punch combination; the first shot lands flush, the latter two I block with a high guard.
As the round goes on, he picks me apart with combination punching while I attempt to use both a cross-arm block and a traditional high one. He never throws too many shots (which would require unnecessary stamina), and he’s almost always accurate. He stuns me at one point: the screen fills with white, and I cover up with a high guard. This is where it becomes clear he isn’t going to hold back too much because rather than stepping back, he starts unloading punches while I’m vulnerable. I spin away and then start to bounce a little, unconsciously taking things up a gear. We touch gloves again. I go back to my corner, trying not to breathe too loudly.
The moment between rounds is critical, just as in a real match. You use the one-minute break to rest and think over what you’re going to do in the next round. There is another psychological element to this too, though; you can watch the opponent in their corner, and they can watch you, for the full minute. It can be unnerving. One opponent decided to make rude gestures to me, and so I usually just turn around and avoid looking at others.
Occasionally I’ll kneel to take a rest, even though this isn’t the best idea. The opponent can then see that you’re seriously tired and thus adjust their strategy. You can try bluffing to appear energetic and eager to kick off the next round, as the former boxer Tony Jeffries points out during his gameplay session, but it’s something I’m too tired to try. You have to consider how much you care about revealing tiredness to your opponent against how much you simply want to rest.
Jeffries is consulting on the game, a detail I find promising. He’s a bronze medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an undefeated professional, and has experience with detailing the sport’s technical side to others via coaching and instructional videos.
Rounds two and three are more interesting. I’m throwing more now, ducking and stepping to the side, feeling more comfortable, even though he’s still winning. I’m enjoying the match to the point where, at the end of the second round, I do something that would be very unwise in a real fight; I put my hands down and dodge punches, twisting side to side, snapping back and forward, in a mimicry of Pernell ‘Sweet Pea’ Whitaker, one of my favorite boxers. I should say that I try to dodge because Fitz is, as always, remarkably accurate.
While my dodging looks flashy, I can hear sounds of punches connecting in places, even if they’re not all flush. The third round is similar. Fitz is landing the better, harder punches, and I decide to try and clinch – a classic grappling maneuver in boxing to buy time – but I can’t quite pull it off, and he chuckles.
“There is one [a clinch in the game] – you have to stay on top of each other for a bit,” he says.
We’re both carrying our hands lower than chin level at times, which Swinburne picks up on. “Ian, if Tony [Jeffries] was here, he’d be talking to you about your blocking.”
“My blocking is fine! I think Tony would be proud!” Fitz says, with a tongue-in-cheek tone.
The match finishes. Fitz has won all three rounds.
Adam Booth, a boxing coach, once said that he views the style of a fighter as an insight into their personality. Fitz, judging by his VR style, is composed, technical, and efficient. Our match is more like a sparring bout than a fight: when you do fight all out in the game, it’s exhausting. My stamina, never my strong point, always crumbles after only two matches, and I need to take at least fifteen, maybe twenty minutes afterwards to rest.
I had always thought that the first Thrill of the Fight felt like a passion project created by a big fan of boxing. I was completely incorrect.
“I’d never watched a boxing match in my life,” Fitz says. “I didn’t know the first thing about it.”
When consumer VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift hit the market, Fitz was excited. He went as far as to quit his job to make the original game by himself with “zero budget,” and was “barely getting by paying [his] mortgage” with the money made from the game. But if he wasn’t a boxing fan…why boxing?
“You’ve got a headset, and you’ve got controllers, and they know where you’re at within a space, and the way that space works, games can get a rectangular area. So I’m like…what’s a game that cares about your head and your hands, and you move around a rectangle? That sounds a lot like boxing!”
His first attempt aimed to be like the famous Nintendo Punch-Out!!, but the feedback he received from players was that they didn’t want an arcade style boxing game, they wanted something more realistic. Fitz subsequently used a “physics-based approach” and looked up research studies about the “biomechanics of boxing” while The Thrill of the Fight 1 was in early access. (“Everything in boxing and real life comes from physics, right?” he says, smiling.) Afterwards, people would tell him they were surprised he had put a certain thing in the game, and he would honestly respond that he didn’t know about that detail they had specified either: because of the foundation in physics and realism he had implemented, things like that simply existed in the game without his intention.
He particularly likes VR games that are based in reality. “I see this all the time, where people say, why do you want a VR game that’s table tennis – you can just go play table tennis, right? But I like that kind of VR game… I don’t need an opponent in the same room as me, I can play online with people, I can play my dad who lives a couple [of] hundred miles away from me, and it feels like I’m playing table tennis.”
“I think there’s a special magic to these games that are replicating things that you can do in real life, but you might not be able to do them right now, or there might be downsides to them in real life that prevent you from wanting to do them in real life.”
He brings up a good example of this: “Why don’t you just box? Well, because I don’t want to get hit in the face!”
He says this with a laugh, but he’s also touching on something deeper here. Boxing has long been a source of controversy even for big fans due to the long-term neurological injuries that can unfortunately come with it. Playing even a small mimicry of boxing without being hit in the head is intriguing. It’s certainly not a replacement for boxing: it can’t be, when there is no physical contact or damage.
One of the biggest complaints among fans currently is relevant to this: players are irritated by ‘spammers’ who simply flail at you for entire rounds with no real regard for technique or defense. In reality, someone like this is probably going to run into a very hard punch which will either knock them out, down, or at the very least make them stop attacking. However, VR makes this scenario a lot harder to replicate. How, I wonder, is Fitz going to find a way to emulate this when there is no damage involved?
“You got stunned while we were fighting – and it’s like you can’t miss it, the screen flashes white – and we’ve seen in a few playtests, that some people just ignore it. And when that screen is white, you don’t do damage, your damage is heavily nerfed, you take extra damage. I think that when you’re in it, your adrenalin is pumping and you wanna win, some people just ignore that white flash and keep going.”
“There is this physical disconnect here,” he acknowledges.
“We’re going to be looking at things like this, what behaviors are people doing in the game that’s differing from the real life scenario in an unrealistic way; can we make adjustments to get the result… to look more like real boxing and play out more like real boxing.”
He’s interested in addressing the damage value of punches, enhancing the stun system, and also introducing a form of guided training. There is also, of course, a forthcoming single-player mode. I personally find Thrill of the Fight 2 fascinating, but there is room for improvement, especially in regard to how the game calculates the power behind a punch. I have trouble actually hurting opponents, which is a complaint I have seen from others too.
I don’t personally spar, even though I do go to a boxing gym to train, hitting bags and such; I’m very cautious over brain damage. Fitz asks me to consider a scenario where I go to the boxing gym and ‘spar’ using VR, without contact, and thus without damage.
“That’s the future we’re trying to get to.”
The Thrill of the Fight 2 is available now in early access on the Meta Quest platform, and the full release window remains unconfirmed.
