Well, Wine has come a long way in the twenty odd years I’ve been using Linux. It’s gone from being pretty much useless, to pretty awesome. As of today, I can now play all of my favourite fighting games with no issues (that I’ve seen so far)!
As far as I’m concerned, fighting games peaked in about 2014, so you won’t see anything newer than that here.1
I’m using Wine 10, Intel i5-9400 CPU, 16GB ram, and a Radeon RX 550 low profile graphics card. OS is Linux Mint 22.1
Garou: Mark of the Wolves
Bought from gog.com for £0.79. It’s an old game and a fair price. I had an iffy copy but buying this for a few pence seemed the right thing to do.
King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match Final Edition
As with Garou, I had a dodgy copy of this but paying gog.com £1.69 made me feel better. Great game, for many one of the best fighting games of all time.
King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match
Paid gog.com exactly the same as KOF98. Amazing game and runs flawlessly on Linux.
King of Fighters XIII
£2.29 from gog.com. Sony got £15.99 from me to play this on the PS5 (cheeky little *******‘s)!. If I had to pick one favourite fighting game, it’d probably be this.
Ultra Street Fighter IV
gog.com don’t have any Street Fighter games except Alpha 2 so I got this “elsewhere”. Great game and yet again, works flawlessly.
Street Fighter X Tekken
This one was my biggest surprise. Over the years, I’ve tried numerous times to get this working on Linux and never succeded. All good things come to he waits they say, and this one was worth waiting for. This is version 1.08, by the way (the adept web surfer should find it fairly easily).
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos
Another all time classic. Available on a variety of old consoles (Neo Geo, PS2, Xbox), you should pick this one up if you see it cheap for easily playing on PC.
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Ok, this isn’t one of my favourites, but it can be fun in small doses. I’ve only included it here in case you’re a big fan and are wondering if it will work on Linux. Yep, perfectly!
Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
Not played this in great depth yet, but all the games I’ve tried seem to work flawlessly. You get all the following games:
- The Punisher
- X-Men: Children of the Atom
- Marvel Super Heroes
- X-Men vs. Street Fighter
- Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
- Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes
It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it if you love your fighting games. Alternatively, I’m sure it’ll be on sale before long.
Updates
2025-04-04
King of Fighters XIV
Thought I’d try this out just to see if it works. Worked completely fine! As this is a bit newer than most of the other ones, my graphics card fan came on a bit louder than with the others. Didn’t experience any slowdowns or anything odd.
Conclusion
We’re getting to the point where using Windows makes less and less sense, even for casual gamers. As long as your PC is not a potato, you’ll probably be surprised what games will run flawlessly on Wine 10. Any issues you do have, should have solutions to try on the various forums.
Footnotes
1 Sorry, Street Fighter 5 & 6 are not better than 4, KOF XIV & XV are not better than XIII. Injustice 2, Mortal Kombat whatever are ok but have no place in a list of best ever fighters.
