Bursting on to the world arcade scene in 1991 with the force of a Hadouken to redefine the fighting genre and inspire a generation of bragging rights, Street Fighter II has since written its own chapter in the annals of videogame folklore. Almost every gamer, be they casual or hardcore, will have encountered this seminal beat ’em up in one of its countless iterations, and being able to perform Zangief’s 360° piledriver, finish the game with Dhalsim on eight-star difficulty or perform a passable impersonation of Ryu performing his Shoryuken at parties has become a gaming badge of honour. Everything, from the combatants to the special moves to the stages to the soundtrack, has become iconic.
An instant sensation, Street Fighter II became a bona fide entrant in ’90s popular culture, spawning manga and anime series, plush toys, and even a hentai subculture dubiously celebrating Chun-Li’s nubile charms. Surprisingly, creators Akira ‘Final Fight’ Nishitani and Akira ‘Forgotten Worlds’ Yasuda claim that they didn’t foresee the game’s success. Admittedly, it was preceded by an underwhelming original more famous nowadays for its pressure-sensitive rubber buttons than any groundbreaking gameplay mechanics, yet with Street Fighter II’s vivid character designs, purity of gameplay and exploitation of a yawning niche in the arcade market it’s hard in retrospect to see how World Warrior could have failed.
Ever the expert at milking a franchise, Capcom released four further iterations of Street Fighter II over the next three years: Champion Edition, Turbo, Super and Super Turbo. Among hundreds of minor gameplay tweaks, more notable revisions included much-requested control of previously
non-playable ‘boss’ characters, a striking visual update, the creation of four new challengers, and the birth of super combos – adding a welcome tactical element to the fast-paced brawling. Such was the popularity of series that unofficial hacked boards – including SFII: Red Wave, Black Belt, Rainbow and Accelerator – soon leaked into arcades. These black-market versions intrigued fans by allowing combatants to perform mid-air fireballs, switch characters mid-round and pull off other twisted feats.
We reviewed Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the Mega Drive in E1. You can read the review through the link.
2003 saw the amalgamation of all five SFII editions in an Anniversary edition, released on PS2 and Xbox to commemorate the original game’s 15th birthday. Needless to say, as an official Capcom product Anniversary fails to acknowledge its bastard children, and it wisely elects to ignore the 1995 aberration that was Street Fighter II: The Movie. It’s also important to note that this ‘compilation’ actually isn’t five disparate titles, and the option doesn’t exist to play each edition separately. Rather, gamers are presented with a veritable SFII melting pot where age-old arcade arguments like whether Championship Edition M Bison could hold his own with Hyper Fighting’s Guile or if World Warrior’s Ryu with his overpowered hard punches and kicks against Super Turbo’s weaker yet more refined Ryu with his Shinkuu Hadoken super combo might finally be put to bed.
An intriguing proposition, granted, although if there’s one thing that the various incarnations of the series have proved down the ages it’s that Street Fighter II is a quintessentially subjective experience and decisions like the inclusion of Super Turbo’s oafish announcer in lieu of the iconic World Warrior broadcaster will always remain controversial. Purists are also likely to lament the absence of the original game’s notorious glitches, like Guile’s ‘handcuffs’ or ‘magic throw’. Despite these concessions, Anniversary still undoubtedly provides the most compelling Street Fighter experience of them all owing to the endless ‘what if?’ scenarios it proposes; while the Xbox version also offers Live connectivity, finally allowing fans to test their mettle against fellow aficionados the world over (if their internet connection speeds are up to the task).
Whisper it, but true purists might even argue that the true gem in this collection is Street Fighter III, though its belated release in 1999 meant that, in most gamers’ eyes, the beat ’em up had inexorably moved on and into the realm of 3D. Third Strike never enjoyed anything like the same commercial or critical success its finely tuned 2D fighting gameplay warranted, although its fanbase remains one of the most committed.
As testament to its enduring appeal, Street Fighter – in all of its forms – remains a staple of the US and Japanese tournament scenes, where it consistently attracts challengers in their droves and the moniker ‘World Warrior’ still holds considerable kudos. Street Fighter IV’s masterful evolution of the form has seen the series return to prominence in recent years; Street Fighter’s quest for global ubiquity appears to be continuing unabated.
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