Curated playlist
Virtual Console games for Wii U
- Street Fighter Alpha 2Street Fighter Alpha 2 made its public debut at the February 1996 AOU show in Tokyo. It arrived less than a year after Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams, its direct predecessor. Among the new characters was Sakura, a face that had…
- Street Fighter II TurboStreet Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting reached arcades in 1992 not as a new machine but as an upgrade kit. Capcom built it for installation directly into Champion Edition circuit boards already in those arcades, less than a year after…
- Super Street Fighter II TurboIn April 1994, the arcade cabinet for Super Street Fighter II Turbo began spinning coins in Japan. Game Machine listed it as the second most successful table unit that month, trailing only Virtua Fighter. This hardware ran on Capcom's CP…
- Final Fantasy Mystic QuestFinal Fantasy Mystic Quest arrived in North America in 1992 with a label that few major game publishers would dare to put on a box: it was marketed as a "simplified role-playing game... designed for the entry-level player." Square, the…
- Final Fantasy VFinal Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities…
- Final Fantasy IIIFinal Fantasy III launched on the 27th of April, 1990, and within its first week sold 500,000 copies in Japan. By March 2003, that figure had reached 1.4 million, making it the highest-selling domestic release among the first three games…
- Final Fantasy Tactics AdvanceFinal Fantasy Tactics Advance arrived on the Game Boy Advance in 2003, carrying the weight of a beloved predecessor and the ambitions of a team that had spent years waiting to build it. The original Final Fantasy Tactics, released in 1997,…
- Final Fantasy IIFinal Fantasy II launched on the 17th of December 1988, almost exactly one year after the original game, and Square's small team of around ten people had already decided it would be nothing like its predecessor. The first game had saved…
- Super Street Fighter IISuper Street Fighter II reached arcades in 1993 as the fourth version Capcom had released under the Street Fighter II name. Game Machine in Japan ranked it the most popular table arcade game of October 1993. This was the first Street…
- Pac-ManPac-Man arrived in arcades on the 22nd of May 1980, and within two years it had earned more than a billion dollars in quarters from American players alone. A yellow circle eating dots in a maze does not sound like a cultural revolution.…
- Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II arrived in arcades in 1991 and changed the way people played games in public spaces. By 1994, an estimated 25 million people in the United States alone had played it. That figure does not count Japan, Europe, or the rest…
- Final Fantasy (video game)Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Final Fight (video game)Final Fight arrived in arcades in 1989 with a premise that could have come straight out of a Hollywood action film: a former pro wrestler turned city mayor tears through six rounds of urban chaos to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Capcom's…