Street Fighter II

• 1. Introduction

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  Street 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 of the world. It does not count the pirated machines flooding Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, and Latin America. It does not count the more than 6.3 million Super NES cartridges sold in living rooms. What turned a sequel to a middling 1987 fighting game into a phenomenon that Electronic Games compared, in October 1992, to the all-out fanatical popularity of the early arcade era? The answer touches on a bug in a car-smashing bonus stage, a decision to rotate three character names out of fear of a lawsuit, a composer who left the company before the game even reached its peak, and a shift in competitive culture that would eventually produce the Evolution Championship Series. This is the story of how a game designed with no particular emphasis on balance redrew the map of popular entertainment.

• 2. Built by Accident

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  Yoshiki Okamoto recalled that the basic idea at Capcom was to revive Street Fighter, a good game concept, and make it a better-playing arcade game. Development took roughly two years and involved about 35 to 40 people, with Noritaka Funamizu as producer and Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda handling game and character design. Funamizu later admitted that the team did not particularly prioritize balance. What he credited most for the game's success was its animation.

  The animation quality was made possible by the CPS-1 hardware. Different characters could occupy different amounts of memory. Ryu used 8 megabits; the larger Zangief used 12. That flexibility allowed the character sprites to feel distinctive and weighty in ways earlier arcade hardware could not support.

  The combo system, now a standard feature across the fighting game genre, was not designed at all. A Capcom developer noticed something unusual during a bug check in the car-smashing bonus stage. A sequence of punches could produce a second hit, then more. The developer recorded it on tape and the team watched it together. They considered the timing so difficult to reproduce that they left it in as a hidden feature. They initially thought four hits in a chain was the ceiling; eventually they reached eight. The developer's own account ends with a question: "A bug? Maybe."

  Yoko Shimomura composed the vast majority of the in-game music. Street Fighter II would be the only game in the series on which she worked, because she left Capcom for Square two years after the game's release. A newcomer named Isao Abe handled the "Versus Screen", "Sagat's Theme", and "Here Comes A New Challenger" tracks, and went on to become the main composer for all the subsequent versions.

• 3. The Roster and Its Secrets

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  Eight fighters were available to players from the start, each designed around a distinct national identity and fighting discipline. Ryu and Ken came from the original Street Fighter. The six newcomers ranged from a sumo wrestler named E. Honda, intent on elevating sumo's reputation internationally, to Dhalsim, a fire-breathing yoga master from India who fights despite being a pacifist, using prize money to help lift people out of poverty.

  Four additional characters, the Grand Masters, could only be controlled by the computer in the original release. One of them, the boxer Balrog, was designed as a pastiche of Mike Tyson and was originally named M. Bison in the Japanese version, short for "Mike Bison." When the game was prepared for international markets, Capcom rotated the names of all three Shadaloo Bosses, out of concern that the boxer's resemblance to Tyson could expose the company to a likeness infringement lawsuit. The dictator became M. Bison internationally; the claw-wielding Spanish bullfighter became Vega; the boxer became Balrog. In international tournament play, the three are often called simply Boxer, Claw, and Dictator to cut through the confusion.

  Takayuki Nakayama stated in an interview that many character concepts were tested and discarded during development, including another bullfighter and an American amateur wrestler. One change made during localization affected not a boss but an ally. The fallen friend of Guile, the American Air Force operative, was named Nash in the Japanese version. A Capcom USA staff member argued that Nash did not sound like a natural English name, so it was changed to Charlie for Western releases. Nash later debuted as a playable fighter in Street Fighter Alpha.

• 4. The Arcade Renaissance

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  Location testing for Street Fighter II began in Japan, then moved to London's Amusement Trades Exhibition International in January 1991. That same month, Capcom ran a two-week test in North America. On the 1st of February 1991, the company unveiled the game at a distributor conference held at the Marriott Harbor Beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, billing it as Capcom's "greatest video game ever."

  The Japanese rollout was not immediately smooth. Most arcade players initially tried the game solo, rather than against another person as intended. Yoshiki Okamoto was disappointed, and was told he should have made another solo beat-'em-up like Final Fight. The fortunes changed when the arcade magazine Gamest published articles explaining the "battle play" feature. By March 1991, the game had reached number two on Game Machine's table arcade cabinet chart, outperforming titles such as Detana!! TwinBee and King of the Monsters. Two weeks after that it topped the chart. It went on to become the highest-grossing arcade game of both 1991 and 1992 in Japan.

  In the United States, the response was faster and louder. Test markets exceeded all expectations, with individual machines earning strong weekly returns. Capcom USA sales representative Jeff Walker predicted it would "become the kit of 1991". RePlay magazine said it showed there was "plenty of life" left in the struggling arcade business. Street Fighter II topped the RePlay arcade software charts from May 1991 through August 1992, a run of 16 consecutive months. By 1992, Electronic Games noted that not since the early 1980s had an arcade game received such all-out fanatical popularity. Leisure Line magazine in Australia observed that not since Space Invaders in 1978 had a game shown such longevity after 16 months on the market.

  In 1991-50,000 arcade units were sold worldwide, including 17,000 in Japan. Between early 1991 and early 1993, Street Fighter II captured about 60% of the global coin-op market. In the United Kingdom alone, 10,000 units were installed by mid-1991. The success did not go unnoticed by counterfeiters: about 200,000 pirated units circulated in Mexico alone, a market where Capcom had no official presence. A manufacturer in Hong Kong was producing 3,000 copied units per month, and a Taiwanese firm produced 20,000 in 1991. In 1993, Street Fighter II generated more annual revenue than the film Jurassic Park.

• 5. Home and the SNES Era

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  Street Fighter II was released for the Super Famicom on the 10th of June 1992, in Japan. The North American SNES release followed in August, with a European release in December. It was the first game ever released on a 16-megabit SNES cartridge.

  The numbers that followed were unlike anything the home console market had seen from a single third-party title. In Japan, 1 million copies sold within the first two weeks. In the United States, 750,000 units moved between the 15th of July and the 30th of September 1992 alone. By September of that year, four million cartridges had sold worldwide; five million by year's end; more than six million by 1993. The SNES version remained Capcom's best-selling single consumer game until 2013, when Resident Evil 5 finally surpassed it.

  Electronic Gaming Monthly's panel of four reviewers gave the SNES version scores of 10, 9, 10, and 9, totaling 38 out of 40, and named it Game of the Month. One reviewer, Sushi-X, called it "The best! Street Fighter II is the only game I have ever seen that really deserves a 10!" Nintendo Power ranked it the best SNES game of 1992, placing it above The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Famitsu's four reviewers gave it 35 out of 40, making it one of their five highest-rated games of that year.

  In the United Kingdom, Street Fighter II replaced Super Mario World as the bundled game for the SNES. The Amiga version, available for only the last 16 days of 1992, became the best-selling home computer software of that entire year. The North American SNES version was re-released in November 2017 as a limited edition item to mark the anniversary of the Street Fighter series.

• 6. Revisions and Piracy

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  Street Fighter II: Champion Edition arrived in arcades in March 1992. It rebalanced character power levels, let both players select the same fighter, and made the four Shadaloo Bosses playable for the first time. In Japan alone, 140,000 arcade units of Champion Edition were sold, at a unit price of 160,000 yen. The revenue from those Japanese hardware sales alone reached 22.4 billion yen.

  Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers arrived in September 1993, running on the more powerful CP System II hardware and introducing four new characters, among them Cammy, who placed fifth in Gamest's Best Characters list for that year. Super Street Fighter II Turbo followed in February 1994, adding powered-up special moves called Super Combos and a new hidden character.

  The revision cycle extended into the home market as well. Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition, released in December 2003, let players pick from any of the five previous Street Fighter II iterations' visual and mechanical styles in a single package. It was later selected as part of the video game collection at the Museum of Modern Art, representing the Street Fighter II subseries as a whole. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, released in November 2008 with high-definition graphics, broke both the first-day and first-week sales records for a download-only game at the time of its release.

• 7. Cultural Afterlife

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  Guinness World Records, in its Gamer's Edition of 2008, awarded Street Fighter II three records: First Fighting Game to Use Combos, Most Cloned Fighting Game, and Biggest-Selling Coin-Operated Fighting Game. In 2017, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted the game into its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

  John Romero cited the competitive multiplayer of Street Fighter II as an influence on the deathmatch mode he introduced in Doom. The game's shift from chasing high scores to head-to-head human competition seeded a culture of organized play that eventually produced the Evolution Championship Series.

  Street Fighter II became a recurring reference point in hip hop. Hi-C's "Swing'n" in 1993 and DJ Qbert's "Track 10" in 1994 were among the earliest samples. The Street Fighter film soundtrack of 1994 was the first major film soundtrack to consist almost entirely of hip hop music. Artists sampling or referencing the game include The Lady of Rage, Nicki Minaj, Lupe Fiasco, Dizzee Rascal, Lil B, Sean Price, and Madlib. The "Perfect" announcer sample appeared in Kanye West and Drake's work on The Life of Pablo in 2016. UK grime DJ Logan Sama described Street Fighter as "just a huge cultural thing that everyone experienced growing up" with an impact that "has just stayed in everyone's consciousness." Grime MCs including Dizzee Rascal were sampling the game as early as 2002. The "Hadouken", "Shoryuken", and "Perfect" samples became fixtures in BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Charlie Sloth's Fire in the Booth freestyle segments. In 1993, Capcom sponsored IndyCar driver Kenji Momota at the Indianapolis 500, giving his No. 88 car a Street Fighter livery; the car failed to qualify, but the image of a fighting game brand on a racing circuit captures something of the reach Street Fighter II had claimed outside the arcade.