Super Street Fighter II

• 1. Introduction

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  Super 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 Fighter title to run on Capcom's CP System II hardware. The CP System II supported more sophisticated graphics and audio than the original hardware could manage. Each player who sat down faced eight randomly chosen opponents, followed by the four Grand Masters: Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison. Four fighters no one had seen before were waiting among them. Whether all of it earned the word "Super" was a question that gaming publications spent much of 1993 and 1994 trying to settle.

• 2. Four New Warriors

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  Cammy arrived as a 19-year-old special forces agent from England, defined from the start by a mysterious past tied to M. Bison. T. Hawk came from Mexico, described as a Native American warrior whose ancestral homeland had been seized by the criminal organization Shadaloo. Dee Jay, a kickboxing musician from Jamaica, entered fights in search of the inspiration he needed for his next song. Fei Long rounded out the quartet as a Hong Kong movie star drawn to real combat to test his skills against genuine opponents. His design drew explicitly from actor Bruce Lee, making him an example of what was known as Bruceploitation.

  The twelve World Warriors from earlier Street Fighter II versions all returned, with their basic and special techniques adjusted throughout. Ryu received a new fire-based Hadouken that would later be renamed the Shakunetsu Hadouken when it appeared in the Street Fighter Alpha series. Ken's Shoryuken was given a flaming version. Zangief gained the Atomic Buster, and M. Bison received the Devil Reverse. The returning characters carried those additions into a game whose visual and audio presentation had been remade from the ground up.

• 3. Changed from the Inside

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  Ryu now opened the game's introductory sequence, launching a Hadouken directly toward the screen. That clip replaced a generic placeholder that had shown two unnamed characters fighting before a crowd. Every stage received new artwork, every character portrait was redrawn, and the HUD was redesigned to match.

  Ken, Guile, and Sagat received new voice lines recorded by a fresh announcer introduced for this version. Music and sound effects were remade entirely. A new scoring system tracked four types of performance: combos, first attacks, reversals, and recoveries, each earning the player bonus points. Character color selection expanded to eight options per fighter, with five new schemes added alongside the two carried over from earlier versions.

  Hyper Fighting's faster game speed was a deliberate revision that Super Street Fighter II reversed, returning the pace to what Champion Edition had established. That adjustment was not permanent. A separate mode had been designed for a competitive format that one cabinet alone could not accommodate.

• 4. Tournament Battle

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  Super Street Fighter II: The Tournament Battle was a distinct edition built for a scale of competition that a single cabinet could not support. Eight players competed in a single-elimination tournament spread across four networked arcade cabinets running at the same time. The format divided play into three stages: an initial round of eliminations, a semifinal, and a final.

  After the first round, winners were routed to the first two cabinets and losing players to the remaining two. The semifinal repeated this sorting at a smaller scale, with survivors moving forward. In the final, players competing for first place were assigned to the first cabinet, and third-place competitors went to the second. Each cabinet ran its match simultaneously, with all eight players' outcomes being decided in parallel.

  Arcade operators who committed four networked machines to the format could run a complete bracket without external administration. The game managed the bracket itself, moving players between cabinets according to each round's results. The eight-player format followed the game into its home versions, though not every platform that received the port would carry it forward intact.

• 5. Home Ports

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  The Super NES version was the first home release, arriving on the 25th of June 1994 in Japan. North America and Europe received it during the same month. It was the third Street Fighter game on the console, running on a 32 megabit cartridge that supported the XBAND online network. New modes included Group Battle, Time Challenge, and the eight-player tournament from the arcade. Nintendo's content policies at the time required the removal of blood from the character portraits, replaced with sweat.

  The Mega Drive and Genesis version arrived simultaneously in all three regions on a 40 megabit cartridge. It also supported XBAND, though only for its North American release. The SNES version had the announcer say "you win" or "you lose." The Genesis version instead had him call out the names of the fighters. An Expert difficulty setting increased the number of opponents from the arcade version's twelve to all sixteen characters.

  Two Japan-exclusive computer versions extended the game further. The Sharp X68000 version arrived on the 30th of September 1994, reproducing the arcade graphics with only minor differences. The game's sound team hid a message inside one of the ADPCM audio files. The FM Towns version followed on the 28th of October 1994, with faithful character artwork but backgrounds that lacked the parallax scrolling of the arcade original.

  Freestyle Software ported the game to the Amiga in 1995, published by U.S. Gold. Rozner Labs brought it to MS-DOS in 1996, published by Capcom, even though Super Street Fighter II Turbo had already reached that system the previous year via Eurocom and GameTek. The 1997 Street Fighter Collection for PlayStation and Sega Saturn included Super Street Fighter II, but without the eight-player tournament. The Japanese version appeared on the Super Famicom Classic Edition, while the Western SNES Classic Edition carried Street Fighter II Turbo in its place.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  In North America, Capcom distributed up to 1,000 arcade units to operators on a revenue-sharing basis at launch. RePlay magazine named it the most popular arcade game of November 1993. Play Meter ranked it the eighth most popular arcade video game and the fifth top arcade conversion kit of January 1994. By early 1994, Capcom was projecting worldwide sales of 100,000 arcade units.

  In Japan, the Super Famicom version was the third best-selling game of 1994, with 941,000 copies sold that year. In North America, the game topped both the Genesis and Super NES sales charts from July to August 1994. By year's end, the Genesis version had outsold the SNES version in the United States, landing among the year's top ten best-selling titles. Worldwide sales eventually reached two million copies.

  GamePro's reviewers called the Genesis conversion solid but said its music and voices were inferior to the SNES version. They described the new features as "pretty cosmetic or just downright boring and unimportant," then concluded that "Super is still Street Fighter" and "Street Fighter is still the best fighting game ever made." Electronic Gaming Monthly gave the SNES version 28 out of 40. All four reviewers agreed the additions were limited, given how many prior versions had already been released. They argued Capcom should have produced a Street Fighter III with new mechanics instead.

  Gamest nominated the game for Best Game of 1993 in its February 1994 issue, where it ranked third. It also placed third in Best Fighting Games, Best Graphics, and Best VGM that year. Cammy placed fifth among the Best Characters of 1993 in the Gamest rankings, with Dee Jay at 36th and T. Hawk at 37th. In 1995, Total! ranked the SNES version sixth in its Top 100 SNES Games, calling it "one of the finest beat-'em-ups and one of the most well-crafted games ever."