Super Street Fighter II Turbo

• 1. Introduction

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  In Japan, no arcade game earned more in 1994 than Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Capcom built it for arcade cabinets as the fifth installment in the Street Fighter II sub-series, following Super Street Fighter II from 1993. Oddly, it did not match the commercial success of earlier Street Fighter II games. Even so, it left a deep mark on the competitive fighting game community, and players still hold tournaments on it today. How did a game that earned less than some of its predecessors become a fixture of those tournaments? Why did Capcom keep revisiting it, again and again, across so many systems? And who was the hidden fighter that players had to find for themselves? Like its predecessor, the game ran on the CP System II hardware.

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• 2. The Hidden Fighter

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  Sagat shows how Super Turbo handled its roster. By entering a code for each character, players could summon versions of the fighters from the original Super Street Fighter II, alongside the regular Turbo versions. These older versions played as they had before, with subtle differences. The older Sagat in Super Turbo, for instance, can cancel the second hit of his standing light and medium kick into any special move. In Super Street Fighter II itself, he could not.

  Akuma, known as Gouki in Japan, sat outside the roster altogether. He was the series' first secret character, playable only by typing a code at the player select screen. Even in this weakened form, he is the most powerful fighter in the game. Competitive tournaments have historically banned him, including in the updated versions of Super Turbo. The ban did not end his career. He went on to become a recurring character in later Street Fighter installments and in other Capcom fighting games.

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• 3. Speed and Super Combos

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  Four speed settings gave Super Street Fighter II Turbo an answer to its predecessor's biggest complaint. Super Street Fighter II had drawn heavy criticism for running slower than the release before it, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. Super Turbo became the first Street Fighter game in arcades with an adjustable speed. An operator could set it in the system configuration. If the operator chose the "Free Select" option, each player picked a speed at the start of the game.

  The Super meter drove the biggest new mechanic, the Super Combo. After a player had built up the meter, they could trigger a multi-hit automatic combo that dealt a large amount of damage. Air combos arrived in the same update as a second new way to chain moves together.

  The presentation changed too. A redesigned HUD carried new graphics, and the opening showed Ryu launching a Hadouken projectile toward the screen. That sequence was intercut with images of Chun-Li and Cammy, plus quick flashes of the new hidden character. Every victory pose and every basic and special move received newly drawn animation frames, and Chun-Li's Kikōken fireball got a fresh animation of its own.

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• 4. Console Conversions

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  On the 13th of November 1994, the 3DO version reached Japan, with releases in North America and Europe during the same year. Its graphics matched the arcade more closely than the earlier 16-bit console ports. It lacked parallax scrolling, however, and some character animations were missing, along with the older Super versions of the fighters. Many people claimed the game ran in a stuttery way because CDs of that era were slow. Modern testing disputes this, and verifiable reports from the time are rare. The soundtrack reused remixed music from the FM Towns version of Super Street Fighter II, with a few new remixes made for Super Turbo. The port also included "CPS1 Chains," a feature that had existed only in arcade versions up through Hyper Fighting.

  In May 1995, the MS-DOS version arrived in North America and Europe, developed by Eurocom and published by GameTek. It played at a resolution of 320×200 on AT/PC-compatible machines. Because the graphic data came straight from the arcade game, the fighters looked large on the narrow screen, and they started each match slightly closer together. Secret commands brought back each character's original color scheme, and attacks that the 3DO version had dropped because of memory limits. The option menus let players switch off parallax scrolling so the game could run on weak hardware. Early shipments carried many glitches. In one, characters knocked out of mid-air by a basic attack landed and recovered as if nothing had happened. A patch file fixed these problems, and version 1.5 of the retail release corrected them as well. A patch for version 1.6 followed.

  GameTek also published the Amiga port in 1996, which Human Soft handled. Graphically it sits very close to the arcade original and has a remixed soundtrack. On an unexpanded machine, though, the animation turns jerky.

  In 1997, the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions appeared inside the Street Fighter Collection. Each match begins with a small delay, and there are numerous small differences from the arcade game. Super Street Fighter II shares the first disc, while Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold waits on a second disc.

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• 5. Dreamcast and Collections

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  On the 22nd of December 2000, Capcom released Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service on the Dreamcast. It went on sale only in Japan, and only by mail order through the Dreamcast Direct online store, later renamed Sega Direct. Its online versus mode ran on Sega's Matching Service, which worked only with analog modems. That service closed on the 1st of September 2003. The bonus mini-games from earlier Street Fighter II titles, which the arcade release had cut, came back and could be switched on through a special options menu. Almost nothing else was changed apart from the score display, so this version is considerably more accurate than the PlayStation and Saturn ports. It also adds faster speeds, numbered 4-6, and a very slow speed 0 that does not remove any frames.

  Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2, for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, includes Super Turbo. The first volume had gathered the first three Street Fighter II games, but the second skipped Super Street Fighter II and offered only Super Turbo. This version has many glitches.

  Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection carries the game too. Save states are built into the source code, and other features can be toggled on and off. Online multiplayer matches are available for this title, as they are for Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. The later updates, Hyper Street Fighter II and Ultra Street Fighter II, are not part of that set.

  Capcom Arcade Stadium sells the arcade version as an individual purchase and lets players choose either the US or the Japan edition.

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• 6. Revivals and Remakes

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  On the 13th of July 2001, Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival reached Japan for the Game Boy Advance, with North American and European releases from Capcom following. It brought new character illustrations and a new title screen, and Nintendo re-released it as a Virtual Console game for the Wii U in 2015. The handheld has only four attack buttons, though the four action buttons are easy to customize. Most basic sprites and animations came from the SNES version of the original Super Street Fighter II, but the new Turbo techniques borrowed arcade sprites. As a result, some characters briefly grow in size mid-move. Guile's standing heavy kick is one example, since the arcade sprites were larger. Walking forward and backward also share the same animation frames. Only Akuma uses sprites drawn entirely from the arcade version, so his advance and retreat look different.

  Several stages were changed. Ken's, Guile's and M. Bison's stages are completely new, while Zangief's and Balrog's were heavily modified. Ryu's comes from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and Chun-Li's from Street Fighter Alpha 2. Akuma gets his own stage, an altered version of Ryu's. Voice clips come from the arcade game, except Ryu's, which follow the original Street Fighter II, and Akuma's, which come from the Street Fighter Alpha series. Here Akuma can use the Shun Goku Satsu as a Super Combo, which he could not do in the arcade. Players can also earn Shin Akuma, a version with even greater fighting skills. Revival was a runner-up for GameSpot's annual "Best Fighting Game" award among console games, losing to Garou: Mark of the Wolves.

  In 2003, Capcom released Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition on CPS-2 arcade hardware, the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. It let players pick the main cast as they appeared in all five Street Fighter II titles: World Warrior, Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting, Super and Super Turbo. The only condition was that the character had been selectable in that game.

  In 2008, Capcom published Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix as a downloadable game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Backbone Entertainment developed it. It runs at 1080p, with graphics by artists from Udon, the creators of the Street Fighter comic book series, and an arranged soundtrack from Overclocked Remix. David Sirlin adjusted the game's balance with input from the competitive community. The code came from the Dreamcast version, Super Street Fighter II X for Matching Service. A "classic" mode switches to classic sprites and drops the balance changes. The remake was played at the EVO Championship Series in 2009 and 2010.

  In 2017, Capcom announced Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers for the Nintendo Switch. It adds Evil Ryu, who first appeared in the Alpha series, and Violent Ken, who debuted in SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos. Akuma can now be picked on the character select screen. Shin Akuma is playable too, through a series of specific button inputs, but only offline.

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• 7. Critics and Earnings

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  In April 1994, the trade publication Game Machine listed Super Street Fighter II Turbo as the second most successful table arcade unit in Japan. Only Virtua Fighter stood above it, while Art of Fighting 2 and Karnov's Revenge ranked lower. The game finished as the sixth highest-grossing arcade game of 1995 in Japan. In the United States, it was the top-earning arcade circuit board of May 1994, and it ranked among the country's twelve best-selling arcade video games of that year.

  In the Japanese magazine Gamest, Super Street Fighter II X, the name used in Japan, placed fourth for Best Game of 1994 and fourth for Best Fighting Game. When the 3DO version came out, Famicom Tsūshin scored it 29 out of 40.

  The four reviewers at Electronic Gaming Monthly gave the 3DO version a unanimous 8 out of 10. They said it recreated the arcade graphics and features faithfully, and that the control was "near perfect," even on the standard 3DO pad. GamePro disagreed. Its reviewer found the control imperfect even with Panasonic's six-button controller, and terrible on the standard pad because of the "mushy" D-pad. GamePro also faulted the missing older versions of the fighters. It called the port "a reasonably close translation of the coin-op" but placed it behind the SNES version of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting among the home conversions. A reviewer at Next Generation agreed that the 3DO controllers were not ideal. He still called it "without a doubt, the best version of Street Fighter II to hit home systems," and described it as "colorful, fast, and so impressive you hardly notice the disk access time between rounds."

  Arcade Sushi ranked the game as the "best fighting game" and wrote that it "is easily the most loved, and the most played game in the franchise. If you haven't played this fighter, then you haven't played fighting games at all." Ultimate Future Games, from Future Publishing, gave the 3DO version 95 percent. It hailed the game as the one that would "save the 3DO" and praised it as the "ultimate beat 'em up," with "slow CD access" as its only complaint. In 2019, Game Informer ranked it the third best fighting game of all time.

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• 8. Tournament Scene

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  From 2002 to 2008, Super Street Fighter II Turbo was a featured game at the Evolution Championship Series, known as EVO. Across its whole life, in one form or another, it has stayed a staple of competitive fighting game events.

  EVO brought the game back in 2012 and 2014 as the "Tournament of Legends," a side event limited to invited players and qualifiers. In 2013, it appeared there as the "ST Games."

  In Japan, the game is a staple of the X-MANIA series of tournaments. It has also featured several times in the Tougeki Super Battle Opera series, so the next bracket is never far away.

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