All Your History: Street Fighter Part 1 – Raised on the Streets

The roots of the fighting game genre go back to the mid-Eighties, when titles like Technos’ Karate Champ and Beam Software’s Way of the Exploding Fist burst onto the scene.  However, compared to other genres like the ever-popular platformer, fighting never really broke out into the mainstream.  Then at the turn of the decade, one franchise hit the gaming world like a punch to the gut, a roundhouse kick to the face that set off the fighting game boom of the early Nineties.  Though the fighting genre is much larger at this point, that franchise remains its single most iconic, to this day one of the most beloved legends the industry has ever seen.  Its name, its characters, and even its supermoves have entered the common consciousness in ways few games have ever achieved.  To this day, the entire genre still follows from where Street Fighter first lead it.

Raised on the Streets

It all began when Takashi Nishiyama got headhunted by Capcom.  Nishiyama had been working at developer Irem, and had made their side-scrolling beat-em-up Kung Fu Master in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Capcom thought he had talent, and so hired him for the task of making their first fighting game.  Unlike the sidescrolling Kung Fu Master, in which the player fought against many weaker opponents, this new fighting game would feature one-on-one matches against opponents of roughly equal power, very much in the vein of Karate Champ.  It would be a game made specifically for Capcom’s arcade division.

Nishiyama wanted to really bring these opponents, and the player character himself, to life.  Where every other fighting game basically pit the player against faceless enemies, Nishiyama wanted everyone to have their own backstory and distinctive look.  The hope was that this would engage the player at a deeper level.  To that end, Nishiyama and his team made the hero a Japanese martial artist named Ryu.  Why name him Ryu?  Well, Nishiyama’s first name is Takashi; and the symbol for the first syllable can also be pronounced ‘Ryu.’  A little vanity never hurt anybody.

The team soon rounded out the rest of the cast, including final boss Sagat and and a second playable character, American rich kid Ken.  These characters were all illustrated by twenty-two-year-old Keiji Inafune as his first video game assignment; he would later find fame as the creator of the Mega Man franchise.  By fighting game convention of the time, gamers could only play as one character, in this case Ryu.  The addition of Ken allowed a second player at the arcade to face off against the first.  To keep the controls the same, Ken literally had the exact same set of moves as Ryu; according to the backstory, this was because the two trained under the same master.  Either way, Ken was effectively just a reskinned Ryu for second-players.

While Ken and Ryu shared moves, the very fact that they had moves to share was a genre innovation.  Earlier fighting games had only featured two buttons: punch and kick.  For his new game, which he called Street Fighter, Nishiyama wanted six buttons: strong, medium, and light punch, and strong, medium, and light kick.  This was actually just an approximation of his original goal: to have a pressure-sensitive punching bag that the player would literally fight.  The harder he hit the bag, the harder Ryu would hit his opponent.  This ended up being too costly for the company, and too tiring for the player.  Instead, Nishiyama would have to settle for six buttons.  Capcom’s executives feared that this would be confusing for players.  After all, the other fighting games in the arcade would only have two buttons; wouldn’t players prefer their competitors simpler products?

But Nishiyama knew what he was onto, because the six-button layout would allow players to do something completely new: execute special attacks.  In other words, if a player input the right number of moves and attacks in the right order, Ryu would execute an even more powerful attack.  Street Fighter featured three such moves: a powerful uppercut, a whirlwind kick, and even a fireball!  Ryu’s enemies, too, would have their own special attacks.  It made Street Fighter a completely different beast than any other fighting game to date.

Nishiyama finally convinced Capcom to keep the six-button layout by arguing that, no matter what button players hit, they would still be attacking, so no one would be confused.  So it was that the game finally released into Japanese arcades in August Nineteen Eighty-Seven.  It quickly grew into a decent hit for Capcom.  Players liked the strong artwork and world-touring combat, and hardcore fans loved all the buttons.  The special attacks in particular were considered awesome.  The game’s success was enough to warrant an international release, for which Capcom debuted a deluxe variant of the arcade cabinet.  This version got a little closer to the original punching-bag idea, by replacing the six-buttons with two pressure-sensitive pads, one for punch and one for kick.  The harder players pressed them, the stronger the attack.

All things considered, Street Fighter became a solid if not stellar performer for Capcom.  Nishiyama, who had been headhunted, had proven his value to Capcom… and then, he got headhunted again.  After Street Fighter released, he left to work for rival SNK, taking a good portion of his team with him.  The first game they made there was Fatal Fury, a fighting game that Nishiyama felt took everything he’d put into Street Fighter and improved on it; to him, Fatal Fury was Street Fighter’s unofficial sequel.  Unfortunately, and ironically, crictics panned it as… a Street Fighter clone.

Meanwhile, the game was ported to several home computer systems, including the Commodore 64, ZX [pronounced ZedEx] Spectrum, and MS-DOS.  For whatever reason, another port published by NEC for the TurboGrafx-CD changed the name to Fighting Street.  Despite the name, the street didn’t actually fight.  Tiertex, a developer who had ported the game for British audiences, crafted an unofficial sequel of their own.  Called Human Killing Machine, the game kept none of the characters or locations from Street Fighter, and other than being a fighting game, really had nothing to do with it.  But their marketing department sold it as a licensed sequel, even though Capcom did no such thing.  Either way, the clunky game was such a small seller that it’s unlikely Capcom was even aware of it.

The first official attempt at a sequel came in Nineteen Eighty-Nine, originally called… Street Fighter ‘89.  As a matter of fact, the game’s makers had originally wanted it to be a new franchise.  It was, after all, a side-scrolling beat-em-up, not a fighting game.  But Capcom’s sales department wanted a follow-up to Street Fighter, and so slapped the name on.  Unfortunately, if predictably, arcade operators took one look at the game and cried foul.  It looked nothing like Street Fighter, and demanded that Capcom change the name.  Capcom complied, and Street Fighter ‘89 became Final Fight.

Which meant that the company still had no sequel to their fighting game.  Well, if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.  Capcom went back to the same team that worked on Final Fight and asked them — again — to make a Street Fighter sequel.  No more side-scrolling: this one would be a true, one-on-one fighting game, a worthy successor to the somewhat-popular Street Fighter.

Who knew — maybe if they were lucky, Street Fighter II would be even more popular.

Tune in next time to see one of the most popular games of all time

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