All Your History: Street Fighter Part 2 – Greatest of All Time

In Nineteen Eighty-Seven, rising Japanese developer Capcom released Street Fighter into arcades.  The game innovated the fighting genre in several ways, adding in six attack buttons and special supermoves.  It became a decent hit both at home in Japan and abroad, enough so for Capcom to want a sequel.  However, their attempt to brand a new sidescrolling beat-em-up game as Street Fighter ‘89 didn’t work.  Arcade operators saw right away that it wasn’t Street Fighter, and so the game was renamed to Final Fight.  So it was that Capcom turned to the Final Fight team and asked them to make a new Street Fighter game that the arcade operators would accept.  A game that would be like Street Fighter, but bigger and better, and that hopefully would sell a little stronger.  What they crafted remains to this day one of the most iconic games ever made.

Greatest of All Time

Yoshiki Okamoto was the producer on Final Fight, and so now, he was in charge of the Street Fighter II project.  He set his two designers, Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, to work on expanding on the first game’s innovations.  Right away, they decided to do something that no other fighting game had ever done before, a simple idea that had just never occurred to other developers: they would let the player choose their character.

Every other fighting game to that time had simply given gamers a hero to play as; for example, the original Street Fighter let them be Ryu, or a second player be Ken.  Street Fighter II would let them choose any one of eight different characters, and what was more, they would not all be carbon copies of one another.  Each one would represent a different fighting style from around the world, and feature different speeds, moves, and supermoves.  Oddly enough, this actually didn’t add too much work to the development.  After all, every fighting game had lots of characters, in the form of opponents for the hero to fight.  Now, those opponents would just be playable.

Originally, Okamoto wanted to build the game completely from scratch, which meant scrapping all the old characters.  Eventually, however, he was convinced to keep Ryu and Ken, largely unchanged from the first game — except that Ryu wouldn’t be a redhead anymore.  Why a Japanese fighter had ever had red hair remains unknown to modern science.  The original game’s final boss, Sagat, would also return as a non-playable enemy.  The rest of the cast would come from around the world, each distinct in their own way, and each one also conforming to an exaggerated stereotype: Dhalsim was a malnourished yoga master from India, Chun-Li was a silk-wearing Chinese beauty, and Zangief was a big burly Russian whose orignal name was Vodka.  Beastly Blanka, sumo wrestler E. Honda, and American commando Guile finished off the roster.

But even though Sagat was was in the game as a boss, he wasn’t alone.  Players found that they had three other bosses to contend with: Balrog, Vega, and M. Bison.  But which was which?  In Japan, it was the boxer named M. Bison, the mask-wearing Spaniard named Balrog, and the ultimate boss named Vega.  The problem was that the boxer was named M. Bison as a parody of real-life boxer Mike Tyson.  While the joke worked fine in Japan, Capcom’s lawyers became afraid that Tyson might sue them if the game came out in the States.  To avoid any potential lawsuit, they simply rotated the boss names in all overseas versions of the game, so that suddenly the boxer was Balrog, the Spaniard was Vega, and the final boss became M. Bison.

And with that, the entire game’s cast was finally set.  Eagle-eyed players noticed that a good number of them strongly resembled characters from the Nineteen Seventy-Six kung fu movie, Master of the Flying Guillotine, though it’s never been confirmed that the designers had this movie in mind.  To finish it off, each character got their own unique ending cutscene.

These were brief and cheaply made, but they gave a note of closure to the experience and helped to make each character feel like they had their own story.  The only question now was, how would audiences react?

Only ten months after development began, Okamoto felt confident that the game would do well, given the first game’s reputation and his team’s experience with the successful Final Fight.  But even with that in mind, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior obliterated all expectations the minute it was released in Nineteen Ninety-One.  The reaction was beyond anything Capcom had ever seen before.  The game’s primary innovation, giving players a choice of who to play as, turned out to be all the difference in the world.  Seemingly overnight, every player had a favorite.  The idea that all these characters had different stories, personalities, and goals helped to bring them all to life, even if those stories were only really present in the ending cutscene.  The different pros and cons of each character became hotly debated, then tested on the battlefield, then debated all over again.  And while the single-player was well and good, the two-player match-ups of Street Fighter II became one of the industry’s earliest indications of the power of multiplayer.  Endless hours, and as many quarters, were spent at the arcades with friends fighting friends.  And of course, just as they got good with one character, they’d have to go and master the other seven.  Nothing else in the early Nineties lit the arcade scene on fire like Street Fighter II.  Every other fighting game on the market was abandoned while players queued up to play ‘just one more round.’

Capcom, naturally, rushed to cash in on the monster they’d unchained.  Over the next few years, they unleashed a seemingly non-stop stream of updated versions of the game: Championship Edition, which allowed players to play as the boss characters; Hyper Fighting, which introuduced new super moves; Super Street Fighter II, which introduced brand-new characters; and finally, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which added super-supermoves beyond the ordinary supermoves.  And that was just in the arcades!  In Nineteen Ninety-Two, Street Fighter II came to the Super Nintendo, and later to the Sega Genesis and Nintendo Game Boy as well.  And once again, Street Fighter II dropped jaws back at Capcom headquarters.  The sales were quite simply unbelievable.  And yet again, a string of updated versions released across all platforms.

In the end, the Super Nintendo version of Street Fighter II sold six point three million units — twenty years later, still the best-selling game in Capcom’s history.  Meanwhile, the Super Nintendo version of Hyper Fighting, called Street Fighter II Turbo, sold four point one million units.  Then the Super Nintendo version of Super Street Fighter II sold two million units.  So three versions of the same game on the same platform sold a combined twelve point four million units in the early Nineties.  Add in all the other versions on other platforms, plus all the sales of arcade cabinets, and… well, you get the picture.  By Nineteen Ninety-Three, Street Fighter II had earned an estimated combined total of one point five billion dollars.  Keep in mind that’s not adjusting for inflation, at a time when the gaming market was only a fraction of the size it is today.

There’s no other way to say it: Street Fighter II hit the gaming world like a fifty megaton meteor.  Or an uppercut to the jaw.  Not suprisingly, a rash of other fighting games quickly came out, and overnight, the fighting game genre went from niche to mainstream.  Every one of them featured a big roster of playable characters; the old model of featuring a single hero was dead forever.  The inclusion of supermoves became so fundamental that many hardcore fans can’t imagine the genre without them.  Games like Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Samurai Shodown, and others all flooded the market in the early- to mid-Nineties.  And while many of these became successful in their own right, no fighting game has ever replicated the phenomenon that was Street Fighter II.

Everyone and their grandmother expected Capcom to make Street Fighter III.  What they got was the most crowded release schedule any franchise has ever seen.

Tune in next time to see Street Fighter turn into alphabet soup

SHARE THIS POST WITH YOUR IDIOT FRIENDS: