DID YOU KNOW that you can now download an apptimized (that’s my new word for something that’s been optimized for use as a mobile app) version of legendary fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 2? DID YOU KNOW that the game costs only three dollars to download—until May 6, after which, it’ll cost five?

DID YOU KNOW that the game incorporates a touch-based control scheme, making use of something Capcom is calling “the innovative ‘Flick Button’”?

WELL IT’S ALL TRUE. All of it. So if you’ve always wanted to play this game on your iPhone or iPod Touch for some reason, now you can. I don’t believe that you’ll be able to play anyone else on the game, which is kind of really the whole point of the game, but there you go.

Here. Some screens:

When Street Fighter was first released, it was an innovative and successful game.  Introducing a six-button layout and supermoves, fans found it to be a great addition to the small fighting game genre.  But then in Nineteen Ninety-One, a different team made a follow-up.  And if the first game had done well, Street Fighter II was a monster unlike anything publisher Capcom had ever seen before.  Introducing the concept of character selection, Street Fighter II changed the genre forever, and the wider gaming world with it.  Rushing to captialize on the phenomenon, Capcom released an entire army of updated versions of the game, each one going on to be a success in its own right.  Everyone expected that Street Fighter III must be right around the corner.  As it turned out, there were a few thousand games that needed to be released alongside it.

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Such was the success of Street Fighter that, in Nineteen Ninety-Four, it was adapted into a Hollywood movie.  Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as the American Guile — think about that for a second — and Raul Julia as M. Bison, it was considered… awful.  Horrible performances, cheap sets, and a turgid script all fueled the fiasco.  Notably, and unfortunately, this was the final film performance of Raul Julia’s storied career, done at the request of his kids.  He died before the film released.

The movie also inspired a video game!  Now that’s meta!  Street Fighter: The Movie was an arcade game featuring digitized sprites of the film’s cast, developed by Incredible Technologies.  This is not to be confused with… Street Fighter: The Movie, a home console game featuring  digitized sprites of the film’s cast, developed by Capcom.  Though the two games sound exactly the same, they were in fact developed by different people.  However, they were both equally terrible.

Fortunately, Nineteen Ninety-Four also saw another Street Fighter film, this one a Japanese anime.  Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie was considered an instant classic by fans of the game, featuring all their favorite characters while staying true to the tone of it games.  And while this film didn’t have a game adaptation of its own, it did heavily inspire the first new Street Fighter game in years.  In Nineteen Ninety-Five, Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams released, a so-called ‘interquel’ taking place between Street Fighters I & II.  Story-wise, the game explained where the rivalries between the different characters originated, fleshing out the characters a bit more.  Graphically, Alpha took the anime look of the film to heart, also taking cues from Capcom’s own Darkstalkers and X-Men fighting games.  Gameplay-wise, it did a fantastic job of retaining the core elements that made Street Fighter what it was, while also adding in some new concepts such as countering and multi-level supermoves.

Unfortunately, right out of the gate Alpha didn’t have very many characters, particularly when compared to later editions of Street Fighter II.   Character selection, after all, had been the innovation that made Street Fighter II the legend it was; scaling this back was a bad misstep.  On top of this, there were far fewer environments to actually fight in, and the music was considered sub-par.  On the plus side, these characters came from Street Fighter I and II and even from Final Fight, plus a few new characters.  One of these was Dan, a wimpy, pink-wearing fighter that looked like Ryu… but sucked.  It turned out Dan was actually an in-joke: Capcom’s rival SNK had released a fighting game called Art of Fighting, which featured the character Ryo, who looked and played a lot like Street Fighter’s Ryu… but worse.  Dan was Capcom’s dig at SNK’s blatant, but worse, rip-off.  The irony here is that the team who had worked on the original Street Fighter had left Capcom to join SNK.

From there, they had watched Street Fighter II become a phenomenon without them.  And now, the franchise that they’d started was mocking them.

If there was a question here, it was why this game wasn’t called ‘Street Fighter III.’  Capcom has never given a reason, but it seems likely that Alpha was meant to be a holdover game while the real sequel was being worked out.  In the meantime, they quickly pushed out Street Fighter Alpha 2 in Nineteen Ninety-Six.  Even though it was billed as a sequel, and it technically featured a new storyline, the developers working on it considered it the ‘true’ Street Fighter Alpha.  The first game had been rushed; this re-release allowed them to refine it and add in some more characters.  And then on top of that, Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold added in new modes and characters.  All these different styles were brought together a few years later in Street Fighter Alpha 3, which was something of a ‘best of’ version.  When all the letters and numbers were done adding up, Alpha, Alpha 2, Alpha 2 Gold, and Alpha 3 were all considered great games by hardcore Street Fighter fans.

But not content with all these releases, and still not content to release Street Fighter III, Capcom then dropped Street Fighter EX on the gaming world.  The game made the move from 2D sprites to full-polygonal 3D, a look made popular in the fighting genre by the Virtua Fighter and Tekken series.  It was made by developer Arika.  The name should be a hint: it’s ‘Akira’ backwards, and sure enough, Arika was founded by Street Fighter II designer Akira Nishitani.  Nishitani largely eschewed the storyline in favor of straight gameplay.  Unfortunately, despite this focus, EX never really took off with fans.  Maybe the look was just too different from what the audience was used to, or maybe the controls just weren’t as tight as they should have been.  Either way, EX did not perform as well as Capcom might have hoped.

But that didn’t stop them from releasing games!  EX was soon followed by EX Plus, which was soon followed by a PlayStation port called EX Plus Alpha.  Later, a full sequel released in the form of EX 2, which was basically the same as EX Plus, which was then followed by EX 2 Plus.  And because they hadn’t done enough yet, EX 3 released a few years afterwards as a PlayStation 2 launch title exclusively for that system.  In all of this, nobody actually knew what ‘EX’ was supposed to stand for.

Anyway, while all this was going on, Capcom was still releasing yet more Street Fighter games.  In Nineteen Ninety-Six Capcom tried out the first in their long-running series of Vs games.  X-Men vs Street Fighter did exactly what its title promised, pitting the popular Marvel Comics mutants against Ryu and friends.  The roster was expanded in Nineteen Ninety-Seven’s Marvel Superheroes vs Street Fighter, which reached its logical conclusion in Nineteen Ninety-Eight’s Marvel vs Capcom, which has itself become a long-running series.

But this wasn’t enough Street Fighter!  Nineteen Ninety-Seven finally saw the release of a full-fledged sequel to Street Fighter II.  Street Fighter III: New Generation was trumpeted by Capcom as the next great fighting revolution.  Unfortunately, when fans finally got their hands on it, they were horrified to find that all their favorite characters had been ditched.  With the exception of the obligatory Ryu and Ken, everyone else was brand-new.  In fact, the team working on Street Fighter III had initially wanted to scrap even the two stalwarts, but were convinced to keep them in.  It should go without saying that this team was completely new to the Street Fighter franchise; none of the old guard were involved in the sequel’s making.

The game kept true to the 2D nature of Street Fighter, adopting the Alpha series’ cartoony look.

In terms of strict gameplay, Street Fighter III was considered by the hardcore community to be the finest yet in the franchise, possibly the best fighting game ever made.  Controls were tight, combos and counters were precise, and animations were fluid.  But for the more casual crowd, the freakish nature of the character art was a turn-off.  Worse, there wasn’t very much to distinguish Street Fighter III from other fighting games, or even worse, from other Street Fighter games that were still releasing regularly.  While Street Fighter III did fine at the arcades, it was nowhere near the force that Capcom had predicted it would be.  Somehow, they hadn’t yet realized that they were oversaturating the market.

As if to prove that point, Capcom decided to release more Street Fighter III games!  Street Fighter III: 2^nd Impact quickly followed, which was quickly followd by Street Fighter III: 3^rd Strike, each of which added new characters and new mechanics to the formula.  In the near-term, neither of them really broke out, and only exacerbated the too-many-games problem.  3^rd Strike would get buried by the runaway success of Marvel vs Capcom 2 a year later, which of course also had Street Fighter characters in it.  That same year, Capcom vs SNK released, finally pitting Street Fighter characters against their SNK competitors, followed by Capcom vs SNK 2 a year after that…

…and then, Capcom finally stopped.  Somebody at the top level finally figured out that overflooding the market was just killing themselves.  So it was that the fighters from the street were left alone for years, finally taking a well-earned break.  During this quiet spell, Street Fighter III: 3^rd Strike slowly emerged as a top-notch fighting game, as tournaments the world over continued to host the game for years to come.  Its perfectly refined fighting mechanics finally found an audience that appreciated it, and without constant new releases, it had some room to breath.  Marvel vs Capcom 2 also motored along for years at arcades.  There was one new game, Two Thousand Four’s Capcom Fighting Evolution, but this went by largely unnoticed.  Other than that, Capcom let the older games play themselves out.

But when at last Capcom decided it was time to hit the streets again, they decided to do it with the team that started it all.

Tune in next time to watch Street Fighter come full circle