This one’s going to be brief, right? Because almost everyone who has been to a video arcade has played or even seen a Street Fighter II arcade machine.
This was the game that gave birth to the modern-day fighting games. Sure, other games had dabbled in this style before; this is, after all, a sequel to the 1987 Street Fighter arcade game that provide the foundation for this title. And you also had other games like Yie Ar Kung Fu and Karate Champ that also had similar one-on-one set-ups… but those felt more like test runs for the style of play that would become the poster child of competitive gaming among the more hardcore group.
This was the thing you either thanked or cursed for changing the face of arcade games. The days of going into an arcade and seeing a wide variety of games from shooters to weird one-offs were a thing of the past. Almost every arcade that I’ve come across – the ones that are still standing, at least – are filled with nothing but fighting games. Whether it’d be different flavors of Street Fighter or something else entirely… maybe you’ll get lucky and someone has a bunch of sitdown racers to play with, but otherwise, it was Street Fighter or bust.
I’d be mad about it if I didn’t enjoy fighting games in general… but I kinda do. I’m not what you call an expert player – hell, someone comes in and joins a game, I’m already planning my trip home… but I do enjoy playing these things when the competition is… less serious, as it were.
But my first encounter with Street Fighter II wasn’t at a local arcade or anything like that. At that point, I didn’t venture out much on my own, so any trips I’d go on, it’d be with family or friends who were willing to haul my ass along for the ride. But yeah, one day, my brother took me along to a comic book shop close by. Lots of comics, some other odds and ends, but what mesmerized me most of all was the Street Fighter II arcade machine that was just sitting in the corner.
I didn’t play it. I just looked at it. I looked at these images that were happening on screen, mesmerized by these people playing these little characters on screen trading blows, and then one of them would throw a fireball and we’d be like wow. Things that we kinda, sorta take for granted nowadays because the fighting game scene is packed with lots of spectacular titles, but the simple allure of seeing someone pull off a fireball and then figuring out the moves, when you only had like two or three special moves per fighter, is something that can never be truly replicated. It’s one of those things that stuck with me until they traded that Street Fighter II machine for a Mortal Kombat one… lather, rinse, repeat… except with more blood and maybe a couple fatalities when someone figured the bloody thing out (no pun intended).
Unlike Street Fighter I – whose only home port I know of is an obscure PC version – Street Fighter II eventually graced a console that I was familiar with: the Super Nintendo. Street Fighter II on SNES became a regular rental whenever I got the chance. And things got ugly when more than one person was around. I’d argue things got uglier when the updated version, Street Fighter II Turbo came long a year later. Same characters, play as the bosses, woe to anyone who decided to use M. Bison and spam his psycho crusher move. You were a hated person in those circles.
Eventually, Super Street Fighter II was a thing. Never having seen the arcade game, it was something I thought was a joke of sorts until the home ports came along and pretty much confirmed it as a real thing. New moves like red fireballs, flaming dragons, a whiny new Guile voice, Big Bird Announcer… 8-player tourneys if you had the controllers and players to spare. Fun time. Great party game whenever we can pull it off. But then there was Super Turbo, which I never played the arcade version, but I did get the DOS port, which ran slow on my woefully underpowered 486SX computer and the music was kinda funky, but there was still fun to be had.
I still have that CD. I wish I could run it on my Pentium, but Windows ME is an asshole with these things. (But I still use it anyway because it still has DOS… and I still use DOS.)
Eventually, Capcom moved on from Street Fighter II and kicked off the Street Fighter Alpha line of prequel fighters… and they’d eventually figure out how to count to three.
But that’s another story.
Later.
dtm666 