In celebration of the release of Street Fighter 4, on the 21st anniversary of the long running series, the inaugural edition of SAVE STATES is pleased to present to you, the first in a 5 chapter look at Street Fighter: The series.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

One-on-one fighting games were nothing new in the late 80’s. People had already dumped a legion of coins into Konami’s Yie-Ar Kung Fu and Data East’s Karate Champ. Using these games as a starting point, Capcom producers Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto would bring Street Fighter to Japanese arcades in August of 1987. A US release would soon follow, and while it wasn’t a blockbuster by any stretch, Street Fighter’s success would bring the fighting game to the forefront of the gaming scene for over half a decade.

Street Fighter wasn’t a perfect game by any stretch. Yie-Ar Kung Fu’s controls were relatively smooth by comparison, and the computer opponents were ridiculously difficult. What SF had going for it was large character graphics and a six-button setup that added a variety of attack options not seen up to this point. It was a difficult game to learn, but could be very rewarding. Players had only two choices depending on which coin slot they chose, series icon, Ryu was the first player, while Ken, a simple palette swap of Ryu, would take the role of player 2. 10 other characters appeared, many of whom will be familiar to SF veterans, (Gen and Birdie would later appear in the “Alpha” series, and the final boss was the beastly Thai kickboxer, Sagat.) Ryu and Ken already possessed some of their signature special moves at this point, the dragon punch, hurricane kick,and fireball were included, though neither appeared in any documentation on or around the cabinet, and were notoriously difficult to pull off in the heat of combat.

Ryu in classic fashion.

My first encounter with Street Fighter came in the winter of ‘88, at a local arcade. Having played a lot of Yie-Ar Kung fu on my C64 at home, the detailed graphics and animation instantly appealed to me. It was an expensive play, two tokens instead of one, and it was the version with the novelty oversized two-button setup – whereby the strength of punches and kicks was governed by how hard you slammed those big-ass red and blue buttons. I made it a round or two in before the game utterly destroyed me, but I was hooked at this point. It was on one play through, after becoming severely frustrated with Sagat, that I accidentally discovered the Dragon Punch (and won the match in dramatic fashion!) Every subsequent playthrough became a test in replicating that damn punch. For the next few weeks that machine would be the only rig I touched, until the P2 buttons gave out – probably destroyed by pre-teens like myself wailing away in frustration. I know I hit those bastards really damn hard.

I didn’t have to wait too long to get my fix. The Turbo Graphx 16 popped up around town in the fall of ’89, and there was one under my Christmas tree that year, alongside the CD add-on and four or five titles. Among the pile was a fighter called “Fighting Street”. The logo on the cover was nondescript, and the artwork not even vaguely familiar. The screenshots on the back looked pretty bland and pixilated,  but as soon as I booted the disc, there was no mistaking it. The TG-16 version was a surprisingly solid port. The games colorful graphics were pretty much intact, the remastered music was fantastic, and the controller made the special moves a little easier to pull off. On top of that – the TG version “sort of” emulated the pressure sensitive two button layout of the arcade version, the longer you held the buttons on the controller, the harder your attack power (it was damn hard to pull off medium strikes). I never did get to fire it up in multiplayer, the damn TG-16 only had one controller port, but I played the hell out of that game for what felt like 5 years (it was actually about 2, as my TG CD-Rom died shortly before the launch of the SNES in 1991.)

Street Fighter comes home, sort of…

Street Fighter came and went without too much fanfare, but there was definitely demand for a sequel. In 1989, Capcom began showing a new arcade title at trade shows called “Street Fighter ‘89”. Instead of one character, you chose between three, and instead of one-on-one vs. matches, you were tasked with wiping out an entire gang a la Double Dragon. When the game finally hit arcades, the name was changed simply to “Final Fight”.

A taste of things to come…

A year later in 1990, Street Fighter spawned it’s first “true” sequel, in the form of an NES title called Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight. This bizarre offshoot had players fight through a series of planets as a cyborg version of Ken, complete with crew cut and sunglasses. It was ridiculously difficult, and now languishes in obscurity, which is entirely suitable. I’m curious as to how many other people my age blew months worth of allowance, pathetic wages or scrounged change on that piece of crap.

Few live to remember it either… thank God.

Meanwhile, Final Fight was ripping up the arcades, and the chief creators, Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, were gearing up for their next project. They were getting ready to drop a bombshell on the video game world.

To Be Continued…