Chapter 2: Here comes a New Challenger!

With Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumodo gone, having moved on to SNK, the team behind the now wildly successful Final Fight, Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, began work on the real sequel to Street Fighter. The graphical style and technology used in Final Fight would serve as a starting point, and the designers would add a level of detail and depth previously unseen in the genre. The end result: Street Fighter II, landed in arcades in March of 1991, and began to gain momentum, by the fall, it had become a phenomenon.

Street Fighter II holds more distinctions than any other fighting game in existence; it introduced us to multiple player characters with varying move sets, combos, specials, vs. modes, and real competitive play. Gone was the solitary lead character (or his palette swap), replaced by a squad of 8 “world warriors”, fighters from around the globe with unique martial arts styles and abilities with unique traits that would differentiate each character from the others (outside of Ken, who still remained a “repainted” model of Ryu). Anyone who set foot into an arcade between the fall of ’91 and the summer of ’92 was bound to see a crowd gathered around the Street Fighter machines. The game was stealing magazine covers and international attention from the then shiny new Super Nintendo and Sega’s established Genesis system. When players did get the opportunity to play solo, they would eventually encounter four “Grand Master” characters, and what few people who did remember the original Street Fighter would see a familiar face in Sagat, the powerhouse you would be pitched against before tackling M. Bison to end the tournament.

When I first discovered Street Fighter II, I actually had no idea what I was looking at. Someone was attempting to beat the claw-wielding boss character, Vega, using a bizarre looking ape-man named Blanka. All I could tell you was that the game looked, and sounded, absolutely stunning. When the guy had his ass handed to him and stepped away, I decided to try my luck. After chosing “continue” I was greeted by the character select screen, and immediately highlighted Ryu. I had to take a step back and look at the title atop the cabinet. When that round began, I was giddy. Vega, being the son of a bitch to end all sons of bitches in the original version of SFII, made extremely short work of me. I persevered, and 6 or 7 dollars later I was coming to grips with the controls, and learning the SFII method of kicking ass. My solo jaunt didn’t last very long before people started jumping in. I never understood how so new a game could have such madly skilled players already, as I was getting annihilated repeatedly. All told I probably spent more than a hundred dollars in quarters on Street Fighter II in the year or so I played before it dropped on home consoles, but I was far from alone. Faces were starting to get familiar, people were starting to gain reputations, some of us were there weekly, some of us daily. I recall downloading a 100 page guide of advanced techniques from a local Onlime Bulletin Board (BBS, pre-cursor to the world wide web) and bringing it along to the arcade in a binder for myself and the regulars to thumb through. This game had gotten into our blood, we had become Street Fighters, and we were legion.

In 1991, this was a common sight. And was considered visually stunning!

Street Fighter II beat out several heavy hitters in 1991 for multiple “Game of the year” awards in several industry magazines. It had become a sensation almost overnight. By early 1992 it was impossible to walk into an arcade without hearing the thunderous roar of an SFII cabinet. What Capcom did next was thought of as a brilliant move on their part. The game was revised, tweaked based on user feedback, and re-released, this time bearing the “Championship Edition” moniker. The four “Grand Masters” were now playable, giving the hardcore players a few new characters to master, and I for one was happy to get Ryu’s nemesis, Sagat, in playable form.

Around the same time, Street Fighter II made the jump to home consoles. It first premiered in July of 1992 on the Super Nintendo, giving that machine the shot in the arm it needed to roar past Sega in the home console race. Street Fighter II on the SNES was not an arcade perfect port, particularly where visuals were concerned. The sprite graphics were very impressive, but didn’t match the resolution of the arcade cabinet, however the remainder of the experience was pretty much intact. Street Fighter II became a pastime for many at home, as well as at the arcade, and the cartridge went on to move over 8 million copies, making it the single highest selling software title in Capcom’s history, a record that still stands. Anyone who owned a Super Nintendo probably had this game.

Three seperate versions of Street Fighter II appeared for the SNES alone.

In the arcades, the “Championship Edition” would be replaced with another revision, “Hyper Fighting”, which would allow for faster game speeds and further character revisions; Ken for example, now played quite differently from Ryu, and featured several different animations, varying speed and attack power, and certain moves which outperformed his P1 namesake. Ultimately released as a response to hacked versions of the arcade rom which were being circulated, Hyper Fighting didn’t quite reach the heights that SFII and SFII: CE did. By now, several other fighting games had taken to the streets, notable efforts included SNK’s Fatal Fury (co-created by members of the original Street Fighter team), Data East’s World Heroes, and of course, Midway’s Mortal Kombat. This dilution of the fighting genre split the audience more than expected, and Mortal Kombat in particular, used its digitized graphics and gratuitous violence to ensnare new users, and it worked in their favor. Interest in Street Fighter II began to decline, magazines began shouting for a true sequel, and when Mortal Kombat II came out of the gate ahead of anything new from Capcom, complete with massive gameplay improvements, the crowds in arcades began to shift to the other side of the room.

Super Street Fighter II came to arcades in the fall of 1993, and brought with it four new characters (bringing the total to 16), redrawn sprites, new stage backgrounds, remastered audio, and a monstrous 4-cabinet, 8-player tournament setup. It was enough to put SF II back into the top spot with the arcade crowd, though print media continued to criticize Capcom for their lack of commitment to a true sequel. At any rate, the 4-cabinet setup began to again draw large crowds, and the home version, released in the summer of 1994 for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis was (and still is) widely regarded as the best version of the game for that era. Yet another revision was to come, Super Street Fighter II: Turbo, introducing a new hidden boss, Akuma, and some further character tweaks (including the “super combo”). It went largely ignored, coming too closely after SSFII, and would appear a year or so later on Panasonic’s ill-fated 3D0 console (as the only arcade-perfect version of the game to appear until many years later).

1994 was also the year that marketing efforts finally began to pay off. Two separate films were released, the fan-favorite Street-Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which featured cutting edge animation and a story faithful to the games, and the Universal Pictures effort, Street Fighter, starring Jean Claude Van Damme as Col. Guile, squaring off against Raul Julia’s M. Bison in a scenario reportedly based on an aborted screenplay for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. Needless to say, the film did middling box-office, and was generally detested by fans of the series. A game based on the Van Damme flick also appeared, borrowing a page from the book of Mortal Kombat, it used actors digitized from the film. It sucked. Bad.

Oh god! The Pain! Make it stop!

With the fan base starting to shrink as the 2D fighting genre gave way to 3D powerhouses like Tekken and Virtua Fighter 2, and with new, more powerful home consoles en route; Capcom had to take a step back, look at what had worked, and find a way to tighten and perfect the formula. The media was insisting that Capcom should “Learn to count to III!” Instead, they went back to the beginning.

To Be Continued…