The local arcade, akin to a second home for many children of the ’90s, was where I first met Street Fighter II. Upon entering, the familiar cacophony of beeps from various games, the clatter of coins being rapidly spent, and the enthused discussions of gamers would greet me. Among all of these sounds, one noise was preeminent— the fast-paced, blood-pedal music of Street Fighter II. Compelled as if by magnetism, I found myself in front of the game visuals. My pre-adolescent self was entranced by the vivid colors of the graphics. My hands were practically twitching to touch the joystick.
Two figures on the screen were combating each other mightily. They appeared to be equally strong as they tried to injure each other during the fight that was being staged for the audience. The first—Ryu—was a popular character known for his balanced combination of speed and power. Meanwhile, the second—Ken—was a blond whirlwind of a character that seemed to accentuate the idea that the game offered its inhabitant special moves to a player’s liking. Each seemed like Michael Jordan when a basketball was in his hand during game night. Each seemed as powerful and as formidable as a lion let out of its cage. Neither was the faint of heart.
Excited to take part, I pulled a quarter from my pocket and got in line. My pulse quickened as my turn approached. I ascended the steep steps of the arcade platform, my heart pounding in my chest. My mom, dutiful and worried, hovered in the periphery, anxiously awaiting my eventual loss. I was a rookie. My opponent was a local hotshot, someone who had “been in” my position before and triumphed. He used a dizzying array of effortless moves and well-timed counters to defeat me. My initiation had taken place: I was in love with the game. I needed to know its secrets and join the society of champions that awaited me at the top.
Street Fighter II was a revolution in gameplay design. It was nothing like the simple fighting games that came before it. Each character in the world of Street Fighter II had a distinct array of attacks, which turned the old system of “strong, medium, weak” on its head. Pre-SFII fighting games, at best, gave the characters one or two special moves. They and the normal attacks they used were simply stronger or weaker versions of each other. Combos—something altogether different from special moves—opened up a new avenue for attacking one’s opponent, and like the special moves themselves, they had built-in trade-offs. And on top of this was something even more vital: the characters were unbalanced.
Street Fighter II was unique because of the special moves. Powerful attacks with joystick and button combinations added a layer of excitement and strategy to the strangely basic mix of rock, paper, scissors in the original Street Fighter. Gaining access to fireballs, dragon punches, and the rest took a lot of practice. You devoted whatever hours of your youth to perfecting the simple joystick and button motion of a hadouken, and that was a source of enthrallment. And those special moves made Street Fighter II the messiah of the diminished video arcades. They had formed in groups around this game. Dying quarters—this was a rite of passage.
Yet another marvel of the game’s design was how balanced every character was. None of the characters had an overwhelming advantage over another. In fact, you never saw the same outcome twice — which was astounding, given there were many matches with hundreds of possible character combinations. The only possible criticism was that this game was so “balanced,” it was hard to beat, once you came up against someone who was either really good or who could “cheese” (use cheap tactics or an overpowered, spammy character). Yet even the “cheesiness” had a certain charm to it. And it added an extra risk for the player.
The Street Fighter II experience was about more than just the matches; it was the whole coming together of one tense, taut moment after another until a victor emerged in the scramble for victory points. And everyone who dared to put up the quarters kept feeling the tug and the rush if they managed to pull off several hadoukens in a row or got off a mad combo. An elated shout when Blanka won was like a howl from the jungle that you would not forget. The whole place felt focused, on the edge, and kind of in love with itself. And it’s still that way nearly 30 years later, only amplified about 100 times over for today’s esports audience.
I recall the thrill of arcade contests, where the top gamers vied for bragging rights and the awe of their friends and foes. These events drew not only the contestants and their coteries of supporters and hangers-on, but also other gamers who wanted to see their community’s best go head-to-head in the kinds of mano-a-mano showdowns that happened in games of unchallengeable repute. Reflected in my memory, these arcade contests feel more like the gladiatorial contests of the distant past, with the darkened periphery of the contests a hive of onlookers watching intently as each of their communities’ prospective champions battled it out for honor after having qualified through regional events for the climactic right to a top slot in an arcade game tournament. In that world, a life that extended just as the dream of the high-definition era was starting to take hold, to win in an event of that kind was enough to make one part of the community “ooh” and “aah” for what amounted to a badge of honor worn only by a handful of people and was recognized by them as such even as it happened in the tangled web of gaming’s knotted narrative underground.
We lived Street Fighter II. Its world seeped into ours more and more. The big boom in the nineties of comic book universes found a different way into the lives of my friends and me than they did into the lives of the people creating them or the people in the comics. They were ours. Some friends played the piano, and we didn’t listen to Beethoven, like, at all. Instead, we arranged iconic Street Fighter II music (there’s a great version of the song “Ryu vs. Ken” if you need it). We all played piano and hit the notes with the figures of a few fighters. That was all we needed.
An unforgettable instance that involved Street Fighter II happened during a summer vacation. My cousins were visiting, and we had the gall to hold a family tournament. We stationed the Super Nintendo in the living room, and that got us set for some serious fighting. The room was filled with the excitement of the soon-to-come battle, with plenty of good-natured chitchat we filled into those moments when we drew up the tournament bracket.
The matches were becoming more intense, with the competition growing fiercer in the latter stages. Against all predictions, my quiet and determined-from-the-first-beat-of-the-game cousin made it to the final match. The family audience found this a nice surprise. He had me, and others who played at a high level, completely knocked for a loop! Was he not supposed to be that good, and so soon? A groan went up when each of our characters appeared on the start-screen; his action figure stretched to the right beyond a human’s reach, obtaining even a win via decision when rounds went long. But this was no match that would be decided on the start-screen. This was the final round of a tournament that the family was now clearly into. What was the path to victory here?
An indelible experience was my initial victory at a real arcade. By the time of this converged gaming pinnacle, I had logged untold hours familiarizing myself with aspects of pretty much every selectable character, and had done so at the arcade itself, rather than at home. Nowadays, it’s as easy as 1-2-3 to get lost in a gaming world during one’s downtime, but there was another level of (positive) obsession that one could feel at the arcade, which I was apparently not alone in experiencing. On the day my arcade win record went from marginal to seriously good, I bested an “unstoppably” good player (at the time) while a crowd “Oooh”-ed and “Aaah”-ed with each landed blow and counterblow. When I emerged victorious, you’d have thought I’d cured a disease.
The genre was not just revolutionized by Street Fighter II; the game also set the standard for the whole fighting game genre. It was, of course, followed by a string of successful sequels. But far from just inspiring imitators, as Mortal Kombat and Saint Seiya did with their in many ways rebellious and unique takes on the Street Fighter formula, Street Fighter II also inspired successful competitors that appeared to emerge from under its shadow, like Tekken and The King of Fighters.
With digitized graphics and over-the-top, extremely violent gameplay, the arrival of Mortal Kombat in 1992 introduced a new level of both hyperrealism and ghastly bodily harm to the fighting game genre. Mortal Kombat games pushed boundaries in several ways – the most famous, of course, being the Fatalities that finished off your unlucky opponent if you performed the right button combination. By contrast, a few years later, Tekken moved the action to 3D and introduced an even more cerebral set of games that relied on players carefully using complex combo chains for success. And King of Fighters? That series helped pioneer the team-battle concept, letting players pick groups of characters to switch between.
The scene of serious competition in games really started to come into its own with Street Fighter II, and the first tournaments began to be held around this time as well. In the ’90s, people began to travel in earnest for competitive gaming, to find out who really was the best. As the money entered the scene, the events grew in prestige and scale. Nowadays, they are massive—held in stadiums, with top production values on the live broadcasts.
The influence of Street Fighter II did not stop at the game room or within the home; it expanded worldwide. Music and animated films took cues from the game’s iconic characters, giving them easily identifiable cameos and theme tunes. Ryu, with his white karate gi and red headband, could be recognized even by relative novices picking up coolest appearance in Street Fighter media because he seemed, on some level, to be cool or safe rather than part of a villainous faction. Their appeal made even me want to wear a spiked bracelet and a qipao like Chun-Li.
The influence of the game can be seen in the numerous adaptations and spin-offs that have come about. The 1994 live-action film took the basic premise of the Street Fighter II game and the larger Street Fighter series and tried to tell a story to far wider audiences. The movies, like the 1994 live-action film, or any of the cartoons from the 90s, or even the newer comic book stories can’t produce the same level of sheer fun as the games, but they did something that ’90s game characters rarely did—they had actual storylines and arcs.
Even the music felt the pull of the game’s enormous fun gravitational field. The iconic character themes that Nobu made are as memorable as the characters themselves. They’re more than memorable, really; Nobu’s character themes for Streethave become totally emblematic. When you hear them, you don’t just think of the Streeth universe; you think of the life you were living when you were playing the game because it was such a component of your daily routine. The same goes for all the Street games.
Looking back at the influence Street Fighter II has had, we can see that its legacy is both far-penetrating and incalculably potent. It changed the very dynamics of the virtual fighting game, from the basic ruleset to the individual modes of operation of every fighter — each of the latter having a unique feel based on a mix of gameplay and character rendering. And the arcade cabinets that once housed Street Fighter II were virtual water coolers that brought kids together in living rooms—and in the sweaty, sodden glow of a thousand furtively-smoked arcade parlors.
Street Fighter II was not merely a game to me; it was a profound influence that guided me through childhood and into adulthood. It was the video game that made me a “gamer,” that taught me what it means to play video games and why I should love playing them. The shared excitement—a friend on the second player side, playfully hitting buttons (often the wrong ones), and shouts of “Hadouken!”—fulfilled a desire found in every kid: to be with others and to be like them. Street Fighter II had moments of magic that were beyond the reach of other games, laying foundations for my lifelong love of video games.
Decades have passed, and even now I find myself going back to play Street Fighter II. This game just resonates with some primitive part of my brain that still lights up when I play it. I remember being a little Aristotle, trying to pick out the small differences that made, say, Ryu play differently than Ken while I was watching a friend goof right through the end of his run after dropping in his last game token to our local arcade machine. In clearer hindsight, I was burning with envy at the time, but now I get that same game on my Switch and reliving all the ways history unfolded in 12 worlds.
The Street Fighter II series’ influence is monumental and can still be seen and felt in not just the fighting game community, but across the games industry as a whole. Whether it’s the strategic depth and hidden details of Street Fighters III, the accessibility enabling anyone to play and enjoy the latest Street Fighter IV, or the esport-proclivity of Street Fighter V, each entry in the series since the original has paid more and more attention to certain figures of incalculable worth on the one side.
The long-lasting allure of Street Fighter and its lineup of characters is a monument to the extraordinary level of craft that is the hallmark of Capcom and its lead design team headed by Akira Nishitani, the creator of the original game and many of its sequels from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. These characters have struck a chord with people from all walks of life, inspiring the global phenomenon of fighting-game fandom with a resonance that has, for decades, seemed almost effortless.
The game that started it all: For me, that was Street Fighter II. It got me fired up about the potential of not just video games but also this massive interactive medium as a whole. When I was in elementary school, I remember watching my mom play Ms. Pac-Man at a Montgomery Ward department store in Toledo, Ohio. From a very young age, I saw what made exceptional video games, and I yearned to play them. Once my mom and dad had gotten me my own Panasonic 3DO game system (R.I.P.), it became not just an experience, but my experience. Upshot: If I had not had a close relationship with Street Fighter II to begin with, who knows where I might have gone astray and not in the direction of a life filled mostly with gaming. Thanks, Capcom, for engendering that pivotal moment in my upbringing!
The immense history of video games views Street Fighter II as a hugely important game. Not only did it lay the foundations for the fighting game genre, but it also changed the whole tide of the video game industry; one could even argue it was the catalyst for the transformation of the entire medium. And, as one iconic title that incapsulated everything a fighting game should be, its brilliance can obviously be seen influencing many of the games that followed it. By Owen S. Good.
Looking back on my adventure with Street Fighter II, it is easy to see the magic and awe the game induced. Street Fighter II certainly was not just a game if it was able to teach so much, not only to me, but also to a lot of people who played it, as well as those unfortunate enough to go up against its players, back in the day. lasting memories. In the theme of the memoir, those memories make up the aforementioned “magic and awe.” They do so for me. They do so, I am sure, for most people who still have a 1991-era passion for the game.
Here’s to Street Fighter II—it all started with that game. For me and many others, it holds a special place in our hearts. The lessons learned from it (some harder to swallow than others) have shaped us and, by extension, have shaped the society we live in. From this point forward, in this piece and in others, I’d like you to imagine that world. I’d like you to imagine the world of DHALSIM.
