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With Red Bull Kumite just around the corner, we take a look at the classic fighter’s rich retro history. A journey from the arcades to the SNES and way beyond.
This month sees the return of Red Bull Kumite, the epic Street Fighter tournament where sixteen of the world’s greatest fighters will meet once again to beat the holy hell out of each other. In the game, that is.
As all eyes in the FGC turn towards the tournament in Japan, we decided to take a look back at the classic fighting series’ retro history – from its arcade roots, to NES-based oddities, to its eventual establishment as the world’s foremost brawler.
Spend some coin
Depending on your vintage, your first memory of Street Fighter may well be plugging coin after coin into the monolithic machines that used to hoover up our pocket money faster than you could say ‘Shoryuken!’
Arriving in 1987, Street Fighter quickly became a favourite among the arcade-friendly crowd. The game built on some of the features established in previous arcade fighters, with Konami’s Yie-Ar Kung Fu in particular laying the aesthetic groundwork for Street Fighter with its strikingly similar characters and health bar design.
Street Fighter, though, combined eye-popping visuals, brutal special moves and most importantly, a fierce sense of competition when pitting fighters against each other such as Ryu or Ken. Yet, despite these advances in the genre, Street Fighter failed to achieve the success and ubiquity its better-loved predecessor would go on to gain.
This is partly due to how ludicrously tough it was to execute a special move or combo, which in turn was largely the fault of the pressure sensitive pads Capcom first released, which would help measure just how hard you hit your opponent. Needless to say, subtlety was lost on many players who battered the pads (and their own hands) into submission, until Capcom finally removed them from circulation. Six-button controls quickly became de rigueur, saving SF competitors from injuries as brutal as their in-game counterparts.
Console clashes
When you think about Street Fighter on console, it’s often difficult to consider much beyond the instalment that launched the series into the stratosphere (you know the one). However, there were some less successful attempts to get Street Fighter into our homes, long before the series’ arguable zenith arrived.
Inexplicably renamed Fighting Street, the first in the series was ported from the arcade and into living rooms for the TurboGrafx-CD (no, us neither), eventually reappearing decades later on the PS2 and Xbox. Then, the NES was the lucky recipient of a genuine Street Fighter curio: 1990’s Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight. The Final Fight did away with the 1v1 Street Fighter beat-em-up style, instead opting for a side-scrolling brawler that on the surface had very little to do with the series, beyond a lead character retconned from Kevin to Ken. Regardless, the oddity did spawn the hugely successful Final Fight series, so even Street Fighter’s missteps were barely that.
Then, onto the main event. In 1991, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior landed in arcades and changed the landscape of not only fighting games, but video games as a whole.
Allowing players to choose between a selection of eight different characters, each with their own fighting style and moves, the game offered not-before-seen depth from a fighter. It also had a memorable roster, adding colourful characters to those carried over from the first game (including Ken, Ryu and Sagat), and it wasn’t long before Street Fighter II made household names of the likes of high-kicking Chun-Li, burly wrestler Zangief and the bizarre Blanka.
With destructible objects, different stages for each fighter and the strange inclusion of blood-type, SFII: TWW set the precedent for what fighters could and should include – a living, breathing world where interesting characters kick lumps out of each other. While its creators, Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda, assumed it would be a moderate hit (a sensible degree of speculation given its predecessor’s return), Street Fighter II: The World Warrior hit the zeitgeist with a vengeance, and its global success soon led to a clamour for console ports.
These soon arrived, though initially through unofficial channels. Nefarious (and creative) fans developed a NES port which did the rounds in Asian markets before copyright-infringement caught up with it, while PC versions also began to pop up from sources that absolutely were not Capcom.
When the game did land on consoles, its initial arrival as a SNES exclusive made waves, with eager Sega fans missing out on a cultural milestone and being rather unhappy to do so. In fact, it was Sega’s missing out on SFII that led to Mortal Kombat’s eventual arrival on the console – a bid to never be late to the party again. However, when it did make its way to consoles (eventually including a Sega Genesis/Megadrive port), its ascension to king of the fighting games was assured, with around 14 million cartridges sold and its place as a genuine cultural phenomenon well established.
Capcom, knowing a good thing when they have it, released a series of updates to Street Fighter II which tweaked the gameplay, offered new playable characters and improved graphics. Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers and Super Street Fighter II Turbo (arguably the definitive version of the game) all built on the legend, and helped sate the thirst for Street Fighter III – a wait that would be far longer than fans anticipated.
Fight the future
Street Fighter II’s success proved something of an albatross around the neck of those behind the staggering sequel. The game’s worldwide fame brought a fortune to Capcom’s coffers, and introduced eager fans to the staggering-in-a-different-way movie adaptation, but following it up proved a tall order. Fighters changed, with the genre growing more interesting and varied. Players began to fall in love with the OTT violence of Mortal Kombat or the sheer depth of Guilty Gear, while the dawn of 3D was just beginning to break. Times changed, and for a while, Street Fighter did not.
It was a long four years before Capcom delivered something akin to, though not quite, a proper follow up to SFII (it’s best we simply ignore the movie tie-in, for obvious reasons). But in 1995, Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams arrived.
While several key members of the SFII team had left Capcom for pastures new, Alpha was a return to form – delivering backstory for key characters between the first and second games, while introducing new characters (including fan favourite Akuma) for players to get to grips with.
With a new (though still 2D) look, different playing styles and a revamped Super Combo system, Alpha arrived on PS1, Sega Saturn, PC, and eventually Game Boy Colour, and delivered critical and commercial success. Spawning two sequels and more fondly remembered than the long-awaited, initially Dreamcast-ported Street Fighter III, Alpha reinvigorated the franchise, and paved the way for the series to shed its retro roots and fight its way into the future with the superb Street Fighter IV and V.
And while the 2D visuals have been replaced, new characters have been introduced and a litany of new modes, features and fighting styles have been embraced, the care and affection behind each new Street Fighter is evident with every kick, punch, and special move. Now, as fighters gear up to compete at Kumite 2019, Street Fighter’s over-30-year history stretches behind it, a brilliant retro series with the future in its clenched fist.
