DOS

Street Fighter II

Trivia

In the 1993 movie City Hunter starring Jackie Chan, there's a part where Jackie, who is playing private eye, fights villains on a shipboard. Accidentally he gets smashed into arcade machine... with Street Fighter II running on it. After electric shock he transforms into Honda, then Chun-Li, Guile, Dhalsim (stretching limbs included) and fights an enemy who transforms into Ken.

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In the music video Juicy, by The Notorious BIG, he has a couple of homeboys play Street Fighter II for SNES on a big screen. Even in the song, after the chorus, he starts the third verse by saying: "Super Nintendo, SEGA Genesis, When I was dead broke, man I couldn't picture this!"

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In Zangief's ending former Russian prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev does a cameo.

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Street Fighter 2 was voted #22 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).

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One interesting quirk about the Commodore 64 version of the game is that the special moves printed in the manual for each character were just plain wrong.

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Remember the Sheng Long controversy? Whenever Ryu won a match he would say his trademark phrase just as anyone else, but his was a little more cryptic than the others: "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance" (???) Who the hell is Sheng Long?? That was what most western SF2 players though. The answer as usual was in a botched translation effort: Sheng Long is the chinese pronunciation of Sho-Ryu, as in Sho-Ryu-Ken, aka the Dragon Punch. Ryu was saying that you had to master his technique in order to beat him, but for some odd reason that we'll never know English, Chinese and Japanese got all mixed up in some poor translator's head and the "Sheng Long" was phonetically transcribed as it was, and coupled with Ryu's cryptic message gave the impression that he was talking about some hidden character.

The rumor flew around from day one (among other famous SF2 hoaxes like the one about you being able to ride Guile's Jet or beating up the bystanders in some stages), but it really spread like wildfire when as an april fool's joke EGM published an article about how there really was a secret character named Sheng Long unlockable via ungodly gaming prowess (beating all characters in "perfect" matches). Regardless of how ridiculous the rumor was, every kid out there (myself included) poured coins after coins in the SF2 machines and spent hours in front of the home versions in an effort to unlock said character. What did Capcom do? They watched as the money poured in by the shitloads! Ah.... Don't you miss when those things could happen in the fantastic world of videogames??

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Street Fighter 2 for Super NES was the first game for the console to feature 16 Megabits (2 Megabytes) of memory. At the time, the biggest games released for both Super NES and Sega Genesis had 12 Megabits.

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Thanks to Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter series is one of the most successful games to be released. According to Capcom, the whole Street Fighter series sold over 500,000 coin-operated units (Arcade) and over 24 million console games worldwide, generating over US$ 1 billion in revenues, since 1987. The movie Street Fighter, released in December 1994, grossed over US$ 100 million worldwide. It was the last Raul Julia movie (he played Mike Bison). Jean Claude Van Damme was also in the film, playing Guile.

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Something few people (at least nowadays) realize about Street Fighter 2 is why on the original release Ryu and Ken where carbon copies of each other. Sure, the tradition of having two very similar main antagonistic characters is present on pretty much all 1-on-1 fighting games since it works as a standard dramatic component, but the reason for said tradition's creation on SF2 was purely practical: the original arcade version of Street Fighter 2 didn't come with different palettes, so there was no way to have two players controlling the same character without getting confused. Thus having Ryu and Ken available was the only real way in SF2 to have a fair and completely even fight.

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Since the (US Gold) DOS version release was rather late, some PC enthusiasts 'released' a home-made clone of the game in the meantime. Though not being an exact 1:1 copy, the project (referred to as SFLIU, more details on http://syste.ms/sfliu.html) features the basic fighters' moves and specials and even allows for the specific arcade sound effects (like Ryu screaming out "Hadoken!") to be played via PC speaker, a feature not implemented in the 'official' US Gold release. Unfortunately, the SFLIU graphics and gameplay are poor compared to the real thing, but some hacks and patches that came later on provided some new innovating moves not found in the original Street Fighter game.

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Street Fighter 2 (aka Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior) is the first of no less than five Street Fighter 2 games:

• Street Fighter 2 - the original that started it all.
• Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition - allowed you to play the boss characters Balrog, Sagat, Vega and Mr. Bison.
• Street Fighter 2: Turbo Hyper Fighting - introduced new moves, faster game speed and different colors for the character costumes.
• Super Street Fighter 2 - this one introduced characters Cammy, Fei Long, Dee Jay & T. Hawk and added even more moves.
• Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo - final and most polished version, this one introduced secret character Akuma.

The first three games were bundled and brought to the 32 bit platform with the Street Fighter 2 Collection, the last two games were re-released together with Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold on the Street Fighter Collection. Confusing huh? :->

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