Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

C64 version

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.

Modul size

Street Fighter II 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.

Ryu and Ken

Something few people (at least nowadays) realize about Street Fighter II 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 the game 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.

Sheng Long

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 poured coin after coin in the SF2 machines and spent hours in front of the home versions in an effort to unlock said character.

References to the game

• 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!"
• 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.

References

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

Sales

According to publisher Capcom, Street Fighter II has sold 6.3 million copies worldwide since its initial release (as of June 30, 2016).

Street Fighter II games

Street Fighter II is the first of no less than five Street Fighter II games:

• Street Fighter II - the original that started it all.
• Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition - allowed you to play the boss characters Balrog, Sagat, Vega and Mr. Bison.
• Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting - introduced new moves, faster game speed and different colors for the character costumes.
• Super Street Fighter II - this one introduced characters Cammy, Fei Long, Dee Jay & T. Hawk and added even more moves.
• Super Street Fighter II Turbo - final and most polished version, this one introduced secret character Akuma.

SFLIU

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.

Awards

• Commodore Format
  • July 1993 (Issue 34) - Modern Classics: Beat-'em-ups
  • November 1994 (Issue 50) – #19 The All-Time Top 50 C64 Games
  • November 1994 (Issue 50) – #9 The Bottom 10
• EGM
  • July 1992 (Issue 36) - Game of the Month
  • November 1997 (Issue 100) - ranked #3 (Titles That Revolutionized Console Gaming) (Arcade version)
• Game Informer
  August 2001 (Issue #100)
  • #22 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll
• GameSpy
  • 2001 – #30 Top Game of All Time
• Power Play
  • Issue 02/1993 – #3 Best SNES Game in 1992
• Retro Gamer
  • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #27 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
• The Strong National Museum of Play
  • 2017 – Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame

Information also contributed by Apogee IV, JayBee, Mumm-Ra, PCGamer77, Robbb, Virgil, WildKard and Zovni