Street Fighter

Arcade machine version

At least two versions of the Street Fighter arcade machine were produced in Japan and America, including one that used the now-standard one-joystick and six-button layout for each player (plus start buttons), and another that used one joystick and two huge fist-sized rubber buttons, which the player banged on to register hits. A light tap would be a jab, and a smash would be a fierce hit.

Street Fighter was based on a gargantuan three-layer 8-bit circuit board, developed prior to the advent of Capcom's hugely successful 16-bit CPS system. Street Fighter was limited largely by Capcom's use of a large number of old, but individually inexpensive, electronic components. But at the time it was a quantum aesthetic leap over two earlier games in the same genre, Yie Ar Kung Fu and Karate Champ.

Two different C-64 ports released on one cassette

After U.S. Gold acquired the license to convert 10 Capcom arcade games for £1.2 million in 1987, they were experimenting about the best way to create the home-computer conversions. So Street Fighter was converted to the C-64 by two different companies as an experiment, one in the US and one in the UK (by Tiertex). The result was quite different: while the US version "looked more like Yie Ar Kung Fu, with static backdrops and smaller characters" (cited David Baxter, U.S. Gold/GO!), the Tiertex version featured large sprites and scrolling backdrops. Having two versions of the same game, they simply shipped both: the Commodore Street Fighter cassette featured the US version on one side and the UK on the other, letting the player decide which one to play. For U.S. Gold the UK version won: further Commodore 64/128 conversions were done in the UK, and the 16-bit conversions in the US.

UK National Computer Games Championship 1988

The Spectrum version was used as competition game in the qualifiers for the computer gaming contest in the UK in 1988. The game was played for high-score.

Awards

• Electronic Gaming Monthly
  • December 1989 (Issue 5) - Best BGM & Sound in a Video Game (TurboGrafx CD version)