Arguably one of the best fighting games ever made, and perhaps more definitively the most famous and long-lived fighting game franchise of all time, Street Fighter II turned 20 years old this month, having been released in arcades (remember those?) in March 1991. Street Fighter II wasn’t the first game in the lineage, but it was the first game in the Street Fighter II series, and the first game of the series that saw broad popularity around the world.
The game was actually the successor to a lesser known and even less played game “Street Fighter,” a 1987 title that had some of the elements of the game most people came to know and love later. In the original Street Fighter, you could only play as Ryu (except in the multiplayer mode, where one player took control or Ryu, and the other player controlled his rival, Ken) and fought your way through five countries and ten different opponents along the way.
Street Fighter II expanded on the premise, allowing you to choose from a roster of eight characters to control. It was the first game of its type to allow you to select the character you wanted to play, and tasked the player with learning the character’s strengths, techniques, and special abilities in order to defeat the other characters in the game.
Once you fought your way through the other playable characters, you were confronted with the four boss characters of the game. In the multiplayer, the second player could join at any time and select any of the other playable characters to challenge the first player with.
Street Fighter II spawned an entire industry. Theatrically released movies, animated features in the United States and Japan, toys and action figures, even a Saturday morning cartoon were all based on the game. The game’s success set the stage for five additional games bearing the Street Fighter II name, the Street Fighter Alpha series of games, the Street Fighter EX series, the Street Fighter III series, and finally, the 2008 release of Street Fighter IV, the current generation of the franchise.
