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Moments: Running The Table In Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II may not have been the first one-on-one fighting game to hit arcades, but it certainly had the most impact. It also provided some of my favorite gaming moments.
If you weren't around when Street Fighter II was released, you missed out on something special. I know, it's not your fault. Fighting games are a dime a dozen now, and enough time has passed since Street Fighter II's 1991 debut that we've seen the fighting-game genre fade into obscurity and pop back into relevance. When it first arrived, it was a revelation.
At first, my friends and I struggled with the controls. Getting the basics down was easy enough, once you got past the six buttons (what is this, Defender?!). But the special moves were something else entirely. The button and joystick combinations were a commodity in our arcade, since they weren't outlined on the cabinet's instruction card. E. Honda's hundred-hand slap was easy to figure out, as was Blanka's electric charge or Chun Li's lightning kick. But what about that dragon punch thing? It's crazy to remember a time when the hadouken's name was relatively obscure, let alone its button sequence.
My friends and I spent entirely too much time playing Street Fighter II in our campus arcade, and we got ridiculously good at it. When we got bored, we'd drive over to the department store that had a machine in the lobby, and we'd take on the local champs. There was a fantastic sense of uncertainty with every battle. You didn't know what you were going to get when your opponent shifted into position. Sometimes it would end in their utter humiliation. Other times, I'd get completely shamed (a battle against a 7-year-old girl comes to mind. She was a super cheap Guile, however.) Nothing compared to the feeling of triumph that came with taking on challenger after challenger and smoking them all in one uninterrupted string.
Capcom refined the gameplay and balanced the characters in a notoriously long series of updates and incremental releases. For my quarter, however, nothing ever came close to the early days of Street Fighter II.
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