Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was first released to arcades 25 years ago, on February 6th 1991. It completely changed the games industry.
http://www.polygon.com/a/street-fighter-2-oral-historySince were old gamers, I remember when it came in my towns local arcade, at lunch time the arcade would be packed with kids putting their lunch money into the street fighter arcade machine. The cost was 50p per go/credit.
I never went to the arcade to play street fighter 2 or had seen what the fuss was about, but I remember guy's who did waste their lunch money saying that it was the best game ever. I was more of a home computer guy with the spectrum/amiga and didn't care about consoles games.
However a year latter in 1992 in the summer a new video game shop had opened in my area who were import specialist, demoed the game on their 21"tv on a import Japanese snes. When I saw the screen, I could see why street fighter 2 was popular.
I remember being amazed, seeing the ken vs ryu on the ken stage, of course I could afford it at the time I was 15 at the time. Even though the pal snes was out, if you wanted to have street fighter 2 at home,you had to buy a grey import jap/usa snes console or or use a pal console and buy a import cartridge converter which cost £20.
The import consoles cost £220 jap, £230 usa ,the game itself cost £65 jap, £70 usa and on top of that you had to have a scart tv, at the time were only on newer expensive tvs, if you had the old rf aerial connector you would have to buy a pal booster adaptor on top, which cost about £45
Since all of the about option were out of my hand, I settled for the amiga version, which came out in December 1992 on 4 floppy disk, which had to be swapped out when loading the player stages. I didn't care how badly the game played at the time, the amiga version played slower then the snes and the graphics was't as lush as the snes version of the game, but it would have to do.
I received a sega megradrive as a gift in 1993 which was my first games console, which coincidently that year street fighter Champion Edition was released on the megadrive. I was lucky enough that my best mate had an import copy of the game and lent me it along with his 6 button joypad & import cartridge converter.
ohh man this was the game that looked like what I had seen originally seen on the snes and the game played and moved much better then the amiga version I was use too., since home computer used joystick which had 1 fire button, compared to console pads which had extra buttons.
In 1994 when super street fighter 2 was released I was finally able to buy my first Street fighter 2 game on sole, as it was released near my birthday in august.
I remember of my friends who was a hardcore street fighter gamer and only play the import version of street fighter pay £90 for the jap version of super street fighter 2 which was released in 2 months earlier.
It would be interesting to hear other olg member stories of there first interaction with street fighter 2 ?
Thanks for the fun memory street fighter 2 happy 25th anniversary, hopefully street fighter 5 will be good.