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Street Fighter 2 (1991)

Developer: Capcom

Jan 2021

Form an orderly queue, put your quarter down and play winner stays on.

We do like variety at Four Quarters but Street Fighter 2 is one of those iconic, genre defining titles that we never remove, unless you lot have filled the buttons with beer and waggled the joysticks into oblivion again and it’s out for repair.

A global phenomenon that went on to define and dominate the VS Fighting genre to this day; eventually, the SNES home port came out, allowing plenty of time to practice before going back to the arcades to flex those fireballs against a never ending queue of opponents. Get in a queue, put your money in then take an absolute beating off one of the bigger lads who played a LOT. Repeat.

The fact the game created such fierce competition was testament to the perfect mechanics that invented a new competitive precursor to e-sports. Interestingly combos, one of the games most important unique elements, were initially unintended and a bug in the code. Once the developers found out they realised it would reward highly skilled players for perfect inputs. Moves could be chained together resulting in relentless attacks that flow from one animation to another and were very difficult to block. Mastery of combo techniques was essential for high level play.

Street Fighter 2 spawned all manner of unofficial hacks as arcade owners attempted to keep the coins flowing in, but titles like Rainbow Edition, whilst fun, destroyed the fine balance of the base game resulting in a non competitive load of nonsense. We’d recommend staying away from them. Capcom’s response was to modify the game themselves, resulting in Street Fighter 2 Turbo – Hyper Fighting (the best version of Street Fighter 2 in our opinion) and Super Street Fighter.

FQ Tip – E Honda is a good character choice if you don’t know what you’re doing – rapidly pressing punch will activate his Hundred Hand Slap special move. Try and trap your opponent in the corner with it.

Note – There were several official editions of Street Fighter II released: Championship Edition (1992), Turbo (1993), Super Turbo (1994) and Hyper-Anniversary Edition (2003)