In the spring of 1991 British arcade-goers met a Capcom cabinet with a joystick and “six (count ’em!) fire buttons” for each player. Street Fighter II let you pick one of eight fighters and take on the other seven around the world, or take on whoever had put a coin in beside you. Computer and Video Games called it “a beat ’em up classic”. Within two years it had sold a Super NES cartridge at £65, persuaded arcade operators to buy the same game many times over, and sent U.S. Gold’s contractors scrambling to fit it onto Amiga disks and Spectrum cassettes.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom.
- Arcade release: March 1991, by Capcom’s own chronology, on its CP System board.
- Producer: Noritaka Funamizu. Planners: Akira Nishitani (game design) and Akira Yasuda (character design).
- Fighters: eight to choose from, plus four computer-controlled bosses.
- Home versions: Super NES (June 1992); Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Commodore 64 and Spectrum from U.S. Gold (1992–93); Mega Drive as Special Champion Edition (1993).
- Updates: Champion Edition, Turbo and Super Street Fighter II followed.
Making the sequel
The first Street Fighter, in 1987, had not been a success. Funamizu told Edge in 2002 that Capcom’s American office asked for a sequel once one-on-one fighting games caught on in the United States. Capcom put Funamizu in charge as producer, with Akira Yasuda “in charge of the character design” and Akira Nishitani “in charge of the game design”. Funamizu counted “around 35 to 40 people” on the project, “a hell of a size at that time”, with 20 designers working on the characters alone, and he said the whole thing took about two years. Nishitani signed his high scores “NiN”, and Fabien Sanglard’s history of Capcom’s arcade hardware points out that the name fills the high-score tables of Street Fighter II, as it does those of Final Fight and Forgotten Worlds.
The design started from the special moves. “We started by thinking what special attack each character would use,” Funamizu said. “Ryu and Ken were already defined, but, for example, we wanted a pro wrestling fighter so we started to think what kind of attack he would perform.” That fighter’s first special move, a pile driver, “was obviously too unimpressive for the game so we had to make it much more spectacular.”
Were combos a bug?
The story that Street Fighter II’s combos, chains of hits that the opponent cannot escape once the first one lands, began as a bug is repeated widely. The source for it is Funamizu himself. In the same Edge interview he said: “One thing is quite amazing: the combo. It was an accident, really.” While checking for bugs in the bonus stage where the player smashes up a car, he “noticed something strange”. Taping the sequence showed that “during the punch timing, it was possible to add a second hit and so on”. He thought the timing was too hard for it to be useful, “so we decided to leave the feature as a hidden one”. Later games made the timing easier and turned combos into a deliberate feature. So the account is the producer’s own recollection, given eleven years afterwards, of a timing window the team noticed and chose to keep. In his words: “A bug? Maybe.”
He had plenty of bugs to remember. “SFII had a hell of a mountain of bugs,” Funamizu said. “I think it was a record inside Capcom. We built around 26 masters.”
In the arcades
Street Fighter II ran on the CP System, the arcade board Capcom had introduced in 1988 so that each new game could use the same hardware. Sanglard describes queues at the cabinets, players who frowned on anyone buying a continue, and operators who bought extra copies to cut the waiting. The figures he cites are 60,000 cabinets of the original game and 140,000 of Champion Edition by 1995. Funamizu gave Edge the same 140,000 for that edition, which cost operators around ¥150,000 to ¥160,000 a board.
It also changed how the game was played. Players in Japan, Funamizu said, had sat side by side at one screen, until complaints about the picture led Capcom to an operator who had built a head-to-head cabinet: “one cabinet with two screens connected to it”, so that opponents faced each other across the machine. Players found their own tactics too. Edge described the “tick”, a light jab that forced the opponent to block, followed by an unblockable throw, a tactic that was “morally outlawed in all right-thinking arcades”.
Super NES and Mega Drive
Capcom released the Super NES version in Japan in June 1992. Nintendo Power reported that it sold 1.5 million copies in America in its first six months and that in Britain it was being packed with the console. The British cartridge cost £65. Sega’s machine had to wait: Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition reached the Mega Drive in 1993 on a 24-megabit cartridge, and Sega Visions made a point of a Group Battle mode “not found on any other home-console or arcade product” and of being able to play as the bosses.
U.S. Gold’s computer versions
In Britain, U.S. Gold held the computer rights. Amiga Power reported in December 1992 that U.S. Gold had not tried “to create a perfect conversion”, only “a home computer version of Street Fighter II which feels as close to the real thing as possible”. The work went to Creative Materials in Bury, where Gordon Fong programmed the Amiga and Atari ST versions. The Amiga and ST sprites were about 20 per cent smaller than the arcade’s, with 32 colours on the Amiga and 16 on the ST, where the PC kept 256. There were 225 frames of animation per character, a single scream for every fighter pitched up for Chun Li and down for the big men, and “The code’s only about 16K on the Amiga — the rest is all graphics and AI or data tables”. For one-button joysticks the 36 moves came down to eight, four punches and four kicks. “We had to reverse engineer the AI because we didn’t get much help,” said the project manager, Tony Bickley.
Simon Hadlington, who acted as U.S. Gold’s producer on the game, later remembered it as “a four-week start to finish debacle”. According to him, Tiertex did the Spectrum version and Creative Materials “did the rest”.
What the reviewers said
- Amiga (£27.99, four disks): Amiga Power had five staff play it and averaged their marks to 74%. Stuart Campbell found “a large degree of context-sensitivity” in the controls, so “you can never be certain that you’re going to pull off a particular move”, but he still thought it “looks more or less like the real thing”. The One called it “absolutely excellent”, though “not as good as the SNES version”. CU Amiga reported more than 40,000 copies sold before Christmas 1992.
- Atari ST: ST Format put its sales at 22,000.
- Spectrum (128K only, £12.99 on cassette): the game came as a multiload on a C60 tape, with each fighter loading separately. Your Sinclair called it “one of the best two-player games on the good ol’ Speccy” but complained of “twenty minutes of loading for five minutes of play” and concluded that the “unforgivably poor loader has basically ruined a Megagame”. Sinclair User called it the best-looking Spectrum title in years and guessed it was “likely to be the last big licence coin op conversion ever on the Speccy”.
- Commodore 64 (£12.99): Commodore Force found programming faults, with the game pausing itself and computer opponents landing on scenery that “isn’t actually there”. It summed the game up as “a licence without a game”.
Later history
Capcom revised the game instead of replacing it, in what 3DO Magazine called in 1996 “an almost endless series of updates”: Champion Edition, Turbo and Super Street Fighter II, the last on the new CPS II board in 1993. Edge called it Capcom’s “ten million selling Street Fighter II” in 1994. The series continued through Street Fighter IV (2008), V (2016) and 6 (2023). The Capcom entry follows that story and the fighting game community entry follows the players.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 115, June 1991: arcade review (“a beat ’em up classic”; eight fighters; the four bosses).
- Sinclair User issue 112, June 1991: arcade review (“a joystick plus six (count ’em!) fire buttons”).
- Capcom, “Corporate History”, Capcom investor relations (web, secondary): the arcade release in March 1991 and the Super NES release in June 1992. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html
- “The making of… Street Fighter II”, Edge issue 108, March 2002, pp. 100–105: Noritaka Funamizu on the American request for a sequel, the team (Yasuda, Nishitani, 35 to 40 people, about two years), the pile driver, the combo “accident” in the car bonus stage, the 26 masters, the head-to-head cabinet, Street Fighter II Dash sales and price; the “tick”.
- Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System (self-published online), chapter 1 and the “People” appendix: arcade queues and operators; cabinet sales to 1995; Nishitani’s “NiN” high scores; Nishitani and Yasuda as the game’s planners; Funamizu’s career.
- Nintendo Power issue 46, March 1993, p. 92: Super NES sales in America and the British console bundle.
- Amiga Power issue 22, February 1993, pp. 34–35: Amiga review (£27.99; Creative Materials; the reviewers’ marks; four disks); the 74% as listed in issue 23. Commodore Force issue 3, March 1993, p. 59: reader’s letter on the £65 Super NES cartridge.
- Sega Visions, October 1993, pp. 5 and 42: Special Champion Edition for the Genesis (24 megabits; Group Battle mode; playing as the bosses).
- Amiga Power issue 20, December 1992, pp. 22–23: preview (Creative Materials and Gordon Fong; the project manager Tony Bickley on sprites, colours, animation frames, sound, code size, controls and the AI).
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 91 and 93: Simon Hadlington’s recollections of producing the game.
- The One issue 52, January 1993, p. 71: Amiga review.
- CU Amiga, March 1993: Amiga sales. ST Format issue 49, August 1993: Atari ST sales.
- Your Sinclair issue 87, March 1993, pp. 12–13: Spectrum review (£12.99, 128K only, the multiload).
- Sinclair User issue 133, March 1993, pp. 8–9: Spectrum review (the separately loading fighters; “the last big licence coin op conversion”).
- Commodore Force issue 4, April 1993, pp. 46–47: Commodore 64 review by Miles Guttery. Commodore Format issue 30, March 1993: Commodore 64 version at £12.99.
- 3DO Magazine issue 12, July 1996: “Capcom History” (the updates). Edge issue 7, April 1994: CPS II and Street Fighter II as a ten-million seller.