In the deluxe Street Fighter cabinet, the attack buttons were two large rubber pads, and the harder you hit them, the harder Ryu hit his opponent. CRASH played a prototype in 1987 and added, “and the more your hands hurt!” Capcom’s first one-on-one fighting game was not a success. It is remembered for three things it handed on: its hero, Ryu, his fireball, the Hadoken, and the joystick motion that throws it, which Street Fighter II made the basic grammar of the genre four years later.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom.
- Released: in the arcades on 30 August 1987, by Capcom’s own account.
- Made by: Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, who both moved to SNK and made Fatal Fury.
- Fighters: Ryu for the first player, Ken for the second, against ten opponents from five countries.
- Controls: a joystick and two pressure-sensitive pads in the deluxe cabinet; six buttons in the standard version.
- Home versions: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga on U.S. Gold’s GO! label in 1988, mostly converted by Tiertex; Fighting Street on NEC’s CD-ROM drive for the PC Engine.
Who made it
Takashi Nishiyama had designed Kung-Fu Master at Irem before joining Capcom in 1986. Fabien Sanglard’s history of Capcom’s arcade hardware names him as a planner on Street Fighter and as the man who created the Hadoken. Retro Gamer describes Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto as the game’s “production and direction team”. Nishiyama told the story of the fireball to Edge: he took the idea from the Hadouho, the energy cannon of the anime Space Battleship Yamato, and shrank it to human size. He also designed its input, down, down-forward, forward and punch, to mirror the move on screen, as if the fighter were grounding himself and then pushing his hands towards the opponent. Ryu’s other two special moves, the rising Shoryuken uppercut and the spinning Tatsumaki Senpukyaku kick, exaggerated real martial arts.
The game did not tell the player these moves existed. CRASH reported only that hitting the pads and moving the joystick “in a certain sequence will give you access to secret techniques which devastate your opponent with ease”. Pulling one off was not easy either: Retro Gamer, playing it again in 2012, found that the inputs “don’t always register properly, making on-demand fireball tricky”.
The cabinet
CRASH previewed a prototype in its October 1987 issue. The cabinet was huge, “the same size as the one used in the four-player version of Gauntlet”, with a screen about twice the normal size and fighters “nearly 10 inches high”. Each player had a joystick and two pads, one for punches and one for kicks. Inside, Sanglard explains, pipes carried air from the pads to a board that measured the pressure.
The pads were the attraction. When CRASH reviewed the finished game at Christmas 1987, it found the action “certainly gratifying, with great feedback from the buttons, but once the novelty of hitting the machine wears off there’s very little to draw you back”. They were also the problem. With no feel for how hard to press, Sanglard writes, players hit as hard as they could, tired their arms within a few rounds and risked injury. Retro Gamer adds that heavy-handed players damaged the pads. Capcom replaced them with six ordinary buttons, three strengths of punch and three of kick. The layout had to be added to the standard arcade wiring, which had only three buttons per player, so Capcom ran the kicks through a separate “kick harness”. Retro Gamer points out that the six-button layout used by many later fighting games started here.
Around the world
The first player is Ryu, a Japanese martial artist. He fights two opponents in each of five countries: Retsu and Geki in Japan, Joe and Mike in the United States, Birdie and Eagle in England, Lee and Gen in China, and finally Adon and the champion, Sagat, in Thailand. Computer and Video Games reported that the first four countries could be fought in any order, with Thailand always last. A match is the best of three rounds, and between countries a bonus round has Ryu breaking a stack of bricks.
A second player could join at any time. The newcomer played Ken, Retro Gamer explains, a copy of Ryu who only appeared in this two-player mode, and the two fought each other before the winner carried on against the computer. Retro Gamer called letting a second player interrupt “a bold step in the right direction for Capcom”.
Not a success
Accounts of how the game did in the arcades differ in degree, not direction. Sanglard calls it “an audaciously innovative title but a commercial failure”, held back by “unimpressive graphics and sluggish controls” even after the pads were replaced. Noritaka Funamizu, the producer of Street Fighter II, told Edge in 2002: “The first Street Fighter was not a success.” Computer and Video Games said in 1988 that it “didn’t exactly take the arcades by storm”. A few later accounts are kinder: a Retro Gamer book says the deluxe cabinet made it popular and that it “did decent business in the arcades and on home formats”.
Nishiyama and Matsumoto left for SNK, where they made Fatal Fury in 1991. Capcom’s next attempt to use the name was a scrolling fighting game shown to the trade as Street Fighter ’89, which became Final Fight. The real sequel came when fighting games caught on in America. Street Fighter II (1991) brought back Ryu, Ken and Sagat.
The home versions
Capcom licensed the conversions to U.S. Gold’s GO! label, and the Manchester studio Tiertex wrote them. GO!’s product manager, David Baxter, told The Games Machine that Capcom’s American office had also made a Commodore 64 version. Tiertex’s brief was to stay close to the arcade, “large sprites and scrolling backdrops”, while the American version “looked more like Yie Ar Kung Fu, with static backdrops and smaller characters”. GO! sold both on one Commodore cassette. Commodore User compared them and put the American version on the A-side: “It was no contest really.”
The pads could not come home. “Arcade fans may know this as the game that had pads you could actually hit,” wrote Bob Wade in ACE. Without them, he found “just another standard beat-em-up, that brings nothing new to the genre”. Reviewers agreed on the graphics and on how easy the computer opponents were to beat:
- Spectrum: CRASH gave it 69% in June 1988. One reviewer found it well presented but beaten “by constantly ducking and kicking - a very old method”; another reached the fifth level on his third go. The Games Machine gave it 73%.
- Commodore 64: Zzap!64 gave it 36%, “an unfortunately poor conversion of a very well received arcade game”, complaining of extra loading and poor control response. The Games Machine gave it 65%.
Tiertex then wrote Human Killing Machine for U.S. Gold, an original fighting game on the same engine. Retro Gamer called it Tiertex’s own “unofficial sequel”.
NEC’s CD-ROM drive for the PC Engine went on sale in Japan in December 1988, and ACE reported that Street Fighter was one of its first two games. It was sold as Fighting Street, “more commonly known in the arcades as Street Fighter”.
Later releases
The original game kept its place at the head of the series. Capcom put it first among the twelve games in the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, released on 29 May 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
Sources
- Capcom press release, 30 August 2022 (web): “Released first as an arcade game on August 30, 1987”. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/news/html/e220830.html
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 137: preview of the prototype cabinet (size, screen, pads, “the more your hands hurt”, secret techniques).
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987, p. 31: arcade review (“once the novelty of hitting the machine wears off”).
- Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System (2022), pp. 26 and 39: the pneumatic pads, the injuries, the six-button retrofit and the “kick harness”, the commercial failure; p. 228: Nishiyama at Irem and Capcom, planner on Street Fighter and creator of the Hadouken.
- “Hadoken”, Edge issue 262, January 2014, p. 111: Nishiyama, Space Battleship Yamato, the Hadoken’s input, the Shoryuken and Tatsumaki Senpukyaku.
- Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012, pp. 62–63: the deluxe and six-button cabinets, the hidden special moves and their unreliable inputs, Nishiyama and Matsumoto, Ken in two-player mode, the roster, Tiertex and Human Killing Machine.
- 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die (Retro Gamer), p. 67: Nishiyama and Matsumoto as director and planner; “decent business”; Street Fighter ’89.
- “The making of… Street Fighter II”, Edge issue 108, March 2002, p. 102: Noritaka Funamizu, “The first Street Fighter was not a success.”
- Computer and Video Games issue 84, October 1988, p. 58: Atari ST and Amiga review (pneumatic buttons, “didn’t exactly take the arcades by storm”, five countries and the order of play, the formats and prices).
- The Games Machine issue 9, August 1988, p. 54: review (Tiertex, the two-player match between Ryu and Ken, Commodore 64 65%, Spectrum 73%, Amstrad CPC prices); p. 90: David Baxter on the British and American Commodore 64 versions.
- Commodore User, July 1988, p. 26: the two Commodore 64 versions, the American one on the A-side.
- ACE issue 11, August 1988, p. 68: review by Bob Wade.
- CRASH issue 53, June 1988, p. 13: Spectrum review (GO!, £8.99, Tiertex, the bonus round, the ducking-and-kicking tactic); the 69% score as given in CRASH issue 58, November 1988, p. 121.
- Zzap!64 issue 40, August 1988, pp. 28–29: Commodore 64 review, 36%.
- ACE issue 19, April 1989, p. 9, and issue 20, May 1989, p. 8: the PC Engine CD-ROM drive and Fighting Street; issue 19, p. 62: Human Killing Machine.
- Andy Wong (Capcom), “Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection Arrives on May 29, 2018”, PlayStation Blog, 20 March 2018 (web). https://blog.playstation.com/2018/03/20/street-fighter-30th-anniversary-collection-arrives-on-may-29-2018/