Best cat ever
Street Fighter II. Summer 1991 I was eleven years old, on vacation in Québec, Canada. An arcade alley, I was searching for Final Fight. I then saw just a bit on the left, two guys playing this fighting game. It was a Guile VS Ken match in the Guile stage. Everyfuckingthing was perfect: style, movements, background, audio fxs, fire balls -did I just witness fire balls??-… No way. At that time all the rage in France was around Double Dragon II on NES, you can imagine how it felt. A magical moment punch in the face I still can clearly remember. Another dimension.
After its release on Super NES (US import!), Street Fighter II would make my friends and I happy for years. Satursdays afternoons were SFII, Sundays were the same. A little Bomberman to chill out a bit and then back on that super tic tac toe II. I think it’s the first time I felt the “balance” thing about characters. I had developed a good technique with the slowest character, Dhalsim. Feeling that all characters had a potential and something to knock the shit out of their opponent whoever he was, was simply awesome and crazy.
And the sound… Oh man, I’ve never had such a sensation of power hitting a bunch of pixels, songs were stuck in my head with really different mood fitting characters… This Sagat stage. The stage of the end of the afternoon. The hard one, the painful one.
What surprises me now is that I didn’t play SF II that much. Street Fighter III was an awesome one but I wasn’t hardcore enough (and entering the gamedev world).
Almost twenty years after the number two, Street Fighter IV is out these days and I couldn’t not feel something. This game even if it’s just a fighting game, changed my life in my perception of what we can achieve in games, that powerful feeling of control. Control and efficiency. A weak but fast hit can make you win. A new level of possibilities only around improvements (more buttons), embedded in the best culture crossover shit available.
I can’t find the 08 GDC session of Yoshiki Okamoto titled “Creativity in the Form of Improvement” in which the japanese producer explained how they did a mash-up of everything that was working at that time (the fire balls were coming from Dragon Ball for example). Fascinating stuff.
Street Fighter is more than a fine tuned fighting game. It’s a cultural melting-pot and a true part of my 90s teenage years.
Big Up to all SF players in the world, kudos to Capcom for releasing SF IV on PC too (killing the stupid exclusive thing).