'Street Fighter II' Wasn’t Just a Game, It Was a Portal
frieze.com
frieze.com
I figured out how to throw a fireball on command and became the wizard of the arcade. Shortly after I figured out the dragon punch too. I never figured out the hurricane kick. The game never showed it during demonstration so I didn't know it even existed. It would happen sometimes randomly while playing but for some reason I thought it was a glitch and not a real move. One day another player showed up from another arcade, and he was doing all three moves. He didn't have them quite figured out though as his technique was to mash the joystick motion spastically while hitting the buttons, but it was enough to figure out the hurricane kick too.
When SF2 came out, I was excited because I already knew the special moves, but then there were all these new characters I didn't know how to play. And that's when it happened: people started playing each other. That's what changed everything. The arcades were all dying, but with SF2 the crowds started gathering around. It was no longer about playing the games and getting the high score. It was about being the best competitor.
It's crazy to see it all start and to have gone to and competed in a lot of the first video game competitions. It has come a long way from arcade employees setting up home grown tournaments and giving away ticket prizes. Now we have EVO.
This was one of the arcade-specific experiences that I've never quite had at any other point in my life. MMORPGS and forums have given me some of the feeling of being at an arcade, but this was something unique.
I was perhaps too young, or for whatever reason not good enough to be noteworthy at the arcades. But (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), my best friend was. He was notoriously good.
We'd go from arcade to arcade in town, until they'd ban him or (in one case) up the difficulty just to get him to leave.
We'd play co-op games where he carried me through and it was a kind of bonding experience I can't quite compare to anything else.
He was so good at the competitive games (in particular SF2) that people wouldn't challenge him. Why waste a coin? I sometimes put in a coin just to bait others, because the clever players knew that if you saw someone playing SF2 alone for a while, they were probably really good. He'd give me 10 cents to reimburse me :).
Whenever a new arcade opened up (usually in a shipping container, but sometimes 'real fancy'), we'd rush there and first try the new games, but then get back to SF2 and hope there were players that didn't know about him yet. It usually worked for a while.
But possibly one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the time that, while I was faffing about on other arcades, out of the corner of my eye I'd see some other guy (it was mostly men, but perhaps that's partly culturally. women became mothers-in-training in their teens) walk up to his solo SF2 play, and pop in a coin.
I swear, when that happened, it sometimes felt like a Western. I'd notice first, on account of keeping an eye on my bestie, but others 'in the know' would nudge each other and cut off whatever game they were playing to watch the spectacle.
A crowd would form around my friend and this 'new guy', and, of course, most of the time he'd do the equivalent of drawing so quick that the other guy didn't stand a chance. Sometimes he'd play around. Pick one of the weaker characters (that monster one I don't remember). Or humiliate his new adversary by offering to play with one hand.
I think there was only one time where he struggled, and it turned out this guy was a dude from the capitol and was known there for being the local SF2 champion.
EDIT: Oh, and just to add some color to this story in case anyone liked it: I was one of the few people in town with a personal computer. My parents told me to not mention it to my friends for fear of theft. I told this friend and I will never forget the experience of having him over and playing games together. This was a 486 and we played Wacky Wheels and (I think) Doom and One Must Fall, the latter which was closest to the fighting games he was so good at (or perhaps a similar game?).
These games were clearly a step down from what we got to play at the arcades, but the fact that we could play them without having to put in coins (even if they had the 'continue' and 'credits' screens) was just mind-blowing to the both of us.
Sadly as I moved on to RPG's and RTS', he stuck with the arcades and we drifted apart in this regard. We bonded over watching badly dubbed films though, The Matrix being probably our favorite.
Sure it had pretty good graphics for the time, and gameplay was great as well.
But the real differentiator was the ability to "compete" with other people.
Not just compete, but the fact that you plopped down 25 cents and within 3 minutes one of your lost. At the time we didn't have much money, so 25 cents per game play was quite a lot. So it really came down to being great and trying to beat as many people as possible so that your 25 cents could last longer.
It was probably my first real memory of truly being competitive at life.
I miss arcades, although I only got to visit them once a year when we went on our family holiday. Can you imagine waiting a whole year to play Outrun, Rygar or Smash TV? Arcade games were so superior to their home conversions that to an obsessive gamer like me, it was like going on a pilgrimage to see a painting that you'd previously only seen in a photocopied reproduction.
My finest gaming moments were playing Golden Axe and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker with a whole crowd of people watching.
As a general rule, this is correct, but Rygar is a glaring exception. The arcade game was a typical mindless scroller. The home version was an epic action/RPG.
Rygar had a rough learning curve but it was possible to get good enough to finish the whole game on a quarter or two.
You can imagine the disappointment when we got NES Rygar. Ported graphics and characters aside, it was one of those games that was damn near impossible without the Official Nintendo Player’s Guide or the mapping tenacity of a fanatic. Of course we played through it, but grudgingly.
That is unless you had a Neo-Geo ;)
I only had a base unit with the tap adapter. And then I got the express too.
But it’s also a social space, even for introverts. People would stop and watch you playing, it was easy to start a chat, or even challenge someone to a game of tekken or dead or alive.
There has to be a business model to bring them back.
I would say Pokemon GO is a good example of an evolutionary / revolutionary game with roots in the arcade-genre. I would like to see more games like this with built-in necessity to bring people together.
Maybe some mixture of peripherals, gesture tech and VR will have to be the way forward. But there really wouldn't be a replacement for getting in a cockpit-like booth complete with full haptic feedback.
Starwing Paradox and Gundam: Senjo no Kizuna come to mind.
or are we having a nostalgia episode?
One recent/current outlier is the Killer Queen arcade game: dedicated hardware, console ports that may capture the game but the in-person experience is entirely different and exclusive.
There's certainly a lot of nostalgia. Arcade games at the time of Street Fighter II were significantly more capable than home games; unless, you had a Neo Geo at home, because somehow $900 for the console and $200 for a game was affordable to you in the 90s. Around the end of the 90s, we started seeing arcade systems that were really supercharged consoles: Sega Naomi is a Dreamcast with more memory and runs from either roms or a ramdisk that caches a whole optical disk at boot. Into the 2000s and beyond, games based on PCs started appearing (some of which will show BIOS screens and windows boot logos at power on... others have the decency to disable video until after the arcade program has started). Most games are simply not impressive in the arcade anymore, unless they're huge, or have a compelling deluxe cabinet. This is part of why you don't see a couple games at a grocery/liquor store anymore --- they'd either have to be classic games, or take up too much space, or a multicade, there's not much coming out that's a standard cabinet, which is mostly what would fit (lots of new pinball though, but those won't fit were you could have had one pac-man, that later became one street fighter II).
The arcade style of game is of course very different than an MMO. There's not usually a lot of state saved between games; a handful of games let you setup a profile and keep upgrades between games, but most start you back at the bottom every time. That tends to make the games more immediate, and less grindy, but also they tend to be less deep. Although, if you want to grind, there's always redemption games.
- large arcade, all games set to freeplay, you pay $x for a couple hours of unlimited play
- a "barcade", cheaper entry fee and you can stay til closing time, where the games are more of a loss leader to bring people in to buy food and drinks while they play. more multiplayer games here to aid in the social aspect. also cupholders at each machine.
Admittedly, the demographic has changed - it isn't 10-15 year old kids all piling into a dark room together with the only "adult" being the 17 year old working there. It is 4-12 year old kids with their parents.
Like others have said they've come back somewhat in urban areas as 'barcades,' at least until Covid-19. These kinds of businesses will be struggling for many years to come if they manage to survive at all.
One of the nice things about Stargate was that the high score allowed for several characters instead of just 3 for initials. You could write almost a whole sentence if you beat the high score.
This led to some extremely heated competition as my friend would write very nasty insults about me so that when I would show up to the arcade I would see it and spend hours trying to beat his score so I could post insulting material about him on the high score.
Another friend and I mastered Asteroids and we would have extra lives/ships lined up all across the top of the screen and beyond.
Over time this would lead to some interesting things due to low memory issues like the lines that made up the asteroid rocks would come detached and strange artifacts flickering on the screen.
Years later collecting ROM’s of these old arcade games to play over MAME emulator I was astonished at just how small the programs were.
I miss the arcades of the 80’s
There is. There are arcade-bars that serve alcohol and food to cater to millennials.
We'd play a two-player game together, and at some point I let him play Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Combat while I shyly tried another game, in the safe knowledge that he was just a few arcades over.
I still vividly remember going by myself because he couldn't join. It was terrifying, but because I picked a mostly-single-player game and I recognized some of the patrons, I managed.
Unfortunately, because I was the only red-headed white guy there, there was a moment where as I was playing some guy thought it would be funny to put out his cigarette on my leg. That set me back for a bit.
But I still consider that arcade experience as the first time I learned to venture out into the scary world, and thankfully the bad experience didn't set me back too much. After that came the Counter-Strike sessions at internet cafés and, with a gap of probably half a decade or so, being a student and actually hanging out in bars with my peers without an arcade game mediating all of it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I imagine my next venture into the social world will probably involve table-top gaming or ping-pong. I'm just not that good at socializing without it being centered around something :).
But man, it's rare that I get a wave of nostalgia this big. I had another rare one recently when I watched the Digital Ocean "Final Fight: DF Retro revisits the arcade original, every port, and all sequels" review (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-retro...). Final Fight and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs were the two arcade games that I remember being somehow significant (other than TMNT: Manhatten Project, but that was mostly because I at least knew of the TMNT. and to be fair it was an amazing game).
Good times - thanks dad :)
Now that's a surprise!
In the US version, there were slightly different names I am guessing. Claw is most likely Vega and Boxer is Balrog?
Dictator: Vega → M. Bison
Boxer: M. Bison → Balrog
Claw: Balrog → Vega
I always liked Blanka, maybe because his electric touch makes him a bit of a nerd.
The next time was a in mall (which was torn down at least 25 years ago) just in a random ally way between shops. I spent about 75 cents of my own money.
Our local bowling ally had a Mortal Kombat arcade (torn down 5 years ago and replaced with an ALDI) which occupied my friends (I still preferred Street Fighter).
I used to carry the Street Fighter II Sega Genesis game manual with me in middle school. The manual was included with the cartridge and had art, lore, and the moves listed.
Street Fighter was a portal for me before the Internet.
My favorite game cabinet, when I can find one, is Marvel versus Capcom. I'm not good at that game, but it felt so expansive with the choices of playable characters, I spent a bit of money but I was older and friendless and not part of the scene (at this point there likely wasn't a scene).
If I had to choose one game that shaped me, it would be a tie between Mario Brothers for the NES and Street Fighter II.
It's funny because I got that feeling from a lot of games. It's why I loved adventure games. Some were set in made-up places, but some were from real places. (I remember playing one where part of it was set in ancient Chichen Itza, Mexico among the Mayan pyramids, for example.)
But I also remember when Street Fighter hit the scene, arcade games went downhill fast. They all became variations on the same theme of memorizing sequences of button presses instead of having goals to achieve or interesting puzzles. Going to the arcade stopped being fun for me at that point, and home computers were starting to get powerful enough to have far more interesting and involved games on them. And shortly after that networked games started becoming a thing.
I Loved E Hondas stage, Balrog's Casino amd Dhalsims stage in particular.
Reminds me of the Twisted Metal series for Playstation - the excitement when you're on your way to a battle in Hong Kong!
I remember my classmates speaking about SFII all the time. They all played it on their SNES.
Later I got one too and would play SFII, Mortal Kombat II Super Bomberman 3, Micromachines and Mario Kart with my friends.
Good memories...
Managing to pull of some frantic fireballs or dragon punches and hang in for a few games against the bigger kids would mean the kind of adrenaline rush and feeling of exhilaration that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Sometimes you’d put a pound in, and some bastard would steal one of your games to replay you. Never put a pound in.
My exposure to Streetfight was a little later in life, when I was around 16/17 hanging out at the local tattoo parlor. They had a Street Fighter 2 Champion edition cabinet tucked away at the side of the waiting-room, and I'd often play friends and random people queuing/waiting for a few hours on a Saturday morning.
Metal Slug, SF2, Sonic, Lion King, Toe Jam, Earth Worm, these were the first games I ever really played as a kid for me were my own portal to gaming which expanded into an early career at Uni although now it's only recreational, I can't help but think I enjoyed the gaming when I was 10 years old, than I do now.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-raspberry-pi-has-revolutio...
I also remember it costing more than other SNES games, it was almost half as much as the console.
Not, not really. I mean, it was a really good port, but if you compare it side by side you can clearly see it's not at the same level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKOd6SVmnb4
Sprites are bigger on the arcade version, and there's higher resolution overall as well.
As a kid, my favourite level was the Dhalsim level. Note that I am not Indian.
edit: I had to look up how to spell that.
My favourite was trying to translate whatever they say on that sound engine into "tatsumaki senpuu kyaku". To this day I still can't hear it