Though the first Street Fighter game arrived in 1987, the series truly took off with the second game, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. The title, which arrived on February 6, 1991, improved on concepts that the original game introduced in addition to marking the debut of many fan-favorite characters.
The World Warrior, like its predecessor, is a two-dimensional fighting game; players control a character of their choosing and must fight against a series of challengers in best-two-out-of-three battles. The game uses an eight-directional joystick with six different attack buttons, and these can be used in conjunction to create special moves. The game was also the first to introduce the “combo” system which has since become the industry standard for fighting games.
Character-wise, Ryu and Ken both returned after starring in the first Street Fighter. Six additional playable characters were introduced: Blanka, Guile, E. Honda, Chun-Li, Zangief, and Dhalsim. The player fights against the seven other potential player characters in the game’s tournament before getting to fight the final four bosses, the “Grand Masters” – Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison.
Street Fighter II’s development almost didn’t happen, since the first game actually wasn’t all that popular. It was the success of Capcom’s other fighting series, Final Fight, that allowed the developer to go back to Street Fighter. Street Fighter II proved to be so successful that it was ported to a number of different consoles throughout the 1990s: Super NES, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Master System, Atari ST, Sega Saturn, and even PlayStation. Of these, the Super Nintendo version is probably the most notable and best remembered.
The game is considered easily one of the most influential video games ever, especially when it comes to the fighting genre. Games clearly inspired by Street Fighter II include Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct. It helped the early 1990s resurgence of arcade games (and was the bestselling arcade game of its time) and assisted in popularizing competitive gameplay.
