#1 – Street Fighter II 
110 Points, 6 lists, Top Vote: #1 ScottotD, CJones Production Date: 1991
Manufacturer: Capcom
Well, here it is. The most influential arcade game since Space Invaders.
Once upon a time in 1987, there was a game called Street Fighter. It wasn't particularly good. SF wasn't even the first game of its type. Yie Ar Kung-Fu came out in '85, and in my personal opinion it's a better game than SF. SF did have a unique feature though: Special Moves, moves that require some joystick motion along with a button press. A novel idea at the time, but nobody really knew how to best implement it. So we got "broken" special moves. Broken in the sense that were exceeding hard to do, and broken in the sense that they are WAY over powered. Fireballs did almost 50%, and the Shouryuken could do 100% damage and was completely invincible AND it was unblockable.
A couple years later, Capcom wanted to make a sequel to SF. That game ended up being 1989's Final Fight. FF was so successful that Capcom decided to invest more in brawlers and fighters, and in 1991, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was born.
SF2 was phenomenally successful. How successful? How about 2.3
Billion dollars by 1995
And that's not even counting sales of console versions. I can remember going to my local arcade and having to actually wait in line to play. Now those were the days
Even as early as 1990, the arcade scene was starting to die-off and Street Fighter II brought it back to life. My friends and I spent God knows how long at arcades, trying to figure out or find out, how to do the specials. On one occasion, I happened to see someone using Zangief, and he was destroying everyone. More importantly, he was doing Spinning Pile Drivers consistently, without jumping or buffering into them. I knew from that point, that I would be a Zangief player.
There was a problem though. Because SF2 was so successful, many of the other game developers felt that they had to make a fighting game themselves. It didn't take long for arcades to become over saturated with fighters, not all of which were good. It reached the point where arcades were filled almost entirely with fighting games, driving games, light gun games and redemption machines, simply because they were the biggest money makers.
Capcom has garnered a reputation for rehashing their fighting games, and rightly so. There was, of course, one version of Street Fighter, but there were five official versions of Street Fighter II : The original, Champion Edition, Turbo, Super and Super Turbo. And God knows how many hacked versions. Three SF alpha games, three versions of Street Fighter 3 and so on...
Let's talk glitches and exploits for a moment. There's the famous Guile "handcuff" glitch, where your opponent is frozen right beside you. The Dhalsim invisibility glitch. And something most people don't realize was a glitch: Two-in-One combos. eg Close Fierce -> Fireball. That's right, that sort of combo wasn't intended. The reason it works is because the game is very lenient about the button presses. So if you hit the button slightly early, just before the joystick motion finishes, the game will activate the normal for that button, but when you finish the motion, the game knows you meant to do that special, and so immediately replaces the normal with the special. In the case of the 2 in 1 combo, the normal hits so early that even after hitting, you still have enough time to trick the game into thinking you meant to do a special. It was such a great feature that every subsequent SF game was intentionally designed to have 2-in-1s
Fun facts:
There is an issue of EGM that explains how to fight Sheng Long. You were supposed to go 10 rounds against Bison without either one taking any damage. It was an April Fools joke, but apparently not everyone realized this. I was at my local arcade one day and I saw one of the regulars there trying to do it. The amazing part is that he had already made it to round 5. I told him it was a hoax, and he was pissed.
Re-dizzy combos are the Holy Grail of fighting game techniques, and Street Fighter II had several. If you got hit by one, you lose. Period. Probably the best known is Guile's jump fierce, close fierce, Sonic Boom, fierce backhand.
I'm sure most people know this by now, but just in case: Balrog is named M Bison in Japan. M Bison, as in Mike Bison. Capcom was afraid they get sued by Mike Tyson if they named him that in the US. But rather than just think up a new name for one character, they just switched names around. M Bison (Boxer) became Balrog, Balrog (Claw) became Vega, and Vega (Dictator) became M Bison. At major tournaments, it's not uncommon for them to be referred to as Boxer, Claw and Dictator, just to avoid confusion.
I leave you with this:
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Topic: LoC 90: Top 50 Arcade Games Countdown (Read 43795 times)
