We hoovered up the game’s lore, later poring over the manga and anime translations.
When we weren’t playing Street Fighter II we were talking about it: teaching each other special moves we’d learned from video game magazines discussing the pros and cons of Ryu, Dhalsim and Guile openly mocking anyone who played with Blanka. When it came out on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, we’d gather in someone’s front room, play all night, sleep for a few hours, then start again. I’d played martial arts sims for years, blowing all my pocket money on formative titles such as Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate, but this was something different: a brilliant, frenzied combination of magical warriors and super-precise control systems that used joystick rotations and button combinations to produce eye-popping attacks and counters. It was Street Fighter II.Ĭapcom’s superlative fighting game arrived in 1991, revolutionising the genre with its flamboyant characters and elaborate special moves. It wasn’t drugs or alcohol and it certainly wasn’t a doomed love affair (if only!). As a teenager in the early 90s, there was only one real threat to my academic future.
