IGN Presents the History of Street Fighter



They travel the world to meet and battle each other, and above all, to win. Some search for answers, some for glory, some for revenge. Some only seek worthy opponents in a never-ending quest to improve their knowledge and skills.

But only one can become the world's greatest street fighter.

Round 1 - Fight!

Konami hired high school senior Yoshiki Okamoto as a graphic artist in 1982, despite the fact that Okamoto didn't like video games and didn't want to make them. Two years later, under orders to create a racing game, he made classic shooters Time Pilot and Gyruss instead... and then asked for a raise. He was fired the next day.

Five-year-old Capcom scooped him up. They were shifting their business model from electronic game machines to video games, and Okamoto - their second R&D hire, after designer Noritaka Funamizu - put one of their first hits in arcades with 1942, a scrolling World War II aerial shooter that, ironically, encouraged players to wipe out the Japanese air force on their way to Tokyo. Together with Tokuro Fujiwara's one-two punch of Commando and Ghosts 'n Goblins, 1942 helped put Capcom on the map, and ushered in their move on the American market. The next step involved Okamoto taking on his old employers.

Data East had release Karate Champ, a basic fighting game, in 1984. Konami answered in 1985 with Yie-Ar Kung Fu (One-Two Kung Fu), staring martial arts master Oolong as he put the hurtin' on fighters like sumo wrestler Buchu, shuriken-throwing ninja girl Star, and tonfa-wielding Tonfun until somebody's health bar was gone. Capcom wanted its own fighting game, combining the best elements of Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung Fu, and outdoing both. Okamoto put director "Piston" Takashi Nishiyama and project planner "Finish" Hiroshi Matsumoto - the team responsible for Capcom's overhead beat-'em-up Avengers - on the job, and stuck newly hired 22-year-old graphic designer Keiji Inafune on the team to design the fighters.

They named their project after the Americanized title of Sonny Chiba's 1974 beat 'em up classic, Clash! Killer Fist. Street Fighter landed in arcades in 1987.

Cosmetically, Nishiyama and Matsumoto didn't deviate far from Yie-Ar's example, and Inafune had cribbed heavily from 70's manga and anime Karate Baka Ichidai for several character designs. Gamers played as Ryu, a solemn, red-headed Shotokan Karate master in a torn white gi and red slippers. The health bars were identical to Yie-Ar's, and several of the ten fighters scattered across the globe were curiously familiar... like shuriken-throwing ninja boy Geki and tonfa-wielding Eagle. Joining them was elderly Chinese assassin Gen, Caucasian punk Birdie, thinly veiled Mike Tyson clone Mike, and Thai bosses Adon and Sagat, the eye-patched Mauythai master and dead ringer for Ichidai's villainous Reiba, the Dark Lord of Muaythai.

Where Street Fighter differed was in the execution.

The colors and characters popped off the screen in ways Yie-Ar's super-deformed avatars never did. You had your choice of where to go first for a best-of-three contest, and whatever the outcome, a very, very badly digitized voice would declare victory or bemoan defeat. Even better, a second player could join the game at any time as Ken, Ryu's blonde, American sparring partner, for a karate duel against Player 1. If the challenger won, they continued the game as Ken. Joust and Mario Bros. covered similar ground years before, but neither brought the same level of competitiveness to their gameplay. Street Fighter was about busting the other guy up and sending him home.


Instead of buttons, the Street Fighter upright cabinets came with punch pads - one for punches, one for kicks - that delivered light, medium, or heavy attacks depending on how hard and fast it was mashed. But the eight-direction joystick was legendarily unresponsive, and players couldn't really judge what constituted a strong versus a weak hit, opting instead to simply pound the machines relentlessly. Tales of sprained and dislocated fingers began to circulate.

Regardless whether the injuries were real or apocryphal, the punch pads didn't last long under all that abuse. Street Fighter cabinets went down with alarming frequency.

Luckily, the game's board had been built to accommodate a second design for the Japanese market. The punch-pads were phased out in favor of a six-button control scheme that made it far easier to use the various kicks and punches. The conversions, however, didn't make the joystick any more accurate, or clean up lingering bugs from the force-reading sensors, which were never removed.

Despite the problems, Street Fighter became a modest success in Japan and a hit - literally - stateside. Capcom USA soon requested a follow-up game. Funamizu and character designer Akira Yasuda gamely obliged with Street Fighter '89, a side-scrolling brawler in the Double Dragon vein that failed to catch on. Meanwhile, riding high on yet another successful title called Mega Man, Tokuro Fujiwara made the Metroid-ish action platformer Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight for the Nintendo Entertainment System, featuring a bionic Ken; it mercifully vanished into obscurity. Street Fighter '89 was soon re-dubbed Final Fight, and went on to its own successes.

But what everyone really wanted was a real Street Fighter sequel, and Okamoto was now on the hook to provide one.

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