Street Fighter II was an important video game. It was one of the very first video games I ever fell in love with, and I know I’m not alone. So many of us just have the tiniest details of Street Fighter II embedded in our consciousness. That’s what makes the Twitter feed of Akira Nishitani so fascinating…
As the original Game Director Nishitani has been filling his feed with little snippets about the creation of Street Fighter II — explanations for some of its quirks or facets of the game that were canned during development. It’s become a real treasure trove for information on the greatest fighting game ever made.
A fascinating thread over at Mugen Fighters Guild has cataloged a whole ton of these tweets and translated them. There’s some incredibly interesting nuggets…
Like the fact that Chun Li’s stockings were resprited three times before being finalised!
This one completely blew my mind…
Apparently someone tested this and the rock does move. Whoa…
I wonder how differently the game would have played had this mechanic been integrated:
This one kills me because I used to think the red hadouken was something to do with the speed of the movement made. I spent way too long experimenting with this!
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I recommend heading over to the Mugen Guild thread. Lots of interesting stuff there.
Akira Nishitani Speaks (SF2 Director) [Mugen Guild]
Comments
16 responses to “Street Fighter II Facts That May Blow Your Mind…”
Awesome stuff!!!!! I remember the red hadouken theories… ‘Its a glitch’ ‘it does twice the damage’ ‘do three in a row and then win ten matches perfect then jump five times then press 1p and 2p simultenously with 10 credits in at once and it unlocks sheng long’ etc
Hahaha yes the sheng long thing was awesome…. I think me and my brother tried jumping over M Bison 10 times on the SNES, nothing happened 🙁
Speaking that good olde classic Sheng Long myth… Game Trailer’s Pop Fiction ran an awesome episode disecting that rumour and the origin of the myth –
Love that series 😀
That video is brilliant, thanks !!!
gg, so many hours spent trying all the Sheng Long rumors from gaming magazines and such…
In the days before the internet, the red hadouken was an absolutely monumental source of rampant, un-verifiable speculation. It was an absolute frenzy of speculation and rumor.
I’ve never been a massive Street Fighter fan but man I love reading about Street Fighter II’s development. It’s like a band accidentally inventing a genre because their instruments were broken. There’s a real ‘we worked hard and put a lot of thought into it, but when things went wrong we just changed course and went with what worked’ vibe to just about every dev story they tell. If you were to read all this sort of behinds the scenes stuff without knowing it was Street Fighter you’d imagine it was the autopsy for the world’s buggiest game.
And to think that SF2 was the COD of the 16 bit/arcade era, it’s even more crazy to think about how cobbled together it was.
In SF2, sometimes Ryu takes absurdly high damage when dizzied. This is due to the fact that we experimented with characters taking twice as much damage when dizzy, and applied this flag to all dizzied animation frames, but forgot to remove it from one.
I’m pretty sure it was 1 frame out of a 4 frame sequence, so it should be possible to watch the animation once Ryu’s dizzied and intentionally aim for that high damage.
Often wondered why it didn’t work on Ken 😛
That was great. Thanks Serrels-shuryou
shoryu-mark
The original SF II had an extra moves (glitches) that only Guile could pull off.
1) The invisible throw.
2) Freeze
3) Game reset
4) Stance
5) Golden stance
6) Game freeze
Many a morning, afternoon and dollar were spent on trying to perfect these moves with Guile. Just doing the invisible throw earned you the beast mode with friends! I wish i could get an arcade box of this game it was definately my favourite of the series
MAME is your friend.
fond memories of SF2 however even though it from a balance perspective wasn’t as good as SF2 I always loved Mortal kombat II way more.
Something about those fatality moves really appealed to my 6 year old brain lol
For some reason this is the best article in ages…
*sniff* Nostalgia feels.