Episode 006: Street Fighter II - a pizza fueled screamathon

Welcome to the sixth episode of the Dadpod Gamescast!Today, we’re talking Street Fighter II in its various incarnations. Along the way, we detour through Walmart arcades, pizza styles, and competitive gaming.Between the recording of this episode and its release, we learned a few things!During the episode Joe wondered, Why do Ken and Ryu have the same movesets?In the original Street Fighter, you could only play as Ryu or Ken and simplification led to a single moveset being applied to both. This carried forward into Street Fighter II.One of the most important changes made between Street Fighter and Street Fighter II was increased accessibility for special moves. In original Street Fighter, the special moves were more complicated to perform and also required a fast and precise input. Street Fighter II made the special moves more sensible and loosened up the timing.As we discussed in the episode, this is also what makes playing the game feel so good.More importantly, this loosening of the timing led to the accidental development of combos. With the loosening of timing, an unintended consequence was that you could string together strikes. The developers found this accidental byproduct to be so fun that they made it a feature in the game. Thus and so: combos!Street Fighter II was one of the most successful arcade games, possibly ever. Sales figures are not available, but across the various iterations, it’s estimated that it may have sold 100,000 arcade cabinets, which puts it in the rarefied air of cabinets like Pac Man and Space Invaders.This popularity created the competitive gaming scene that we still know.This also led directly to the accidental development of Street Fighter II Turbo.With anything this successful, knockoffs proliferated. One of the changes made in some of these pirate versions was an increase in speed.Distributors and salespeople encountered these cabinets and liked them a whole lot and convinced the Street Fighter team to increase the speed.They Create Worlds on Fighting Games and Beatemups.An oral history of Street Fighter II at Polygon.Music by Damage Trax.Artwork by Jake at Scott Creative.Find eddy at his newsletter and Joe at twitter.Email your questions to the show at dadpod.blankcast at gmail.com.Dadpod GamesCast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dadpod GamesCast at dadpod.substack.com/subscribe