Arcade

Street Fighter II

FightingArcade

Time to beat: about 1 hour

Overview

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior is a 1991 fighting game developed and published by Capcom for arcades. It is the second installment in the Street Fighter series and the sequel to 1987's Street Fighter. Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto and Akira Yasuda, who had previously worked on the game Final Fight, it is the fourteenth game to use Capcom's CP System arcade system board. Street Fighter II vastly improved many of the concepts introduced in the first game, including the use of special command-based moves, a combo system, a six-button configuration, and a wider selection of playable characters, each with a unique fighting style.

Street Fighter II became the best-selling game since the golden age of arcade video games. By 1994, it had been played by an estimated 25 million people in the United States alone. More than 200,000 arcade cabinets and 15 million software units of every version of Street Fighter II have been sold worldwide, earning an estimated $10 billion in revenue, making it one of the top three highest-grossing video games of all time as of 2017 and the best-selling fighting game until 2019; estimated to be approximately £260(~$350) million in arcades in the UK alone. More than 6.3 million SNES cartridges of Street Fighter II were sold, making it Capcom's best-selling single software game for the next 20 years, its best-selling game on a single platform, and the highest-selling third-party game on the SNES.

Unlike its predecessor, Street Fighter II became a pop culture phenomenon, and is frequently regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made. It is also cited as the most important and influential fighting game ever, with its launch being credited to popularizing the genre during the 1990s and inspiring other producers to create their own fighting series. Additionally, it prolonged the survival of the declining video game arcade business market by stimulating business and driving the fighting game genre. It features a popular two-player mode that obligates human-to-human competitive play, inspiring grassroots tournament events, culminating in the Evolution Championship Series (EVO). Street Fighter II shifted the arcade competitive dynamic from achieving personal-best high scores to head-to-head competition, including large groups. Due to its major success, a series of updated versions were released with additional features and characters, starting with 1992's Street Fighter II: Champion Edition; its major successor was Street Fighter III in 1997.