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Episode 367: Street Fighter II (The World Warrior) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-03-26 13:00:00
Imported:
2026-06
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Our next stop in the year-long journey across the history of Street Fighter is the main event, the game that turned 30 years old last month and inspired this entire trip through time: Street Fighter II. Specifically, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. Yes, this episode is specifically about the very first iteration of the game—no sequels, spinoffs, updates, hacks, merchandise, media adaptations, or collectibles. We'll be covering the game's iterations and evolutions in due time! But for now, we simply have our eyes on the K.O. punch delivered by the property's initial arrival. Feat. the talents of Feit, Kalata, and Bailey, with art by Wanserski and edits by Leahy.

Description: Kat Bailey, Kurt Kalata, and Diamond Feit face off against Jeremy Parish in a free-for-all throw down of video game history to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the most influential pop culture creations of all time: Capcom's Street Fighter II.

Music selections:

13:01 - Street Fighter II (CPS): Title

23:26 - Street Fighter II (CPS): Character Select

33:40 - Street Fighter II (CPS): Japan (Ryu) I

47:12 - Street Fighter X Mega Man: Claw Stage

57:53 - Live A Live: Knock You Down! (Ken Theme mashup by SilvaGunner) / Street Fighter II (CPS): Continue

1:10:45 - Street Fighter II (CPS): U.S.A. (Guile) I

1:23:46 - Super Street Fighter II (SNES): Fei Long

Closing - Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix: Street Market HD (Chun Li Stage)

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Comments

Normallyretro

Oh wow. This ep is gonna do numbers.

Christopher Hughes

Street Fighter II appeared in a 7-11, where I lived in Saginaw Michigan. I might have been 10 years old. I used to ride my bike to check it out and hope a kid was there playing who had real skills, and I was happy to just watch.

Rasheen Jordan

One of the playable characters in Rival Turf looks like a Bison ripoff, and the soundtrack on SNES blows the arcade version out of the water.

Michael Castleberry

Still remember my first time ever playing SFII. It was towards the end of 4th grade and I was at the 7-11 by my house with my dad. He gave me a quarter and I saw this new game there. I dropped a quarter in, picked Blanka because he looked cool, and my first fight was vs Ryu. Immediately I was like "OH, THIS IS THE THING I LIKE NOW!" and had to tell everyone at school about it the next day.

John Simon

Ten year old me scoffed at Super SF2 on snes. They released SF2, SF2 turbo seemed like a minor upgrade, and now Super with just four more characters. I knew people who owned three copies. It’s just buying Madden every year. In the arcade, SF2 might have been as far as CPS1 could handle and SSF2/T on CPS2 is where it really shines, the best version of the classic game.

SilverHairedMiddleAgedTuxedoMask

SFII might be the only retro game that's had multiple seperate changes due to cultural sensitivities over the years. The most infamous was the dude playing pocket pool in Kens stage which was removed in the initial console ports though I forget if they added him back into later ports. Then later the console ports of the Championship Edition pallette swapped the black man getting punched in the intro to a white man because somebody complained to Capcom USA (also unsure if later ports reverted it back). The most recent one was the recent removal of both the Rising Sun flag and Japanese flag itself in E. Honda's stage in the new Capcom Arcade Classics ports. Also apparently Fei Long in that version is now from China itself not Hong Kong?

Andrew Grieve

I didn't play a lot of SF2 in arcades, but I was there for the SNES port when that was released and rented it often as a kid. I shared that same experience Diamond had, where the first time I got to the bosses it just felt like a twist that I did not see coming and I had no idea how to take on any of them at first, especially Vega. The way he'd interact with the stage and the claw really forced me to learn how to fight the bosses properly - I probably made it more difficult for myself as a Zangief main at the time but it was very satisfying to finally beat all four bosses...even if I didn't get that maximum difficulty ending.

littleterr0r

Just like you said, Street Fighter 2 was everywhere, and I remember playing it most at a laundromat near my house that I could walk to when I was 11 where there was always a huge crowd of kids that customers had to navigate through when coming to pick up their laundry. One time this kid had just gotten ten dollars worth of quarters from the cashier but his roll of quarters broke, sending kids scrambling around on the ground for his money and definitely not giving any of it back to him when they got it (this was the rough streets of Upstate New York).

Jay Gironimi

Like Kat, winning one round of a fight against one of the older kids at the arcade is a cherished memory. I still remember his friends clowning on him when I won. He destroyed me in the next two rounds. I played SFII on SNES first. My grandmother made friends with someone in the electronics section of the local Ames and they would tip her off on the games the kids were playing. She handed me the game one day after school and said “the guy at the store said everyone likes this.” I probably played that game for six months straight before my cousin visited me from Virginia and showed me how to throw a fireball. Up to that point, I’d been maining Ryu without even using any special moves. I was a bit of a dull child.

CAMBOT

I don't have much to say other than thank you to everyone involved with Retronauts. I absolutely love this podcast and all the content you create. It is really nice to have these episodes to look forward to during normal times but even more so during the pandemic. Thank you!

DarthObvious

Baring major renovations to that bowling alley, I can still take you to the spot where I first played SF2. The P1 joystick didn't work, and I didn't know you could play P2 by itself (that was not a common thing at the time) but even then, I was hooked. All my nostalgia though is for the SNES ports. I had to play some in front of my mom to get her approval on it (because she assumed it would be like Mortal Kombat), and I had never owned it, but it was a frequent rental, which helped me to not get burned out on the slight revisions.

Phoequinox

I wasn't much of an arcade kid growing up. It was rare for me to get to go anywhere with actual cabinets installed, and also rare was actually being able to buy games. So renting SFII was the only way I could experience it. But that fated, uninformed rental was more significant than I could have ever imagined. My brother and I played it constantly and were obsessed with it for a while. It actually had an instruction booklet, so we knew the moves, but struggled to pull them off. My first main was Blanka. Because if you weren't fighting someone with projectiles, he was nearly untouchable. As a kid, playing cheap was the best way to play. Then I gravitated more towards E. Honda. Darting across the screen and doing the hundred hand slap were so much fun that I didn't care if I lacked coordination and strategy. These days, I'm more a fan of Ken. He was given more identity as the series went on, and even though he was a playboy version of Ryu, he just has a certain charm about him. Also, Kat. The calluses. My thumbs still haven't healed, 28 years later.

Ibrahim

For myself the experience of learning about and playing SF2 was closely linked to the experience of reading about the game in US and UK magazines. By the time I had access to the game I already knew the special moves so there wasn’t that same sense of surprise or discovery but without exaggeration it absolutely was one of the key defining games of that era for me, and I’ve continued to be deeply engaged with fighting games decades later. One of the interesting points around SF2 in particular and the wider fighting game community of the 90s is that we have a wide range of secondary media and material relating to the game. Google groups has an archive of alt.games.sf2 stretching back to the early 90s and it is crazy to look back at that kind of stuff now.

TeamVenom

Something interesting I recently learned about Street Fighter 2: Sagat's Theme has a very odd time signature, 11/8. It's a very unusual time signature and very difficult to compose in, might explain why the theme has such a mystical feel to it.

Tyler Doerschuk

I absolutely loved this fucking episode. I am 34 years old and was introduced to SF II via the SNES iteration well after the arcade craze. I had no idea it was a monster like that on the declining arcade scene. Give the people what they want Retronauts! More SF content in the backlog plz!!!

James Krusling

I was very young when it came out but I remember playing it in the arcade all the time and getting the Genesis version of Championship Edition whenever that came out! Also shout out to Jeremy because my favorite character was also Chun-Li, and while not SF II specific, once the Marvel crossover games starting coming, picking Chun-Li and Spider-Man on a team was like hitting the nerd lottery. Anyway great episode and I really want to hear you guys talk about all the spin-offs and multimedia stuff too, not to mention Alpha and the Vs games!

Guillermo Jiménez

Really great episode. Gives a sense of what it was like being there in 1991 when the game dropped in arcades. I'm a couple of years too young for that but even by, say, 1994 SFII really was everywhere. I got the SNES port a few years later and it only gets better with age. The connection they make here that the first game has the same structure as Mega Man 2 and it's blowing my mind. And I'd forgotten that story about how Japanese players initially did not play SFII head-to-head and nearly always played it on single-player like it was an action game. Wild. Jeremy's badass teenager anecdotes are killing me too.

Cajun Baz

Great episode. Glad there's an quick mention on the glitches of the first generation SF2 arcade machines. I remember there were a few glitches that players purposely did with Guile to "handcuff" the opponents that either led to a showy victory as the time counted down or a freeze that required a reboot. For the follow-up episode, please give some airtime to the "rainbow" editions that proliferated between Champion Edition and Turbo: Hyper Fighting. Although they were illegal mods, they literally took over every SF2 arcade machine in Northern California when I was young.

G

Oh wow how could people have played SF 1 as hardcore as SF2? (Comments above). SF one had like no appeal. It was more fun to just not advance the screen and fight each other in double dragon 1 or 2.