Top 7... weirdest Street Fighter insults

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From scary to stupid, we kick off Street Fighter Week with a look at the series' most ludicrous victory disses

The blurb at the end of the article, which credited the trick to W.A. Stokins ("waste tokens") of Fuldigen, HA, was a dead giveaway. So was the boxout at the bottom of the page inviting readers to try and spot that issue's April Fool's joke. But tons of gamers apparently don't understand jokes, and so the trick was reprinted in other publications as factual, and Sheng Long started showing up in comic books as Ryu and Ken's mysterious teacher.

So what was really the source of all the mystery? A mistranslation, that's what.For whatever reason, acouple of the Kanji symbols in Ryu's Japanese victory screen were just transliterated from their Chinese pronunciation, instead of actually translated from their Japanese meaning. So instead of "Dragon Punch," we got the Chinese equivalent, "Sheng Long."

But what the hell - that screwup gave us the most memorable April Fool's joke in videogame history, and ultimately resulted in the creation of Akuma as a stand-in for Sheng Long. Who then gave us that weird quote about how much he likes to smack babies, or whatever. It's weird how these things come full circle.

Mar 17, 2008

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.