Why Street Fighter is still the most important fighting game series around

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Seventeen years after Street Fighter II there's still no-one to touch Ryu and co. But what makes the series so special?

Forget Halo 3. Forget WoW. Forget Quake. Street Fighter II was the first game taken over and led by its players, and it set the precedent for fan involvemement in a major videogame series. It was in many ways the first true gamer’s game.

The story of combos sums up the whole situation really quite well. The depth of Street Fighter II provided its players with a multi-layered sandbox of violence from which they would truly get as much as they put in, and as a result they eagerly set out to cram it with their own input like a hungry fat man stuffs a turkey. Each advanced technique they discovered begat an advanced counter-technique as dedicated players plumbed the game’s depthsand experimented with its engine. Every

counter eventually got a counter-counter, and whether it existed by accident or design, SFII’s chess-like tactical play was rapidly revealed. However Capcom intended the game to be played, what it became was all down to its players.

For all of its technical advancement at the time of its release, Street Fighter II’s gameplay was sculpted by the human element. Rather than being pre-designed and dictated by the developer, the game’s most effective attacks, defenses and counters were born organically out of the ways in which human beings naturally chose to play and experiment with it. Unlike in other fighters before and since, they weren’t creating an artificial play style based around pre-set approaches to pre-set tactics. Early Street Fighter II players were building their play around the natural invention of their fellow men and women. The game was about understanding and outsmarting the human mind within the ever-expanding framework those minds were discovering and learning to exploit. Capcom made the game, but the players made the rules.

David Houghton
David Houghton
Former GamesRadar+ Features Writer

Former (and long-time) GamesRadar+ writer, Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.