UPDATE: Wow, we didn’t expect this little feature to be so popular! We had many requests for additional stage comparisons so here is Ryu versus Guile @ Guile’s stage. Let us know what stage you would like to see in the poll below.

		Street Fighter II – Evolution Length: 00:01:26 We take a brief look at the evolution of Street Fighter II from 1992 to 2008.

		Street Fighter II – Evolution – Ryu vs Guile @ Guile’s stage Length: 00:01:29 We take a brief look at the evolution of Street Fighter II from 1992 to 2008.

The original Street Fighter II was released in Japanese arcades in 1991 and became the game that defined the fighting genre.  17 years, 5 arcade versions and over 25 ports later Street Fighter II is still going strong.  To commemorate the release of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix we will take a brief look at how the game has evolved over the years.

When Street Fighter II launched in July 1992 on the Super Nintendo it was a technical marvel – one of the first games to ship with 16megs of memory. The result? One of the closest arcade ports at the time.  You see, today we compare the PlayStation 3 to the Xbox 360, in the 90’s you used the arcade to measure the power of your console. Whichever system could deliver the closest “arcade perfect” experience in your home was the winner. Usually the quest for arcade perfection left the consumers disappointed. Shrunken characters, poor sound effects/music/voices and choppy animation was commonplace. Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition for the Sega Genesis was an example of this. But over time the programmers became more comfortable developing for the consoles and the conversions got closer to the arcade. In 1994 Capcom released Super Street Fighter II Turbo for the 3DO.  The 3DO version had a remixed soundtrack, arcade perfect characters and sound effects, but missed the mark on background parallaxing. This was as close to the arcade version we would see until 1997.

In 1997 Sega and Sony released their next line of consoles, the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. With the power of the new systems the developers were able to deliver an arcade perfect port of Street Fighter II, except for load times. After 5 years of attempts we finally had the arcade game in our home. But this power came at a price. Little did we know then that this generation of consoles would kick start the downfall of the arcade.

From 1998 to 2006 various versions of Street Fighter II continued to be released on consoles. During these years Street Fighter II made appearances on the Dreamcast,  PlayStation 2, Xbox and Xbox 360. While still being arcade perfect the game was starting to show its age. Gamers had moved on from the graphics of the 90’s. They expected more from the next version of Street Fighter. Capcom read our minds and released Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November 2008. The talented artists at Udon redrew every character and background in ultra sharp 1080p. Unfortunately they kept the same frame rate from the original game, but we understand why. They didn’t want to break a game that has been 17 years in the making.

Be sure to check out our indepth review of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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