CHAMPION'S ROAD

How Street Fighter II: Champion Edition lit the blue touchpaper for tournament gaming worldwide

- MATT LEONE

With nearly 50m copies sold, the Street Fighter series is one of the biggest in game history. Unusually for such a storied franchise, though, the original 1987 game wasn’t the one that caught fire. It took 1991’s follow-up, Street Fighter II, to really capture the imagination of arcade goers worldwide, ensnared by a combination of super-detailed visuals, a selection of characters with distinctive personalities and abilities, and endlessly rewarding play in both singleplayer and versus matchups. An even bigger success, though, followed in 1992. A basic concept on the surface, Champion Edition was, essentially, a response to player criticisms. Adding mirror matches and playable bosses was the sort of idea that would pop up in arcades, on school playgrounds and in game magazine reader mail sections. Tracking down how it all happened inside Capcom, however, gets a bit more complicated.

As is something of a trend with the Street Fighter legend as a whole, the stories told by Capcom USA staff don’t always match the stories told by Capcom Japan staff. In the case of Champion Edition, there even exist multiple accounts of how it happened on the US side. The first of these comes from James Goddard and Jeff Walker, who worked closely together and generally tell the same version of what happened.