Street Fighter 2 is probably the most famous fighting game of all time. In his time, the early 90s, 2D fighting was the most popular genre, and Capcom was the undisputed king, both in arcades and at home.
If you are excited about this game, in this report you will learn many curiosities about it, directly from the mouth (or tweets) of Akira Nishitani, director of SF2.
One of the game’s best-known urban legends has to do with the Shakunetsu Hadouken, which is basically a red Hadouken rather than a blue one. Although they ended up being offered to the game in its origin, Street Fighter II, they were just an easter egg introduced for no apparent reason.
This red Hadouken did no more damage, and its appearance was totally random. However, many people believed that it was a more powerful variant of the attack, and they went crazy looking for button combinations to try to get it out (without success, of course).
Although it was long considered to be a bug, Nishitani confirmed that it was actually an easter egg purposely put in by developers. Were they aware of how that would confuse the players and the theories they put together around them?
Another mystery has to do with the appearance of Chun-Li. Why does orange appear on the character selection screen (arcade only)? Although we still have no answer to this.
And it seems that Akira Yasuda did not like much to create the Chun-Li stockings, and ended up redrawing the character three times.
He also mentioned a character who may have appeared in the game, and who could have been very important. And is that they came to think of a character, like a mysterious old man, who would be the one who would give advice on the controls and special movements of the game on the Continue screen.
However, it was never included. Can you imagine what it might have meant for the lore of the series to have such a “sensei”?
About the gameplay, he told some anecdotes, such as what happens when an attack and a block are made at the same time. Who wins? The answer is – chance. When two opposite inputs are sent to the processor at the same time, it “orders” them randomly and executes them that way. Thus, 50% of the time an attack is launched it is impossible to block.
What does happen in Street Fighter 2 is that, when you have less life, your attack power increases. And that’s something they wanted to communicate with a message on the Continue screen that said “Don’t give up until the end!”. “It probably seemed like a generic message of encouragement and no one noticed it.” If you want to read more stories about the game, in this forum you will find most of his tweets translated from Japanese to English.
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