Childhood really is the time to make the most of your
injuries.
Think back - back to a time when all your afflictions and
ailments, however embarrassing, just served as the punchlines to fantastical
lies. I walk funny because I fell out of a fourteenth story window. I’ve got this rash because my body’s
rejected my robot arm. You
could take anything, and turn it into anything else; you could take something
as unremarkable as a sprained wrist, and inflate it into whatever magnificent
bollocks you liked.
It’s the two things I like most about children; their
thoughtless capacity for violence (punching you in the cock, for example), and
that beautiful, earnest willingness to indulge any story, however
ridiculous. In the cartoonish
realm of violence and inconsequence that they occupy, kids are willing to
believe almost anything.
“Why haven’t you got a finger?”
“It was bitten off.
By a shark. A big, metal
shark.”
And why not? Who’s going to prove otherwise?
Sometimes, though, truth is beauty, and beauty truth. Sometimes you don’t need to lie. Children are idiots, let’s be honest, and when you factor
that idiocy into their misadventures, the scripts just tend to write
themselves. Take my friend (who’s
asked to remain nameless): he’s got a small, neat scar, in the middle of his
forehead. After many years of
changing the subject, he finally admitted to me that his older brother had once
stabbed him with a chip fork.
Hysterical, he’d then run off with it protruding from his head, like
some wailing, speccy Dalek.
Just look at the ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ warnings, which
are so proliferate in things like the WWE: it’s because Tombstone Piledrivers
and hitting someone with a flaming plank are precisely the kind of things that kids will try at home, given the chance. And that’s a good thing – to operate beyond fear, and
consequence. You don’t really
fathom the repercussions of violence until you’re about 9 or 10, which makes
those early years a beautiful, adventurous thing; I remember nearly mincing my
neighbour’s hand with a lawnmower, in the most bloodthirsty ‘what if...?’
scenario ever conceived.
The same friend has another story; the tale of his wonky
bottom tooth. The story goes that
he and his brother were playing Streetfighter
II on their SNES. Older
Brother was doing his usual thing – playing as Eddie Honda, the Sumo Wrestler,
and pinning my friend helplessly into the corner with the Hundred Hand Slap. My mate was getting frustrated, and the
argument escalated, until finally he yanked out his brother’s controller. The coup
de grace. Game, set and match.
Except it wasn’t.
His brother considered this for a few moments, weighed up his options,
and then threw my mate onto the floor, punching him fully and repeatedly in the face. He punched and punched, until there was blood. Only then was he vindicated.
This would have (just) pre-empted the moral dirge that
encircled computer games in the mid-90s; if a paper like the Daily Mail had gotten hold of it, I can
safely say that they would have held the front page for him. He’d have been their posterboy - a
prototype for the war on light entertainment. I can see it now; my mate with a fat lip, his eyes flushed
red, just to the side of some headline about whatever was supposed to be giving
you cancer at that particular point.
His story, though – this humdrum, everyday tale of domestic
assault - articulates a much bigger point, and brings me neatly onto the main
subject: namely, Streetfighter II,
and how much people cared about it.
In all honesty, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog
if you hadn’t heard of Streetfighter II,
if you didn’t know what it was about, or if you weren’t already aware of its
seismic contribution to the history of computer gaming. Simply, it is the Rubber Soul of fighting games; the parting of the proverbial waves,
the drawing of the lines for an entire, multi-billion dollar genre.
I first encountered SFII
on holiday in Orlando – I would have been about 11 or so. I’d heard a lot about it, but never
played it: they had the game
somewhere down near the lobby of our hotel, and there was a gaggle of kids
swarming constantly around it*.
This was back when arcades provided a public podium for dick-swinging, when
every cabinet tended to be monopolized by a single, unblinking alpha-youth,
ploughing wordlessly through his competition. As I recall, I had my SFII
cherry brutally popped by one such youth: it took all of about two minutes, as
he pummelled me dispassionately into the ground, barely saying a word. My quarter was probably still rattling
down into the guts of the machine as I slinked back to our room, and for the
duration of our stay, that kid never shifted - morning, noon or night. That song remained the same for every SFII machine in the world – in every video
shop, cinema, airport, swimming pool, or bowling alley, there seemed to be some
immoveable child-savant, demonstrating his supremacy as a gamer and –
accordingly, at that age – a human being.
(* It’s probably on account of this phenomena that we should
salute SFII’s contribution to global
etiquette, as it played a pivotal role in teaching children the world over how
to queue [presumably, therefore, it was never released in France]).
In summary: SFII
is a 2D, one-on-one fighting game.
You picked from eight playable characters - each with their own moves,
attributes, strengths and weaknesses - and then progressed sequentially through
a series of best-of-three battles, until... well, until you ‘win’. And that, really, is it. Sounds a bit mundane? That’s only because the premise has
since been unapologetically cribbed by just about every other fighting game in
existence.
The eight characters have all since become canonical within
gaming folklore: there’s Ryu (ethereal martial arts everyman, and the de facto protagonist of the game); Ken
(Ryu, in the body of Owen Wilson); Blanka (lime-green Brazilian jungle-loony);
Zangief (lumbering Soviet man-bear); Chun-Li (disconcertingly sexy Chinese
spy-crumpet); Dhalsim (hyper-extending Indian fire-breather); E Honda (the
surface-to-air sumo wrestler); and Guile (preposterously haired Top Gun escapee). Work your way through these, and you
face off against the boss characters: Vega (infuriatingly nimble Spanish
uber-ponce), Sagat (double-hard Muay Thai nutter); Balrog (a thinly veiled Mike
Tyson pastiche, just before he went all rapey); and finally, the iconic Streetfighter II overlord, M Bison
(continuing Capcom’s proud tradition of lumbering their scariest characters
with slightly incongruous names).
The action pans out across a global span of impressive set-pieces; you
swing from a dojo to a Chinese street scene, an aircraft carrier to the docks
of New York, a temple to a factory.
There’s even a reclining Buddha, with one very distracting nipple on display (distracting when you’re 11, anyway).
It’s better to assess SFII
not in terms of how it stacks up against today’s competitors (which is still
very well, incidentally), but in terms of what it introduced to the genre. And in this sense, where do you start? The democratic concessions of actually
picking your own character, in a game that intuitively understood and
accommodated the style or preferences of whoever was playing it – that was very new. So was the 2-player facility; de rigueur for almost any game now, but revolutionary back then,
and something that extended the game far beyond its natural lifespan. It meant that you could really hone
your craft, adopting a character and mastering their every nuance, perfecting
strings of devastating, sinewy combos... before being inevitably beaten by some button-mashing mong.
Sigh.
Then there were the special moves. Tournament play.
Unlockable characters.
Bonus rounds. It even
helped to educate me as to where Thailand was (I learned more about global
geography through SFII and football
than I did in an entire GCSE course).
The game also ushered in the proud tradition of ‘post-fight
mockery’, now another staple of the genre, with each character having their own
signature taunts. They’d celebrate
their victories by crowing something (and usually, something completely
abstract) at their beaten, bloody opponent. it was always my fondest wish that Capcom would release
something like Streetfighter Blue,
chuck in a load of blood, digitally remove Chun-Li’s pants, and maybe beef up
the insults a bit; instead of having Guile asking ”are you man enough to fight
with me?”, they could have changed it to something like “aaaaahhhhhh,
you’reatwatyou’reatwatyou’reatwat!
You’re a twat!”.
So insolubly did the tendrils of this game take root in
young minds, that the move combinations seem to have been etched into the
brains of an entire generation. It
was with great joy that I recently overheard someone at work threatening to
“down, forward-down, forward, strong punch” an underperforming colleague:
anybody in the room who’d ever played SFII
would have understood the gravity of this threat.
SFII also ushered
in one of modern gaming’s less salubrious traditions – milking a licence for
all its conceivable worth. To put
it lightly, Capcom got their money’s worth out of the franchise… to the point
of making New Line’s additions to the Nightmare
on Elm Street series look positively vital. Since the release of the original game in 1991, we’ve been
variously treated to Streetfighter II: Champion
Edition, Streetfighter II: Hyper
Fighting, Streetfighter II Dash, Super Streetfighter II, Super Streetfighter II: The New Challengers,
Super Streetfighter II Turbo, Super Streetfighter II: Special Champion
Edition, Super Streetfighter II X:
Grandmaster Challenge, Hyper
Streetfighter II: The Anniversary Edition, and – how could we forget - Super Streetfighter II Turbo HD Remix. With every single release, every
nominal change in graphics, sound, speed or gameplay, Capcom have managed to
massage a few more millions out of the game’s loyal patrons. But then it’s the significance and the
transcendence of that first game that’s allowed them to do it.
I struggle to think of another game franchise that’s managed
to span such a disparate array of media; since it first arrived in the arcades,
there’s been Streetfighter films,
animated television shows, comic books, novels, booklets, playing cards,
trading cards, role-playing games, albums, and even an online slot
machine. In the arcades, it’s
taken over $3bn in revenue. It’s
also widely credited as the game that saved the SNES in the 16-Bit war (my
little heart crumbled to ash the day I opened up C&VG, to discover that Nintendo had been granted exclusivity
for the port). It is, in the
context of computer games, an absolute work or art.
For my money, fighting games have gone the way of
first-person shooters, pop music and football; they all attained perfection by
the mid-90s, and it’s been downhill ever since. Just as the amphetamine ultra-realism of the COD series has overcomplicated the
blueprint drawn by games like Doom
and Duke Nukem’, so the fighting
genre – with its bells-and-whistles shift into polygons / 3D, its bombardment
of nuances and distractions – has made itself too inaccessible. The magic of SFII was it’s pick-up-and-play immediacy, the manner in which it
compensated for the incapable, and challenged the exceptional.
The idea of my friend being flung to the floor and savagely
beaten becomes suddenly, weirdly reasonable when you chuck Streetfighter II into the equation; it’s the glue that binds, the
thing that stops it being a senseless and unwarranted tale of violence. Bring SFII to the table, and it’s instantly the “ahhhhhh… I see”
factor. It’s not big, it’s not
clever, but it’s understandable… and it’s exactly what I wanted to do to that
prick in Orlando. And if I ever
see him again, it’s what I’m gonna do.
He’ll get some ‘down for two seconds, up and strong kick’
action. You mark my words.
