Street Fighter II

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior is a competitive fighting game developed and published by Capcom, released to arcades in 1991 and ported to the Super Nintendo in 1992. The sequel to the lukewarmly received 1987 original, it transformed the genre and the arcade business almost single-handedly. Players choose from eight distinct world warriors, each with a unique fighting style, normal attacks, and special moves performed with directional motions and button presses, then face off in best-of-three single matches. Its roster, Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile, Blanka, Dhalsim, Zangief, and the rest, became some of the most recognizable characters in gaming, and its control vocabulary of fireballs, dragon punches, and spinning piledrivers established conventions the genre still follows. Street Fighter II also popularized the combo, originally an unintended exploit that Capcom discovered during testing and chose to leave in, which became a cornerstone of competitive play. The game's head-to-head design turned arcades into social arenas where players queued to challenge the reigning winner, and it is widely credited with sparking the competitive fighting-game community that endures today. Commercially it was a phenomenon, drawing enormous arcade revenue and selling over six million copies of the Super Nintendo port alone. Capcom followed it with a long line of updated editions, Champion Edition, Turbo, Super, and more, a practice that became notorious in its own right. Few games have been as influential: Street Fighter II defined the one-on-one fighting game and remains the genre's foundational text.