I remember when Street Fighter I was a new arcade game. The demonstration mode would show Ryu fighting Retsu, and occasionally he would throw a fireball. The game didn't say how to do it. It would always be this random thing that happened while playing. If you play fighting games, you know the motion is pretty simple, but on SF1 it's actually pretty difficult to do on command. The input scanning just wasn't very good and you had to do the motion with just the right joystick speed and button on/off timing.
I figured out how to throw a fireball on command and became the wizard of the arcade. Shortly after I figured out the dragon punch too. I never figured out the hurricane kick. The game never showed it during demonstration so I didn't know it even existed. It would happen sometimes randomly while playing but for some reason I thought it was a glitch and not a real move. One day another player showed up from another arcade, and he was doing all three moves. He didn't have them quite figured out though as his technique was to mash the joystick motion spastically while hitting the buttons, but it was enough to figure out the hurricane kick too.
When SF2 came out, I was excited because I already knew the special moves, but then there were all these new characters I didn't know how to play. And that's when it happened: people started playing each other. That's what changed everything. The arcades were all dying, but with SF2 the crowds started gathering around. It was no longer about playing the games and getting the high score. It was about being the best competitor.
It's crazy to see it all start and to have gone to and competed in a lot of the first video game competitions. It has come a long way from arcade employees setting up home grown tournaments and giving away ticket prizes. Now we have EVO.
> One day another player showed up from another arcade, and he was doing all three moves.
This was one of the arcade-specific experiences that I've never quite had at any other point in my life. MMORPGS and forums have given me some of the feeling of being at an arcade, but this was something unique.
I was perhaps too young, or for whatever reason not good enough to be noteworthy at the arcades. But (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), my best friend was. He was notoriously good.
We'd go from arcade to arcade in town, until they'd ban him or (in one case) up the difficulty just to get him to leave.
We'd play co-op games where he carried me through and it was a kind of bonding experience I can't quite compare to anything else.
He was so good at the competitive games (in particular SF2) that people wouldn't challenge him. Why waste a coin? I sometimes put in a coin just to bait others, because the clever players knew that if you saw someone playing SF2 alone for a while, they were probably really good. He'd give me 10 cents to reimburse me :).
Whenever a new arcade opened up (usually in a shipping container, but sometimes 'real fancy'), we'd rush there and first try the new games, but then get back to SF2 and hope there were players that didn't know about him yet. It usually worked for a while.
But possibly one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the time that, while I was faffing about on other arcades, out of the corner of my eye I'd see some other guy (it was mostly men, but perhaps that's partly culturally. women became mothers-in-training in their teens) walk up to his solo SF2 play, and pop in a coin.
I swear, when that happened, it sometimes felt like a Western. I'd notice first, on account of keeping an eye on my bestie, but others 'in the know' would nudge each other and cut off whatever game they were playing to watch the spectacle.
A crowd would form around my friend and this 'new guy', and, of course, most of the time he'd do the equivalent of drawing so quick that the other guy didn't stand a chance. Sometimes he'd play around. Pick one of the weaker characters (that monster one I don't remember). Or humiliate his new adversary by offering to play with one hand.
I think there was only one time where he struggled, and it turned out this guy was a dude from the capitol and was known there for being the local SF2 champion.
EDIT: Oh, and just to add some color to this story in case anyone liked it: I was one of the few people in town with a personal computer. My parents told me to not mention it to my friends for fear of theft. I told this friend and I will never forget the experience of having him over and playing games together. This was a 486 and we played Wacky Wheels and (I think) Doom and One Must Fall, the latter which was closest to the fighting games he was so good at (or perhaps a similar game?).
These games were clearly a step down from what we got to play at the arcades, but the fact that we could play them without having to put in coins (even if they had the 'continue' and 'credits' screens) was just mind-blowing to the both of us.
Sadly as I moved on to RPG's and RTS', he stuck with the arcades and we drifted apart in this regard. We bonded over watching badly dubbed films though, The Matrix being probably our favorite.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I grew up with Street Fighter and never really connected the dots as to why I love the game so much.
Sure it had pretty good graphics for the time, and gameplay was great as well.
But the real differentiator was the ability to "compete" with other people.
Not just compete, but the fact that you plopped down 25 cents and within 3 minutes one of your lost. At the time we didn't have much money, so 25 cents per game play was quite a lot. So it really came down to being great and trying to beat as many people as possible so that your 25 cents could last longer.
It was probably my first real memory of truly being competitive at life.
Oh yeah! While I preferred the games there focused on co-op, I could see the appeal of Street Fighter. My friend seemed to have a decent amount of fun seeing how long he could last in single player, but the constant second player putting in a coin was what it was all about. Some of them would tell me later that they spent their weekly allowance on trying to 'git gud' beating my friend.
I spent my teenage years copying pictures of Street Fighter II characters from C&VG magazine, I loved the art and music. However I was terrible at the game. I didn't truly enjoy a fighting game until Tekken.
I miss arcades, although I only got to visit them once a year when we went on our family holiday. Can you imagine waiting a whole year to play Outrun, Rygar or Smash TV? Arcade games were so superior to their home conversions that to an obsessive gamer like me, it was like going on a pilgrimage to see a painting that you'd previously only seen in a photocopied reproduction.
My finest gaming moments were playing Golden Axe and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker with a whole crowd of people watching.
Arcade games were so superior to their home conversions
As a general rule, this is correct, but Rygar is a glaring exception. The arcade game was a typical mindless scroller. The home version was an epic action/RPG.
Arcade Rygar was more than just a mindless scroller. It may have seemed mindless or repetitive especially against the RPG, but all 25+ levels had unique artwork and layout, and the graphics and color were brilliant around that time as if the arcade industry made the leap between 8 to 16-bit.
Rygar had a rough learning curve but it was possible to get good enough to finish the whole game on a quarter or two.
You can imagine the disappointment when we got NES Rygar. Ported graphics and characters aside, it was one of those games that was damn near impossible without the Official Nintendo Player’s Guide or the mapping tenacity of a fanatic. Of course we played through it, but grudgingly.
I just have to reply because of that last sentence. I totally forgot that feeling until now. Each rendered frame, the side scrolling, the pixelated sprites (not rectangular, but smoothed due to the CRT). Ignorance is bliss...
I miss arcades so much :(. Some of my best memories is playing Crazy Taxi, itS. just so much better with the wheel and pedal and clutch.
But it’s also a social space, even for introverts. People would stop and watch you playing, it was easy to start a chat, or even challenge someone to a game of tekken or dead or alive.
There has to be a business model to bring them back.
They are back, at least in my area. Nickel arcades, with a collection of the old games from the 80s/90s, a handful of newer games, and boatload of ticket/skill games. They typically charge a few dollars admission, and then make additional money off the insane profit from making someone spend 20 dollars to get enough tickets to buy a 50 cent toy. The nickels that go into the arcade machines mostly just cover the cost of maintenance, and give the parents something to do while their children throw nickels away to win tickets.
Admittedly, the demographic has changed - it isn't 10-15 year old kids all piling into a dark room together with the only "adult" being the 17 year old working there. It is 4-12 year old kids with their parents.
Me too! My friend and I were masters at the old Defender Stargate arcade game.
One of the nice things about Stargate was that the high score allowed for several characters instead of just 3 for initials. You could write almost a whole sentence if you beat the high score.
This led to some extremely heated competition as my friend would write very nasty insults about me so that when I would show up to the arcade I would see it and spend hours trying to beat his score so I could post insulting material about him on the high score.
Another friend and I mastered Asteroids and we would have extra lives/ships lined up all across the top of the screen and beyond.
Over time this would lead to some interesting things due to low memory issues like the lines that made up the asteroid rocks would come detached and strange artifacts flickering on the screen.
Years later collecting ROM’s of these old arcade games to play over MAME emulator I was astonished at just how small the programs were.
I remember going to the arcades with a friend who was so good at gaming that some of these places banned him. There was one that raised the difficult to what is best described as 'insane' just because of him.
We'd play a two-player game together, and at some point I let him play Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Combat while I shyly tried another game, in the safe knowledge that he was just a few arcades over.
I still vividly remember going by myself because he couldn't join. It was terrifying, but because I picked a mostly-single-player game and I recognized some of the patrons, I managed.
Unfortunately, because I was the only red-headed white guy there, there was a moment where as I was playing some guy thought it would be funny to put out his cigarette on my leg. That set me back for a bit.
But I still consider that arcade experience as the first time I learned to venture out into the scary world, and thankfully the bad experience didn't set me back too much. After that came the Counter-Strike sessions at internet cafés and, with a gap of probably half a decade or so, being a student and actually hanging out in bars with my peers without an arcade game mediating all of it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I imagine my next venture into the social world will probably involve table-top gaming or ping-pong. I'm just not that good at socializing without it being centered around something :).
But man, it's rare that I get a wave of nostalgia this big. I had another rare one recently when I watched the Digital Ocean "Final Fight: DF Retro revisits the arcade original, every port, and all sequels" review (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-retro...). Final Fight and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs were the two arcade games that I remember being somehow significant (other than TMNT: Manhatten Project, but that was mostly because I at least knew of the TMNT. and to be fair it was an amazing game).
> There has to be a business model to bring them back.
Like others have said they've come back somewhat in urban areas as 'barcades,' at least until Covid-19. These kinds of businesses will be struggling for many years to come if they manage to survive at all.
I don't see that specific business model coming back. With high bandwidth, and cheap parts the more profitable business model at the moment is online multiplayer games you can play from anywhere. You lose that in-person social aspect, but this a concern for the community not the business.
I would say Pokemon GO is a good example of an evolutionary / revolutionary game with roots in the arcade-genre. I would like to see more games like this with built-in necessity to bring people together.
A shame. A pipe dream of mine has always been to build the greatest mech sim there could be.
Maybe some mixture of peripherals, gesture tech and VR will have to be the way forward. But there really wouldn't be a replacement for getting in a cockpit-like booth complete with full haptic feedback.
It's not very common and about 15 years old, but if you can find the deluxe cabinet of Afterburner Climax it's a pretty fun experience. If you were to add VR and more modern technology, it would be pretty awesome.
There's still progress being made on this front in Japan. I remember seeing a few interesting haptic chair or cockpit games (and other interesting control schemes).
Starwing Paradox and Gundam: Senjo no Kizuna come to mind.
There's certainly a lot of nostalgia. Arcade games at the time of Street Fighter II were significantly more capable than home games; unless, you had a Neo Geo at home, because somehow $900 for the console and $200 for a game was affordable to you in the 90s. Around the end of the 90s, we started seeing arcade systems that were really supercharged consoles: Sega Naomi is a Dreamcast with more memory and runs from either roms or a ramdisk that caches a whole optical disk at boot. Into the 2000s and beyond, games based on PCs started appearing (some of which will show BIOS screens and windows boot logos at power on... others have the decency to disable video until after the arcade program has started). Most games are simply not impressive in the arcade anymore, unless they're huge, or have a compelling deluxe cabinet. This is part of why you don't see a couple games at a grocery/liquor store anymore --- they'd either have to be classic games, or take up too much space, or a multicade, there's not much coming out that's a standard cabinet, which is mostly what would fit (lots of new pinball though, but those won't fit were you could have had one pac-man, that later became one street fighter II).
The arcade style of game is of course very different than an MMO. There's not usually a lot of state saved between games; a handful of games let you setup a profile and keep upgrades between games, but most start you back at the bottom every time. That tends to make the games more immediate, and less grindy, but also they tend to be less deep. Although, if you want to grind, there's always redemption games.
One recent/current outlier is the Killer Queen arcade game: dedicated hardware, console ports that may capture the game but the in-person experience is entirely different and exclusive.
- large arcade, all games set to freeplay, you pay $x for a couple hours of unlimited play
- a "barcade", cheaper entry fee and you can stay til closing time, where the games are more of a loss leader to bring people in to buy food and drinks while they play. more multiplayer games here to aid in the social aspect. also cupholders at each machine.
Ja the memories ! I was lucky enough that I grew up in a house filled with computers in the 80's and early 90's with enough diversity (386,486, early pentiums) to explore and have a brilliant geeky-upbringing. My dad was never really into games, but whenever we had to go on a milk-run to the local cafe, he would always give me money to go play "the fighting game" and was always "amused" at how "Dhalsim" or the "Toordoker"(afrikaans for shaman) could stretch his limbs that far !
Ag jussie, this is the most Afrikaans thing I've read in ages :P Grew up in Pretoria, also had some computers but thanks to the Telkom monopoly I wasn't really able to use the internet until going to UCT.
Apparently guile is clearly the strongest character in the game, that makes some sense... but apparently at high level Dhalsim is the second strongest by consensus.
It depends a lot on the version of the game: in the last version released in arcades (Super Street Fighter II Turbo aka Super Turbo or ST), Guile is roughly in the middle. It's fairly unanimous that the top tiers in ST are Dhalsim, Claw, Boxer, and O.Sagat.
I’m happy to see Dhalsim nominated as the dominant street fighter. One of the most difficult characters to play as a novice but street fighter rewarded defensive play and Dhalsim is the best character for defensive players. I worked in blizzards QA department and they had a slick X-Men vs street fighter machine with additional characters like Sabertooth. I was undefeated and Dhalsim was the only character I used. In fact only one person ever took more than 25% of my life meter away. Much less defeated me.
Yeah Dhalsim's dominance was something I only learned recently as an adult through random Googling. Dhalsim seemed like by far the easiest character to beat whether it was CPU or human controlled, because of how slow he was, and how fragile he seemed to be. Guess none of the people at my local arcades were top tier!
This type of article is why I come to HN. I grew up in a tiny German town where even the most outward looking place, the big supermarket, was completely devoid of anything from outside central Europe. Our parents wouldn't let us watch movies for grownups, but playing SF2 on SNES - at an age that would send pedagogues into meltdown nowadays - did feel like the first glimpse of the wider world in more ways than one.
I always liked Blanka, maybe because his electric touch makes him a bit of a nerd.
Jump kick high and then sweep low was a basic strategy that would cause your opponent to lose their mind in anger if you timed it right so they could never really get back up.
Pretty easy to block that, if you know how to block, you can usually get in some hits after you block the sweep. If you're good, you can probably just counter directly, but I'm not that good.
The first time I saw Street Fighter was inside a Burger King. My parents didn't let me play but the intro screen was mesmerizing (Ryu throws a fireball!?)
The next time was a in mall (which was torn down at least 25 years ago) just in a random ally way between shops. I spent about 75 cents of my own money.
Our local bowling ally had a Mortal Kombat arcade (torn down 5 years ago and replaced with an ALDI) which occupied my friends (I still preferred Street Fighter).
I used to carry the Street Fighter II Sega Genesis game manual with me in middle school. The manual was included with the cartridge and had art, lore, and the moves listed.
Street Fighter was a portal for me before the Internet.
My favorite game cabinet, when I can find one, is Marvel versus Capcom. I'm not good at that game, but it felt so expansive with the choices of playable characters, I spent a bit of money but I was older and friendless and not part of the scene (at this point there likely wasn't a scene).
If I had to choose one game that shaped me, it would be a tie between Mario Brothers for the NES and Street Fighter II.
> We were too young to notice anything but the sense of limitless curiosity that it inspired, especially when we began to realize that the scenes were based on actual places.
It's funny because I got that feeling from a lot of games. It's why I loved adventure games. Some were set in made-up places, but some were from real places. (I remember playing one where part of it was set in ancient Chichen Itza, Mexico among the Mayan pyramids, for example.)
But I also remember when Street Fighter hit the scene, arcade games went downhill fast. They all became variations on the same theme of memorizing sequences of button presses instead of having goals to achieve or interesting puzzles. Going to the arcade stopped being fun for me at that point, and home computers were starting to get powerful enough to have far more interesting and involved games on them. And shortly after that networked games started becoming a thing.
For me it was a local chippy (fish and chips shop) just outside school. Every lunch hour about 15 kids would pile in. Some of them would maybe order a chip barm, the rest would be clutching a few 10p’s from their pocket or paper round money.
Managing to pull of some frantic fireballs or dragon punches and hang in for a few games against the bigger kids would mean the kind of adrenaline rush and feeling of exhilaration that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Sometimes you’d put a pound in, and some bastard would steal one of your games to replay you. Never put a pound in.
Chip Barm? Gonna guess you're a Bolton lad, or somewhere close?
My exposure to Streetfight was a little later in life, when I was around 16/17 hanging out at the local tattoo parlor. They had a Street Fighter 2 Champion edition cabinet tucked away at the side of the waiting-room, and I'd often play friends and random people queuing/waiting for a few hours on a Saturday morning.
Ah very similar here for me too. Karate Champ at the kebab shop opposite school in 1980's North London. Winner stays on. Always got to the point where you had to decide between a potential high score and avoiding a whipping for being late.
Anecdotal, and I think expanding on the "portal" idea, I've just downloaded MAME + GENS for my two (young) boys (2 hours ago). The timing of this article is relevant for me.
Metal Slug, SF2, Sonic, Lion King, Toe Jam, Earth Worm, these were the first games I ever really played as a kid for me were my own portal to gaming which expanded into an early career at Uni although now it's only recreational, I can't help but think I enjoyed the gaming when I was 10 years old, than I do now.
Arcade 1up has a table based street fighter console. It’s a ¾ sized version of a real arcade table. I bought some 7” furniture legs which made it a comfortable sitting height. Has 12 games installed from all the classic street fighter to 1942 to commando. It’s a lot of fun and I had a lot of fun showing my son how some concepts of the games he loves now(terraria) started in these games.
For the folks who miss arcades, this has been posted several times... how to build your own Arcades on a budget with pre-built kits and a Raspberry Pi:
I remember the first time I watched a video of the Super Nintendo version (in a promotional VHS tape that came with a videogames magazine), I was blown away, it looked just like the arcade!
I also remember it costing more than other SNES games, it was almost half as much as the console.
I remember watching a promotional VHS tape about the N64 that came from Nintendo Power magazine back in '96. I watched that tape over and over, I was absolutely enamored with Mario 64. For months after it was released, people would line up at Wal-Mart in the electronics section to get a chance to play it. No 3D game up to that point had quite nailed the exploration and freedom that Mario 64 had pulled off. The thumb joystick control (which no other system had at the time) was also part of what made it a much better experience.
Even though I am very well acquainted with Japanese the anglicised "rye-yoo" "hadooken" and "shore-yoo-ken" are deeply ingrained in me from all those childhood times spend playing sf2.
My favourite was trying to translate whatever they say on that sound engine into "tatsumaki senpuu kyaku". To this day I still can't hear it
CPU Ken was an absolute terror, especially when if you beat him once and were in Round 2. Then it was just nonstop dragon punches, hurricane kicks, and hadukens
I figured out how to throw a fireball on command and became the wizard of the arcade. Shortly after I figured out the dragon punch too. I never figured out the hurricane kick. The game never showed it during demonstration so I didn't know it even existed. It would happen sometimes randomly while playing but for some reason I thought it was a glitch and not a real move. One day another player showed up from another arcade, and he was doing all three moves. He didn't have them quite figured out though as his technique was to mash the joystick motion spastically while hitting the buttons, but it was enough to figure out the hurricane kick too.
When SF2 came out, I was excited because I already knew the special moves, but then there were all these new characters I didn't know how to play. And that's when it happened: people started playing each other. That's what changed everything. The arcades were all dying, but with SF2 the crowds started gathering around. It was no longer about playing the games and getting the high score. It was about being the best competitor.
It's crazy to see it all start and to have gone to and competed in a lot of the first video game competitions. It has come a long way from arcade employees setting up home grown tournaments and giving away ticket prizes. Now we have EVO.