“He’s the Meanest Son of a Snake You’ve Ever Seen!”
“Screen shots from Atari ST format.”
Spin-kicking art by Zach McCue (@Zoddman).
The original Street Fighter arcade game is something of an oddity; in that it’s responsible for spawning a hugely successful franchise, and yet it is also treated as the proverbial “red-headed stepchild” within that series. Hell, Ryu’s hair was even colored red in this initial outing, which feels oddly prophetic in hindsight? In any event: It feels like folk often forget (or reject) that the first Street Fighter was, in fact, a modest success in its time — selling through somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 coin-op units during its initial production run. Whether that estimate accounts for apparent recalls of the ‘Deluxe’ cabinet variant – requiring players to literally pound their fist into pressure-sensitive buttons in order to execute heavier attacks – is unfortunately unknown. What we can account for are the immediate influences this inaugural entry had on the fighting game genre; such as normalizing the oft-imitated world tour template, moving theming past the traditional karate and boxing fare, and the innovation of “special” techniques hidden behind specific input strings. Naturally, producing a sequel would prove an effective way for Capcom to capitalize on the game’s momentum — as well as serving as something of a genre shake-up in its own right.
Lots of folk will claim to know the road to Street Fighter II: The World Warrior from there; including the first Final Fight originally being envisioned as a ‘Street Fighter ‘89,’ before ultimately kicking off a franchise all its own. But that spun-off beat ‘em up represents just one fork in the road — one of several branching paths which Capcom could’ve alternatively chosen to travel down. What if the company had decided to look past Street Fighter’s arcade earnings, and determined that the home computer market was where the franchise futures lied? Crazy as it is to think about now, it may well have been a viable option back then: Conversions of the game to computers of the era had done reasonably well in their own right, and examples did exist for other arcade properties successfully spinning off on the PC front. As a matter of fact, one of Capcom’s publishing partners in this field had even gone so far as to pre-emptively develop their own take on a sequel, and pitch it for approval by the Osaka offices.
Though Capcom would elect to turn down this proposed game, its producers would still eventually end up bringing it to market, albeit lacking a planned ‘Streetfighter II’ subtitle. The resulting software would now be known simply as Human Killing Machine, and see release across the various computer platforms of 1989. And for as pivotal The World Warrior would prove in cementing Street Fighter’s place in the history of video games, HKM may well have proven to have utterly doomed the fighting franchise had Capcom chosen to travel down its darkened path. Between completely broken gameplay mechanics, an utter lack of production efforts, and a gameplay progression which sees you kicking dogs on Moscow streets en route to combating terrorists in Beirut; you’ll find it hard to believe that this game ever had a snowball’s chance in Hell at being the sequel to Street Fighter. But so it was, and here we are.
It now falls on us to examine the circumstances between the franchise dead end that could’ve been, and to explore the depths of its content as a standalone release. Will we survive this challenge to fight another day, or will we face defeat at the hands of the infernal machine? That may sound like dramatism, but believe me when I say that no game has ever come quite so close to besting us.
