Street Fighter

Street Fighter is a 1987 arcade game developed by Capcom. It is the first competitive fighting game produced by the company and the inaugural game in the Street Fighter series. While it did not achieve the same popularity as its sequels (particularly Street Fighter II) when it was first released, the original Street Fighter introduced some of the conventions made standard in later games, such as six attack buttons (only found on some versions of the game) and special command based techniques.

It was released on the TurboGrafx-CD console under the title Fighting Street.

Gameplay
The game begins with the player being prompted to choose one of two destinations (or four, depending on the DIP switch settings) as the setting of their first fight. There are four countries to choose from: the US, Japan, England and China. Once a country has been selected, the player must fight against the nation's two fighters in best two-out-of-three matches. Once the player has defeated both of the nation's fighters, they must go through a bonus round before proceeding to the next destination. Once all four countries have been cleared, the player character travels to Thailand for the last two opponents in the game.

There are two types of bonus rounds in the game: one in which the player must break wooden boards held by three or four men (depending on the progress) and another in which the player character must break a set of stacked roof tiles with proper timing.

Characters
The original Street Fighter features a cast of twelve fighters: two playable characters and ten CPU-controlled opponents. Of these characters, only Ryu, Ken and Sagat would return in the game's immediate sequel Street Fighter II, although characters like Birdie, Adon, and Gen would resurface in the Street Fighter Alpha series.

Unlike the subsequent Street Fighter games, the player cannot choose his or her own character. Instead, the first player is assigned to play as Ryu, while a second player can join in and play as Ken in competitive matches. The player can perform all three of Ryu and Ken's signature special moves, but the timing is very difficult. Also unlike later games, doing 1 or 3 of these moves could easily defeat an opponent in a matter of seconds.


 * Ryu - The main character. A Japanese warrior entering the tournament to test his strength.




 * Ken - Ryu's former sparring partner and rival. Ken appears primarily in competitive matches, as he is controlled only by the second player.

Japan stage



 * Retsu




 * Geki

USA stage



 * Joe
 * Mike

China stage

 * Lee
 * Gen

England stage

 * Birdie
 * Eagle

Thailand stage

 * Adon
 * Sagat

Development
Street Fighter was directed by Takashi Nishiyama (who is credited as "Piston Takashi" in the game) and planned by Hiroshi Matsumoto (credited as "Finish Hiroshi"), who both previously worked on the overhead beat 'em up Avengers. The two men would leave Capcom after the production of the game and were employed by SNK, developing most of their fighting game series (including sequels to Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting). A strong similarity is evident between Street Fighter and these early SNK fighting games.

Arcade Versions
There were two different arcade cabinets were sold for the game: a Regular version (which was sold as a tabletop cabinet in Japan and as an upright overseas) that featured the same six button configuration later used in Street Fighter II and a Deluxe cabinet that features two-pressure sensitive pads. The pressure-sensitive pads determine the strength and speed of the player's attacks based on how hard they were pressed.

In the American and Worldwide versions of the game, Ryu's and Ken's voices were dubbed so that they yelled the names of their moves in English (i.e: Ball of Fire, Dragon Punch, Hurricane Kick). The localizations of the subsequent games left the characters' voices in their original Japanese language.

Ports

 * Street Fighter was ported under the changed title Fighting Street for the TurboGrafx-CD and released in 1988. This version features an arranged soundtrack, but is otherwise identical to the arcade version. This version was published by NEC Avenue and developed by Alfa System.


 * Versions for the Amiga and Atari ST were published by U.S. Gold and developed by Tiertex.


 * An emulation of the original arcade version is featured in Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded for the PlayStation Portable and Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox.