Street Fighter II': Champion Edition

The version that first made it possible to play as the bosses and to fight mirror matches between two identical characters.

Street Fighter II': Champion Edition was released in 1992 as Capcom's direct response to one of the most common requests from players of the first Street Fighter II: The World Warrior - the ability to also play as the four bosses and to fight matches between two identical characters. Unlike the original version, where the bosses were reserved solely for computer-controlled opponents, Champion Edition made all twelve fighters available to every player equally.

Gameplay-wise, it's still the same one-on-one combat system with six punches and kicks graded by strength and speed, which founded the entire fighting-game genre of the 1990s. However, Champion Edition added distinct color palettes for the second player in mirror matches, fine-tuned the balance of individual fighters, and slightly sped up the overall pace of the game compared to World Warrior. These very adjustments made it the version that players in arcades, and the nascent tournament community, accepted as the truly refined one, and it long served as the unofficial tournament standard before being replaced by further revisions of the series.

Champion Edition was among the most successful titles on the CPS-1 board and cemented Street Fighter II's position as a game that earned arcade operators extraordinary sums and kicked off a wave of competing fighting games from other studios. In the history of the CPS platform, it's one of the pivotal titles that showed what a balanced, tournament-viable fighting game should look like.

Why play it: Champion Edition is the refined version of Street Fighter II that first offered all fighters, including the bosses, to both players.

The same title elsewhere (2)

The Sharp X68000 version ranks among the most faithful home conversions of Street Fighter II ever made — the computer's hardware sat close to Capcom's own arcade boards, so it could keep colors, animation smoothness, and sound quality very near the arcade original. Other home platforms of the era fared worse: weaker sound chips couldn't reproduce each fighter's theme faithfully, color palettes had to be trimmed, and character animation lost frames just so the game would run on the available hardware. If you want to experience Street Fighter II' Champion Edition as close to the arcade as possible without feeding it coins, the X68000 version is the clear choice.

The same title elsewhere (2)

From the same series Street Fighter →

More from Capcom CPS