Franchises
Street Fighter
Street Fighter started in 1987 as an odd arcade cabinet with pressure-sensitive punch pads, but the history that matters begins in 1991, when Capcom released Street Fighter II: The World Warrior on CPS hardware. Eight fighters with distinct styles, two players facing each other, and a coin laid on the cabinet edge as a queue for the next challenge — the arcade turned into a sports arena overnight. The game rested on things the genre now takes for granted: quarter-circle motions, punches and kicks with different reach and speed, an advantage measured in fractions of a second. Even the combo, a string of hits an opponent cannot recover from between, began as an unintended consequence of how the game cancelled attack animations.
Capcom then spent years honing the game through revisions — Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting and finally Super Street Fighter II Turbo, still respected as one of the best-balanced fighting systems ever made. Street Fighter Alpha brought a more stylised look and a meter for beefed-up special moves, while Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike added the parry, deflecting an attack with a precisely timed forward tap, and became an icon of the tournament scene. After a long silence Street Fighter IV put the brand back on top, winning over a new generation with its look and its pacing and kick-starting a second life for the whole genre. Without Street Fighter, competitive fighting games as we know them would not exist.
Entries in the series (23)
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Street Fighter II · 1991
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Street Fighter Alpha 2 · 1996
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Street Fighter Alpha 2 / 3 · 1996
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X-Men vs. Street Fighter · 1996
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Street Fighter Alpha 3 · 1998
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Street Fighter · 1999
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Street Fighter Alpha · 1999
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Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper · 2002
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Street Fighter IV · 2009
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Super Street Fighter IV · 2010
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Street Fighter X Tekken · 2012
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Street Fighter V · 2016
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Street Fighter 6 · 2023