History of Street Fighter scene

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Shadow_WX: Thanks for reviving my old skool lore from the olden days and for giving me credit at the end.

You modern guys can read the original thread, which includes tons more stories from old skool fellas and legends:

http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=1427

On a sidenote, ran into the legendary player and shit-talker Jeff Schaeffer (aka, LAAKUMA, aka Tomo partner-in-crime, aka Worlds Finest crowd) on Team Fortress 2 a couple weeks back. He played Heavy, mostly, and some Demo, while I played mostly Medic. We made a good team. :slight_smile: We finished tops over three or four rounds. :slight_smile:

Tony and I were never in the league of Thomas Osaki or Jeff or Mike Watson. We were good, but not nearly as good as those guys. The level of competition was so high in those days. Everybody played. Everybody knew the basics. Most knew way beyond the basics. Whereever you went, you might find a challenge.

You young players may not know this, but every 7-11, every bar, every convenience store, every grocery store had a Street Fighter II. And woe to the fool who didn’t scope his opponent for a couple rounds before dropping in his quarters…

Only the biggest pussys would rage quit in those days. You had to drop a quarter to play, so any game was essentially a “money game”. A guy would battle back from zero health to win. Legendary comebacks were common.

These days, Tony and I concede we’re better “thinking” players but our reactions aren’t nearly as good as they used to be in the old skool days. We used to play up to six hours a day back then - street fighter was life - and now, given jobs, girls, life etc. we only play a couple times a month. Still, we manage to win the majority of our matches. :slight_smile:

We play online sometimes as ‘crtxbr240’, mostly on HD Remix on PSN. Look us up if you’re online! We love a good ass-beating. Love the challenge and don’t get whiney when we lose.

Lotsa love, SF community. See you online!

42

very good read and the scene was something beautiful back then from this read but i was so small when all this was happing. i remember my dad taking me to the arcade and i use to wonder why is he putting his quater on the bottom of the screen with the other guys quaters…but very good read and so much knowledge wow i did not know it was that deep back then.
thanks for sharing

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Not sure why the red text, but…

My old skool homies and I were playing games like Gauntlet, Space Harrier, Rastan, Ghost and Goblins through the mid and late 80s - all games that managed to get made amid the wake of the video game crash of '83-84, when video games were really not popular and considered dead. Arcades were considered dead. We played 8-bit Nintendo like fools when it came out, and played lots of games on the C64.

Every year, arcades got smaller in the late 80s. Every trip to reno, to the “big” arcades, were a bigger and bigger disappointment.

Circus Circus, in Reno, used to have about 30 games in the upper buffet area, but also had another 50 games or so in the lower arcade down among the main carnival games. I remember one year I went downstairs and the downstairs arcade was gone. WTF? And all the upstairs stuff was old and tired.

Then around 1991, Capcom put out Final Fight. Fools were lined up to play.

Then SF2 hit not too long after. It was just nuts.

Street Fighter 2 single-handedly brought back the arcades and video games in general back in the early 90s. It was a thing of beauty. Arcades were packed. SF2 was so popular it was truly mainstream. Remember Pokemon? Remember Power Rangers? The iPhone? Yeah, it was like that, but probably bigger. Everybody was doing it.

These days, you don’t see games in 7-11s or Circle-K’s. Back then you did, and when Street Fighter really hit, there were crowds of 15 kids at every corner store. We created such crowds they used to kick us out!

These days, you have games like Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty, where people can play against each other online. Street Fighter 2 was really the genesis of all that, and never gets the credit. It was really the first big game where the emphasis was about fighting the other human opponent, and not about fighting the computer AI. Street Fighter never gets credit for it, but it was the one that really kicked that off. Yeah, there were other games before SF, but none that captured the public like SF 2.

Around 1994, Doom had modem play, where you could play with or against another opponent. I remember playing it with a friend. We had to write our own modem connect strings to make it work.

I knew, from then on, that the future of SF was online. I posted a few times on SRK how online was the way to go. Few agreed - saying home play was no comparisson to the “in-person” experience of arcades, they said.

We were both right. The future is online play. And the truth is, it doesn’t quite compare to the old skool face-to-face battles. But hey, life moves on and technology moves on.

It’s a very different gaming experience than what we experienced back then, but I’m glad it’s still going!

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Great read!!!