im 27 been playing fighting games since i was 5 on snes and arcades i didnt play cvs2 till 2005 on ps2. i love the game older i get the more i can appreciate it. my main games have been st, hf, alpha 2 but i just love cvs2 for all the options characters very deep and never gets old.
im curious how the sf community felt when it first came out. everyone then was playing alpha 3 so i figure this game was a blessing to get rid of that crap lol jk
Depends. Not so big where I was at the time (Oahu) because we had CVS1 & MVC2.
CVS2 came out on the DC 1st before the arcade!
But in like December 2001 it was hot!
really didnt know it was on sega firsti wonder how big it was n cali id think the valles chois wongs ect would be inlove given the game was footsie heavy and had so many grooves iv never seen mike watson and valle really play the game on youtube weirdly enough
It was a HUGE DEAL in the Midwest where I was from!!! And yes, it was released on import Dreamcast before the arcades. In fact, the arcade where I competed at didn’t even have CAPCOM vs SNK!!! But when 2 came out everyone was on it…
Warning: Wall of text…but it’s been years since I posted here…so let’s just say I’m catching up.
Having been through this era through the prime of my playing days, coupled with the fact that I’ve been digging up some archived stuff in the basement, I’m a bit nostalgic and feel the need to set everything straight. Note that I can only convey on stuff that I experienced, but I feel that I did play an important role.
Capcom v SNK 2 was pretty big for a variety of reasons. Some notes:
It was off the heels of CvS1, although terribly flawed, was a lot of fun and brought a lot of communities together. I know in the past, there was the Midwest Championships where Michigan would usually represent by bringing maybe around 10 people…at least from the Wizzards crew (you’ll see me mention that place a lot). This is not counting Michiganders who traveled on their own. CvS1 brought players who ordinarily didn’t travel to compete. Michigan brought maybe 25 - 30 players from Michigan alone that year. CvS2 brought even larger turnouts, and was a part of the first Evolution 2002 tournament. I attended that, and might return when it hits its 20th Anniversary.
I’m not sure about the status of Alpha 3… TOSF had a following (Toronto Street Fighter), and if someone ran a tournament on it, people would play it, but it was by far second fiddle at this point. CvS2 was released in 2001 and tournaments beforehand was dominated by Tekken Tag Tornament and MvC2. This is the time frame where players were witnessing the ascension of Justin Wong. Tekken Tag’s prime was winding down, and most were looking forward to Tekken 4, only to be more divided on how the game turned out upon release. This in my opinion brought even more people to CvS2 and dwindled the popularity of Tekken until Tekken 5 was released.
While I’m on the subject, you’ll notice that I didn’t mention much of SF3: 3rd Strike. I know people have this high ilk of the game, and I like it too. However, truth be told, it never gained steam until maybe a year before Evo Moment 37. Keep in mind, that’s 5 years after its arcade release in 1999. It had some very great dedicated followers from areas like Family Fun Arcade, TOSF, and the Nebraska players but it never was a “main” tournament…or a tournament worthy to travel for. Once Capcom stopped making fighting games for a time is when I believe it started to gain some steam. From what I’ve seen:
1999 = Tekken Tag, Marvel vs Capcom 1 were the heavies, followed by Alpha 3. Tekken was also backed by an official tournament sponsored by Namco: https://web.archive.org/web/20000229130016/http://www.tekkentagtournament.com/tourney/frame.html
2000 = More TTT, Marvel v Capcom 1 which died down by March, MvC2, CvS1
2001 = CvS2. MvC2, TTT, Tekken 4 had a decent following in places like ATL.
2002 = CvS2, MvC2, TTT (via PS2) This was around the time where fighting games weren’t being released at a pace compared to 1996-99.
2003 = CvS2, MvC2, 3rd Strike’s ascension
Back to CvS2, it wasn’t all cotton candy and puppy dogs. For as hype as people got for the game, people were immediately calling A-Groove “broken” after seeing paint the fence combos and A-Groove guard breaks. It really got controversial when Roll Cancelling was introduced; to the point where tournament organizers had to decide on whether to ban the technique and some tournaments did. Having run some tournaments myself, we allowed Roll Cancelling. Wizzards Arcade had an early build of the arcade game, so we had access weeks before anyone else did and well before the Dreamcast. Roll cancelling existed on that build. People were not keen on Sagat or Blanka in general, and CvS2 kinda evolved into a slower, more defensive based game (barring exceptions). People learned to deal with it but truth be told, it did hurt its popularity a bit. It didn’t help that the game is horrendously long to play during a tournament, which was always a bane in the CvS series.
That being said, I don’t think an upgrade or a “patch” was necessary. Capcom had this unusual reputation of putting out upgrades, 238723 years too late, when a game was well past its prime and people accepted the game for what it was. CvS1 Pro, SFA3 Upper, etc.
SRK introduced the Apex system to help with the surge of tournaments tying in to Evo 2002, which CvS2 was a major part of.
Also to note, people were traveling to these tournaments in years past, but now with the internet a lot more relevant than it was vs the early to mid 90s, you had a lot of people traveling who ordinarily wouldn’t, and turnouts started to increase substantially. The “Godfathers” of that age were hands down CvS2, Marvel 2, and Tekken Tag Tournament. You might say CvS1 piggy backed as well, because remember…we didn’t have crazy things like Mugen, Geese Howard/FF characters on Tekken, etc. Outside of Marvel vs Capcom, Godhand from Ehrgeiz, and random cameos (Akuma in COTA), you didn’t have outside promotions in a single game much less from a direct competitor. CvS1 was among the first of its kind on a major, major level.
They can correct me on this if they ever got around to reading it, but I want to say that John Choi’s first encounter with Ricky Ortiz at CvS2 was at a tournament that I ran. SRK might even have remnants of the thread known as the $500 Tournament. That doesn’t sound like much now, but pot bonuses were NOT the norm back in 2001-2002. Yes, more money is always a good thing, but being known as the best was something that a player had a lot of pride on. This caused a lot of internal competition which made everyone better as a result. Our first tournament in CvS2 in 2001 lasted until about 4AM. Those were good times 
But yeah, there’s more to it, but I’d say overall, CvS2 was a big deal.
Yes, I remember most if not all of this stuff during the time I lived through the CVS2 days. This kinda reminds me of @jcasetnl with this thread:
Info on the Old School SF Scene?
I’m glad that Info on the Old School SF Scene? didn’t get erased
That old school SF scene thread (to me) will go down as one of the best threads in the history of SRK’s website 
Great read! Thanks for posting. 
Yes it will if it hasn’t already…
Also there’s this:
Info on the Old School MK Scene?
You know, as I read my post from a few weeks back, I want to reiterate a major factor which really helped the likes of the CvS series alongside TTT/MvC2 and that’s the ascension of the internet.
I mentioned this in my original post, but people need to realize how much of a role this played into the games that were released at the time. Tournaments and games were always played beforehand, but was very difficult to spread the means of communication on a regional or national level. Even locally, you had separate areas within the state that only gathered purely through word of mouth, and that was really the only bridge to create rivalries and factions from other arcades.
The best way to get those groups together were by means of tournament advertisement…with hopes that someone who traveled more became a conduit between areas and they would tell the other arcade players. The better players knew where the hot spots were and would travel regardless, but tournaments guaranteed their presence. I’m hoping many has heard of him, but this is how I knew of some of the Michigan players beforehand, most notably VDO who I originally seen playing Tekken 3 at an arcade called Basketron (this arcade was known for its Virtua Fighter 3 players) back in 1997…though we’ve been playing fighting games for much longer than that, I’m sure. He was mainly from Wizzards (east side), but I was mostly on the west side of town. It wasn’t until after the TTT Namco Tournament in '99 where we started to talk about gaming and what not.
The internet…rather the widespread use of same bridged the gap for players who had larger interest at becoming better and receiving news that we would ordinarily receive from magazines. Jason Arney pretty much ran a lot of the official tekkentagtournament website that was advertised in the arcade demo mode. I’m not one to speak for their marketing department, but I think they knew that the web was becoming big enough to where they could host an official tournament with a decent following using the web as a means to gather talent. That combined with Tekken.net (Castel, Mr Wizard, Tragic, and Catlord) eventually transformed to the Tekken Zaibatsu, and the rest is history. I want to say that I posted the very first tournament when Zaibatsu created their Tournament section of their forums. Shoryuken pretty much did the same thing, but I’m unsure of the site’s launch date since I was mainly playing Tekken up until CvS1 in late 2000.
My point is now we have almost instant access towards stepping our games up. We don’t have to read about tournament results in magazines like GamePro or GameFan when it’s all said and done. We have access to attend some of these major tournaments on our own and spread the word to others without internet access, or we could create them if we choose to (which is the route I took for many years). TTT, 3rd Strike, CvS1, and CvS2 pretty much came at the exact right time to reach its gaming potential to the masses. Only 3rd Strike became niche during that 1999-2002 time frame.
It makes me wonder how Alpha 3 would’ve turned out had it been released a bit later. It did very good for itself, alongside its Alpha 2 predecessor despite being released in the infancy of the internet and #mIRC. People need to realize that the Alpha series is pretty much the seeds that planted Evolution via the Battle by the Bay series. When Evolution started, Alpha 3 was a US v Japan side exhibition and Alpha 2 was nowhere to be found. My hope is that by 2022, when Evo turns 20, Evolution will add a “Classic Series” to their lineup on a yearly basis. And I know people run a boat load of side tournaments during Evo weekend, but I think having one “promoted” official game per year, done right could really polish the already prestigious tournament series while at the same time providing history to the franchise.
Example:
2022 - Street Fighter Alpha 2
2023 - Street Fighter Alpha 3
2024 - Marvel v Capcom 2
2025 - Capcom v SNK 2
2026 - 3rd Strike
2027 - And so on…
Random side note: I’ve been collecting video game soundtracks for about 25 years at this point, accumulating between 300-500 discs since 1994. Imagine trying to order import soundtracks WITHOUT the internet. Another story for another time.