Praise the GODS this thread is still around. I was starting to get worried when it wouldn’t appear during the shitty search engine days.
Ditching school, stealing money, feed the machine.
SF2 came out when I was in junior high school. Two of my buddies were always talking about it, I had no clue what they were talking about, but it sounded cool. I went into the 7-11 on the corner near my school to check it out, and there was a green guy with claws and a biting attack, and he was from Brazil! I used to play the shit out of the old Pro-Wrestling game on the NES, remember the Amazon? Green amphibious dude that would bite your head? He was my favorite, and so I got hooked on Blanka. I started ditching class to play, the only time I’ve ever stolen money was 5$ from my mom’s purse to play SF2 at the 7-11. But I was getting my ass KICKED by my friends, and I realized that extra damage blanka takes if he gets hit during a spin TOTALLY off-balanced the game and made him nearly un-playable. So, I looked at the other characters and saw that Guile had the same movement for his sonic-boom AND he had the razor-kick. Plus he was big (I was more…fat than Guile) and blonde, like me. So I switched, was able to hold my own, and I’ve been a Guile freak ever since. For some reason when I would play the brown alternative color for him, I had better luck, and my friend called me “Shit Guile”, both for the color and because he’d say it allot when we would play. Iv’e had a Guile knockoff in every pen/paper RPG I’ve ever played. Sabin was my personal PIMP on Final Fantasy 3. I’m playing a Sabin/Guile hybrid monk in D&Dv.3.5 right now. I never obsessed over a game like I did with SF2.Then the SNES came out and I got one. Then SF2 came out for it and I think I had my first orgasm when I first slammed the cart in and saw the intro. My brother got into Ryu with an almost manic fanaticism and we would piss each other off every day. My best friend was a Chun-Li cheese fan and he would piss me off too. I was a slow learner, I realized why I was getting beaten was because I was predictable with my game play. As soon as I got the feel, my bud, bro and I were usually 50/50 on the win loss ratio. I remember playing Super SF2 and beating it without losing a round on lvl 8 diff so I could see that picture with all of the characters on it. I felt like King fukkin Kong. I bought an import Sega Saturn and played all of the Capcom VS. games, but Alpha/Zero one and two never did it for me. I was a Guile fanatic and I thought Charlie/Nash was a pussy. As soon as SF03 hit Japan, I imported it for the Saturn and my bro and I haven’t stopped playing it, although we play the Sega DC version. I have two back up systems just in case we fry this one, I’m still on the original system, so it may never happen, but i won’t risk losing the best SFA3 incarnation for the life of me. Guile was back with a vengeance and I couldn’t have been happier. I would play SF3 allot more if they had put him on. I like Dudly and Urien though. Remy is Guileish, but he’s more of a pussy than Charlie! WTF!!!
I’m finally getting my Guile/Ryu tattoo this year. I’m stoked. I won?t claim to be a master A3 artist like those tourney geniuses, but most of our friends don?t volunteer to play my brother and I anymore. I used to go to arcades and hurt people, I’d hang out at video game stores that were demoing the DC or import Saturn and I’d do the same. I took my brother over to a friends house once for an A3 party, and they got all pissed because they thought I set them up by bringing a ringer. I was proud. Actually haven?t played them for years. Never did tourneys, they were intimidating, and I was never THAT good with an arcade stick. I have respect for the truely obsessed :china: That?s my story, long live Guile, Ryu, Capcom and SFA3!
Wanna know how old school SF2 scene is?
Go to an anime con, put out SF2 CE. Enough said.
been in the sf loop since 90-91-92 or whenever ww came out on the snes and been playing since and probably will till I die. I had OG training on oahu which has a pretty decent scene from what I hear. Playing against people 10+ years my age schooling me up and eventually winning a little bit before I left the island. Me and djb13 and probably a few other OG oahu players used to all play @ the same arcade. All though I didn’t know him then, we played for years @ the same place so eventually we had to play against each other @ one point. oahu is the roots!! probably one of the best places in the world for a kid to grow up
I really appreciate the compliments, and those of the others over the years.
The only point was to tell the story like it really happened, and I’m glad so many people shared their own stories. I hope this story will be told for a long time. 
Wow, dude that was a freaking amazing story you wrote. You should write novels 
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Honestly, I was glad to be at the arcades so frequently due to my uncle taking my younger brother and I almost everysingle day, and every weekend was basically at the arcades.
The greatest thing about the Early-Mid 90’s, was that you didn’t have to travel 10839402384092 miles for great competition, that was the single BEST thing about it, kind of like how in Japan is, where if you just travel to your local arcade you’ll get solid competetion already, it was the same here in the US at the time.
Gosh…I really miss those days, now a days if you don’t live in a big city, your choices of competition is severely limited.
This thread is golden, I would hope that more people come and read up about these things, because this was without a doubt the greatest time period of the fighting game scene within the US, which was OG SF2.
Honestly, someone who has access to some of the Top SF2 OG Players should get a hold of them and interview them about the scene, and the competition back in those days, because that would be Prime!
man… i remember when sf2 first came out. i was very young so i wasnt a completive player. i remember ppl crowding around and playing. and we had two cabients back to back to each other. here in VA there used to be city teams. like a norfolk, virgiinia beach team and they would all compete every weekend. and i remember this well and i was only about 6/7 at the time.
i remember watching ppl doing shoryukens and wondering how they did those moves lol. and it used to be very hard to rent, man back when we would rent games. wow this brings me back. but anyways man va used to have so many arcades and now we only have about 5 left. some of the o.g’s are still around but its died down of course.
i remember renting it and practicing the moves all night tryna be good at it. even tho i don’t like MK now but at that time it was groundbreaking and off the wall, so we would rent that too and hear the quote “get over here!” on countless times.
aw man this thread is awesome. in fact the 90’s arcade scene was awesome. so many games you had to go to an arcade to play.
truly depressing
Common misconception; it was in development before SF2 was released (both released the same year, similar graphic style, yeah, it looks like a SF2 knockoff superficially, but the fighting system is just way too weird in comparison). It’s more like an SF1 knockoff; the timing it takes to play FF is ridiculous.
damn i remember my local billiards place had like 10 SF2 machines and kids to teens to adults would wait in like 10 different lines to play.
Funny how my first days of Arcades involved KoF 97, but that’s another story; the arcade actually DID have SFII (The last arcade release), and as irony would have it, ppl played KoF 97 FAR MORE than the BARELY played SFII! Then again it was what 1999? Ah well, I was using Ken mostly, but only cuz he had a flaming Shoryuken.
Wow so glad I found this thread, every competitive gamer should read this (especially the first few pages - jcasetnl your posts were inspiring) and be thankful for sf2.
Sadly I didn’t get involved in the SF scene, my local mall just didn’t have it. I remembered being in an arcade in another suburb and walking past SF2 machine with a bunch of ‘bigger’ kids crowded around. I only really saw a few seconds of gameplay as my friend wasn’t interested in watching but man it really mesmorised me. SF was so ahead of its time.
My local video store Fountain Flicks (later taken over by Blockbuster) had TMNT and eventually got MK, but the games I grew up on were SNK. The computer store in the mall (I think it was called Pacific) got a Neo Geo 6-slot and it was awesome. Every month or so they would add a new game and it was like Christmas. Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, World Heroes. Non-fighters i remember playing were Blue’s Journey, Nam 9*something or other and other random stuff.
I wish I got to play more competitively but my friends and I were poor. We would just play one player games where the other one would jump in when we were about to die. Always funny trying to get that ‘moment’ before they lose, either guessing to late (game over), or joining in to early and getting an earful. “Man I could have had him!”
Didn’t really get to play SF2 until my two friends(twin brothers) got it on SNES. Their grandma wouldn’t let me stay until after 5pm so our sessions were always too short. Even though they got to train against each other all the time I could still beat them around 75%. I always dreamed of playing in tournaments. Of course I would have been demolished playing the pros but I never got to play any top players till many years later.
I only remember one street fighter tournament in Australia. It was like the World Street Fighter Championships and the winner(s) were supposed to get flown to play in other countries (U.S i’m guessing) I think I remember hearing the Japanese won but my memory is hazy. It must have been around 1995, does anyone know of this tournament?
Sounds interesting, I’d like to hear more about it, which aussies competed, won etc?
So I was looking up all the new SF4 and Turbo HD stuff, licking my chops for some good ol’ fashioned Street Fighter and I was thinking about the glory days, back when UTC’s Yellow Brick Road crew and Tomo’s LA crew were pretty much the two dominant groups and decided to see if there was anything on the web about it. This is the closet I got.
I was one of those UTC kids that pretty much never left the mall/arcade and was playing SFII and all of it’s spin-offs.
I really wonder what ever happened to the guys like Alex, Sean/Shawn and David (and David’s younger brother who I can’t remember the name of). I was the 11-13 year old white kid that was always getting people mocked by their friends for losing to me.
Is there anyone else from that yellow brick road group around?
The guy with the really notable Honda at UTC/Yellow Brick(I want to say Jeff but that doesn’t seem right) is probably also the guy who, after losing to my Balrog 3 straight times (this was back when no one played Balrog and I was one of the first to master charging at the arcade) freaked out and threw me head first into the wall. At the time he worked for the arcade and was obviously fired . . . but in the end we kept playing for quite some time.
Later on guys like Wei this massive asian dude who was notorious for shouting out things like, “No way!” or “Too Easy!” from the other side of the back-to-back games showed up. This was as Alex and Sean weren’t coming around as much.
For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the guy who had the really notable Zangeif. He was japanese as in from Japan and spoke very little english. Before him Zangeif, even with the good Zangeif players, was considered a much more ‘capped’ character.
One of the things that kind of drove the fact that the Yellow Brick Road crew used so many odd characters was that the core group probably only consisted of about 10 people. Outside of those ten, there really wasn’t anyone who was a challenge (accept of course when Tomo and his friends came down) so if everyone just used the best characters, things got real boring because there weren’t even that many people to get a real game from. That meant people spent a lot of time using non-standard characters, trying to learn the various exploits that others hadn’t even bothered with because that character wasn’t considered a top-tier character.
It even got to a certain point where guys like Sean, Alex and David didn’t even use their “best” character accept in the late rounds of tournaments and when they did it was always kind of like, “Oh shit, he really wants to win, he busted out Dhalsim.” To catch one of those guys playing a Ken, Ryu or Dhalsim outside of a tournament or unless we had visitors from LA was very, very rare.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure out what that guy is talking about as well. For SFII, when it came down to his final match in that first national tourny at Yellow Brick Road, he chose Dhalsim as I recall.
We always called the “axe-kick”.
Heh. I remember all the exaggerated button tapping. The fake rolls like you were going to throw a fireball, or doing a fireball motion and tapping kick to get people to jump . . . some of the stuff people would do was down right comical.
Man. Too funny. I think I even remember this tourny but I’m not sure. I distinctly remember a tourny when Wei had pretty much taken over YBR as the lead player and there was a whole bunch of LA folks coming in (we had tourny’s all the time so they kind of blur together) and it was kind of a big deal. As I recall Wei got knocked out pretty early in a shocker where, I believe, he actually lost to one of our own players and the big show-down between him and the top LA guys never really happened in the tourny . . . but obvious a ton of rounds were logged when the tournament were over.
I miss those days. . . as arcades started to die off and the competition around me started declining (I know there were still great players and arcades, but they were out of my radius), I lost a lot of interest because what I loved was having people around who were way better. If I just strolled into a regular arcade it’d be around 30 minutes before no one wanted to play me and that got boring. Eventually I just stopped playing. It’s always funny, though, when we would get those various console versions and I’d play with my friends because it really was a different level of play. My friends would tell me about their stories of being able to whoop everyone at the local 7-11, but at places like UTC and the big LA spots, it was a whole different world. My friends would find that out quite quickly even if it has been years since I’ve put any time into the game.
All that said, I was never a match for guys like Tomo, though I could take 2 or 3 out of 10 against Wei.
I generally lived at the Mission Beach arcade, but got out to UTC at least once every 2 months. I didn’t know most of the people personally, but I do think I remember Wei. I think he’s the one that used to play me for $2.00 in tokens vs. $1.00. I used to usually come out about even, only because it was basically 2 to 1 odds in my favor, but he did get up on me sometimes. The competition was good up there, it’s where I learned how to play proper, or became unscrubby. I too at one point in my life thought throws were cheap, heh.
I used to be a real dick at SSF2 on the head to head though, I was young. I had the Zangief teleport throw timing down almost perfect. I feel bad for the newer players at Mission Beach playing the other side back then to this day.
I probably played you way back then, either way, a shout out to the good old days.
You should really check out GGPO dude.
Yeah. My peak was around SFCE but I played quite a bit, long after that. What mainly separated me from a lot of the best there was that I got bored with having a primary character so I focused on learning a lot of the less popular characters. When we were just challenging eachother with random characters I could hang with most anyone there but when it was a competition and people were playing their best characters I usually wouldn’t make it to the finals due to losing to one of my own damn buddies.
My name is Dash, by the way. I would have been the little blond-ish white kid. If Wei was around, we were playing against eachother or splitting rounds if there weren’t a larger group of the top-notch guys.
Again, I think some of my fondest memories were when we’d get what we’d call tourists from other arcades who were top-dog in their arcade but still at that more “advanced scrub” level. They’d have their whole group of buddies and they’d get beat by this little 12 year old white kid and their friends would start trashing them . . . until they got beat too. Guys like Tomo, though, would pretty much beat me most games minus the ones I managed to sneak a few moves in by reading their tendencies . . . but they were so good they’d pick up and counter on my exploits by the next game and continue on.
Wow as long as I’ve been on SRK I have never come across this thread, such an awesome read.
Up at Forest Fair, right? Or were you talkin’ Tri-County? Either way…
Also wanna make my mourning of Doc Holliday’s known.
For me, SF2 was when I got into the game. I’d always wondered why I’d seen II around when I never saw 1. And when I did see it, it was clear. WW was far superior.
I also remember the first move I ever learned, both normal and special: Chun’s headstomp and Ken/Ryu’s fireball. I remember managing several wins with just the headstomp alone. When I was taught the fireball, being shown to me as DB-F (yes, I was shown an exaggerated motion), the game changed for me.
Another thing stick out in my mind very plainly, and that’s when I had my younger brother down to literally nothing, and all red bar, and my on the verge of a perfect… when I felt I HAD to hit him with a DP just to outclass him… turned out he came back and actually won.
That right there, never giving up even when so close to defeat, shaped my play, even to this day. There’s some people, and even in the big AE set from this past week on kaillera, that sees someone close to death, and starts trying to put it away. Normally, this only allows me to get a little more damage in before the curtain’s closed for good, but there are those rare times…
When CE came out, I was pumped. Those four bastards that munched so many of my quarters were now under player control? It made the game feel more complete, because now, they weren’t some mindless boss characters that could press the win button on you when they felt like it. You had a chance. Oddly, though, Cincinnati never had much of a local fighting game scene from what I could find during those times. I must’ve been too young, or not in the right places.
HF, when I first saw it, felt like a rip. CE and WW were a quarter each, while Turbo was 50. I thought ‘why pay extra for simple discoloration?’ It didn’t have the same kinds of major changes like CE did (increasing the roster by 50%), and all it was was faster.
SSF2 hit Doc Holliday’s and was promptly ignored, what with the KI machine taking credits, and MK2 seeing tons of play. It was even thrown into the back, where they kept the few pinball tables, also not good for showcasing it. The big game at the time from Capcom’s side was Children of the Atom later on, and finally SFA showed up in the main gaming area.
By then, though, the writing was on the wall. Games sat unused for hours, more and more games were fitted to accept tokens (newer and more popular games were quarters-only, and tokens were 8 to the dollar), and by '97 or '98, they had closed completely…