So many banned members on one page.
wowzers.
seems old schoolers don’t know how to behave themselves.
Why isn’t this stickied…
Gotta keep this alive…
Not really on topic, but I heard Tomo & Michelle are expecting another child so congrats to The Original Champ and all-round Familyman!
Not stickied?
Wow I just found some of my old posts from alt.(insert topic here) posts from usenet via dejanews. In the following post I was criticizing (Dictator) in CVS1 and was wondering why there was no MKvSF game yet:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/7Xz4dboesgY
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/KnHAQCCVxHE
Wow. I laughed so hard after reading this again. I guess my trolling started out early:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/nNwIZuUIkkY
An post about the original ST revival:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/TZEGhjfFd9U
My 1st impressions on CVS1:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/peHQxvDB-eo
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/lFKI0Mj3r94
a CVS2 post before it even came out!!!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.games.sf2/k9Q1omqA7sc
Oh and that one gamer chick from the 1990s/early 2000s named Jenn Dolari
Staying alive
jcasetnl’s posts are golden. No other posts in this thread will ever top jcasetnl’s.
Let’s see if SFV can bring back the old schoolers
Awww, here it is…
I found a WW cabinet at a pool hall across from Next Level arcade in brooklyn nyc. That cabinet brings back my childhood.
Anybody familiar with CE should play it on Fightcade.
Still not stickied???
I posted as "juergdogg@my-deja.com" back in the day and as Jion_Wansu on SRK back in 2001
I’ve spent like 2 weeks in work reading this on the DL, even though I’ve read it all before lol…needs to be more stories on YT about this era too. But It’d like to see some more stuff from post SF2 - pre SF4 era.
Let me toss in my own personal history with Street Fighter 2, and refresh this thread bit. (although my own story isn’t quite as interesting as the ones from people who lived in Cali back then)
I was already in college when SF2 hit the scene back in 1991, so I was a bit older than most players. But SF2 was being played by almost everyone, and being 20 years old put me right at the upper threshold of the Street Fighter 2 craze. I was already a video game junkie since I was a kid in the early 80’s, where I practically grew up in the arcades. I was a little kid when Space Invaders was new, and when Asteroids was new, as well as games like Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Defender, Robotron, Moon Patrol, Berzerk, Frogger, Missle Command, Tron, etc., etc… too many games to name… but I was there during all of that time period.
I remember the sights, the sounds, and even the smells of walking into all of the different arcades in Houston. There was the Gold Mine in Westwood mall, that looked like a dark mine, with red lanterns giving it the dungeon like ambiance. There were the three arcades in Memorial City Mall… Quiptars, Greens, and the arcade near the food court area, which the name escapes me right now, but it was before Exhilarama. There were the 3 or 4 Malibu Grand Prix arcades around the city. There was Good Time Charlie’s in Sharpstown Mall, where the arcade changed from Alladin’s Castle to various other names throughout the years; along with Sharpstown’s other arcade, Time-Out. There were all of the various Tilt arcades throughout Houston as well. There was Supertrack, and Games People Play, and all of the little independent mom & pop arcades. And there were all of the bowling alleys, washaterias, grocery stores, pizza parlors, and convenient stores as well.
So during all of those years in all of those arcades I had experience with games like Yie Ar Kung Fu, Shinobi, Bad Dudes, and Final Fight. But the two fighting games that stood out as being unique in some way, were Karate Champ and Street Fighter.
But why? What made those two games different from the others, or special?
It was because they were played against another human person. Each person put in their quarter, and each person had a chance to knock the other person off the machine. It was one-on-one, mano-a-mano… and that element seemed like it had a certain special quality to it. I enjoyed Karate Champ, but only to a certain degree. It felt kind of slow and sluggish, and it wasn’t very responsive control wise. It just didn’t feel like the moves came out right, and the animations didn’t precisely match up with with the controls, timing wise, or visually. The same goes for Street Fighter, it was better than Karate Champ in some ways, but not good enough to grab my full attention.
Although I have to say, I wouldn’t have been able to describe it this way back then because we didn’t have anything to make comparisons to, at least not head-to-head fighting game wise. There was no SF2 yet… so we didn’t know about any of the technical fighting game mechanics, nor the terms that would later become common in the fighting game genre.
I mean, I played and mastered games that required a great deal of manual dexterity and quick reflexes. My main game was “Stargate”, which was the sequel to “Defender”. And anyone who knows anything about Stargate will tell you… that game was one of the most extremely fast and chaotic games ever made. It required the use of both hands to control an up and down stick, along with six different buttons, with almost all of them being used simultaneously and in perfect coordination with each other. So I was used to video games that had instant reaction times, precise controls, and real time action.
And when it came to Karate Champ and Street Fighter… I just knew that they didn’t feel 100% right. They didn’t have the ingredients that they needed to take them to the next level. So what was that missing ingredient, or that next level, and what did that mean? At the time, I don’t think anyone was thinking about what would make fighting games better, or even wondering about those kinds of questions.
But in 1991 we got the answer… It was Street Fighter 2.
As I said, I was around 20 years old, and I was fumbling around in college at the time. I wasn’t spending much time in the arcades anymore, so I was a bit out of the loop with what was current in the arcades. One day, and I still remember this very well, my younger brother came to me and asked, “Hey, have you played the new Street Fighter 2 game?” I said, “No, what is it?” I didn’t really make any kind of correlation to the original SF game at that time. My brother told me that it was a sequel to the old fighting game, and that it’s really cool… and then he added the one detail that immediately grabbed my attention, which subsequently took control of a major part of my life from that point on. He said that it’s so good… that people are playing it like crazy everywhere and competing with each other like mad. He told me that the Boone Food Store had 2 machines and all of his Vietnamese friends are there everyday now. So the game had already been out for a while, it had taken over the arcade industry, and I hadn’t even known about it. Well I had to go and check it out.
We immediately drove to the convenient store, which was only 5 minutes away. I walked into the store and saw a crowd of at least 8-10 guys around some machines. The two SF2 cabs were next to each other, sandwiched in between some other games, which no one was even paying attention to anymore. I remember looking at the screen and seeing the guy with the blond flat top haircut, wearing camouflage pants. And I noticed he was throwing out small, circular disk-like projectiles, and saying sonic boom… which I thought looked very cool. And I noticed another character who was wearing the torn up karate Gi, and I vaguely recalled that he was the Ryu character from the original Street Fighter.
What immediately struck me from my first glimpses of the game was the movement and the graphics. There was something very, very different about this fighting game. It was flowing, and moving, all in real time, seemingly without any delay or sluggishness. The moves came out smoothly and quickly, and the animations were clear, especially the hitting and contact animations. I could see everything happening in a way that made both physical and visual sense… instantaneously.
But what solidified this moment and my reaction to the game… was when I first put my hands on the joystick and buttons and played it. I selected Ryu, because he was the only character I knew anything about, particularly move wise. The Vietnamese guy playing Guile had already beaten a few people and everyone had obviously been playing this game during all of these months that I didn’t even know about its existence. So I was way behind already, and I was gonna have to take some beatings just to even catch up. But even though my memory is very vague about the actual match, what I do remember is this:
Ryu moved exactly in time with my joystick movements, and his moves came out exactly when I hit the buttons. It was an amazing feeling to me. I couldn’t get over how precise and how intuitive the games controls and graphics were. I don’t remember if I threw any fireballs or not, and I know for sure that I didn’t know how to dragon punch (or all-u-can) at that time. I lost the match, and I played a few more times. I watched everyone playing and I tried to soak in what was happening in my brain. I didn’t realize it at that moment, but some kind of trigger had been set off inside of me, and it couldn’t be turned off… and it wasn’t going to go away.
It was such a unique experience in video gaming history. Watching guys faces as they waited, watching everyone studying the game, watching guys lose and have to dig in their pockets for more money, watching guys win and sensing their feelings of confidence and dominance. And looking around and just knowing that almost all of the guys there were experiencing the same thrills and emotions.
It was video games king of the mountain, it was egos and pride, it was pure competition… and it was mano-a-mano (him against me). For the first time in video gaming history we had a fighting game that pitted 2 players against each other, that gave us different characters with different attributes to work with, that gave us an engine with accurate precision and graphics, and a game where we had to mix all of those elements with both manual dexterity and deep knowledge of the game.
And for those of us that had a special need to explore that competitive nature… SF2 just struck a specific nerve and it resonated deep within us… this was the beginning of my obsession with the game… and the moment that I became a SF junkie for life.
To be continued…
Nice
comeon lets hear more there isnt enough info out about the old school days when arcades were huge i was born in 91 so i didnt get starte dn arcades till late 90s and it was dead in missisisppi by that time tekken 5 and sc 2 were last big fighting games n arcades then it died n 2007
everyone vote “Marvelous” on the very 1st post so that it appears in the “Best Of” section in SRK!!!