Every now and again you see or hear something that makes you go “That can’t be right?” and you spend many hours researching and working out if what you heard was true. Tonight while browsing through Twitter and it’s usual array of opinions, outrage and other websites posting reviews on things that we somehow didn’t get a chance to cover, a tweet popped up that made me think if it was true… That tweet you can see below:
Despite its name, Street Fighter 2 featured very few streets. pic.twitter.com/MEJLQpyFIf
— Stefan (@Zin5ki) February 24, 2019
Now I stopped for a moment and thought about it, and looked at the image posted in the tweet, and thought about it again. “That can’t be right?” I said to myself, even with the proof right in my face, I still questioned it. For a game called Street Fighter, it didn’t contain many streets. To be honest, in the original World Warrior edition, there was only one street in the game: Seen in Chun-Li’s stage in China. Everywhere else is either some indoor or outdoor area that is technically not a street. Hell, even Balrog’s stage is more of a representation of the Las Vegas strip than an actual street.
And things didn’t get much better with Super Street Fighter II. Fei Long fights in a movie stage, T.Hawk fights in a courtyard with his people, Cammy fights on a bridge, and DeeJay fights at a beach side party. Even going back to Fighting Street, the original Street Fighter, and you see places like Mount Rushmore, the Great Wall of China, a railway depository, temples in Thailand, and 2 actual streets: One again in the back streets of China (Gen’s stage) and outside a bar in the UK with more sidewalk than actual street (Birdie’s stage). It’s amazing how little fighting on an actual street happens in a game called Street Fighter…
At least when they got to later games like Street Fighter III and beyond, there is still very little found in stages which take place on actual streets. If anything, I think Street Fighter V has the most actual street stages out there… Shocking.
