9/18/2007 - Street Fighter II Music Comparison (3 Videos)

It's been 16 years, and I still haven't gotten tired of playing Street Fighter II. In fact, I just bought the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and I'm playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo everyday. It's the only version I've never owned on a console and it's preparation for the upcoming HD Remix on the Playstation 3. Ahh, it reminds me of high school.

Before SF2, the arcades were filled with beat-em-ups. You had the Konami beat-em-ups (TMNT, X-Men, Simpsons) and the Capcom ones (Final Fight, Punisher, Captain Commando). Beat-em-ups were fun, and the Konami ones did justice to their licensed material, but they were pretty much quarter munchers. You controlled a character with a few lives and a health bar, and you had to wade through dozens (if not hundreds) of enemies with a few bosses in between. Regular enemies would get their cheap hits in and bosses would kill you routinely. Once your lives were up, you insert another quarter, continue, rinse, and repeat. They were definitely easy money-makers, but you could have two to four players hogging the machine until they finished the game.

Here is where you can see the brilliance of Street Fighter II. By making it a competitive game, you could have a LINE of players waiting to play against the reigning champion. In fact, you would routinely see a row of quarters on the arcade machine itself, representing your place in line. You could see how good a player was by how long they were staying on the game. If you were good, you'd get your quarter's worth by beating numerous opponents. If not, well, bet prepared to spend your allowance by practicing.

Since typical matches were at most two minutes, an arcade machine with a constant stream of players would rake in the cash at an even faster rate than the beat-em-ups, and would allow a greater audience of players to play the game (especially once people saw the lines and were curious about the hype). At a rate of 25 cents a minute, a typical machine can make $15 an hour... and you better believe an arcade operator at the time knew this figure.

It's hard to know if Capcom knew that SF2 would be the phenomenon that it was, but every aspect of the game was handled with such care that you could tell that they knew it would be special. The best example of this was the music in Street Fighter II. To this day it is still one of the best and most recognizable soundtracks for a video game ever. There's no greater evidence of this fact than the huge number of remixes of the various tracks. Even though each track loops after only a minute and a half (about the time it takes to finish a round, not coincidentally), the melodies will stick in your head long after you've finished playing the game. You know, if the music wasn't any good, you could not bear to play the games hundreds of times as a lot of players have (including myself).

I can't emphasize enough how good the translation was from the arcade to the 16-bit consoles. Because the fighting engine is so complex, if the timing of the moves were off even a little bit, it would not be the same game. Capcom really performed a miracle porting SF2 over to the SNES, Genesis, and the TurboGrafx-16. Not only did they perform amazingly gameplay-wise, the music from the arcade made it over remarkably well. Here is a video doing a comparison of the music for the three different systems. Maybe I'm a little biased, but I really prefer the SNES version.