Forgive me the fact that I’ve been browsing through some Tim Rogers writing lately, and along with the release of the 20th Anniversary Street Fighter art book recently, this makes me want to wax long and poetic about Street Fighter.
Every so often in life one has a brush with something that changes us forever. I’ve already written about Super Metroid in this regard so let me discuss another part of my personal equation. I’m not going to discuss Street Fighter mechanically in this little article, more artistically and emotionally.
I can’t actually remember distinctly the first time I saw Street Fighter II. I do remember one specific time that made a lasting impression – during a sixth grade field trip, where all of us gifted students were riding a tour bus to Detroit, we stopped at a rest-stop that happened to have arcade machines, to take a dinner break. Here now a bunch of boys were clustered around the Street Fighter II machine, trying to do certain tricks or make certain moves happen, since, apparently, if you do the right sorts of kicks, you can see “her panties.”
Street Fighter II, I here realized, had something many other video games did not have: a girl. Her name was, is, Chun Li, and she is the female fighter in a tournament that, at the time, was strictly a man’s game. So unusual was the presence of this female character in the boys’ club that she must, therefore be “the Strongest Woman in the World,” and so it was. She wears a frilly, feminine garb that’s all part of her plan of catching her opponents off-guard when she strikes them with her powerful series of kicks.
I hadn’t gotten a chance to play a game as a girl since finishing Super Mario 2 with the Princess, and only the Princess. I was daydreaming myself of a game where you got to play as the Princess and rescue Mario, a vision that was obvious to me at age 12 and took Nintendo an embarrassingly long time to realize. (If Nintendo is interested in making another, I can probably find the intricate level maps that I drew at age12 to help out with this? I believe I had decided, that since Mario World took place in Dinosaur Land, there should also be a Dinosaur Princess, and drew one up that wore an outfit sort of like Ayla’s from Chrono Trigger, with tiger spots. A digression.)
Chun Li and the Princess Peach had, have, something in common, which is that they can fly. Not the long, lengthy air-swimming flights that Superman and his boyish ilk do, but the way that I can fly when I fly in dreams: a push off the ground that requires effort, followed by a strong lilt up, a hovering action, the feeling of weightlessness, then a slow, controlled float back to the ground, landing precisely where one had initially planned. Chun Li can notably do this while rotating upside-down. I used to call butterflies “Flyfly stick” when I was little, and this is because it wasn’t just the act of flight that was important, but it was that the landing, rather than being a heavy, pounding thing like the Hulk’s jumps thing, be “stuck,” a light but extremely certain lilt on the petal of a flower or a blade of grass. Fly, fly… stick.
Watching the boys play the game just to exploit a woman who was already inspiring me made me long to get good, really good, at the game, so I could wrap little painted fingernails around that joystick and knock them all down, one at a time.
This thing came out for the Super Nintendo and I had to buy it. I immediately started saving up all my allowance money or anything I’d stumbled across, because I needed that system, for that game. (With some exceptions, I usually don’t buy a new game system until the “bolt of lightning” game that I absolutely must have comes out for that system. For the Playstation 2, it was Silent Hill 2, because I remember having the same reaction: Hm, that game is out? Buy console now, immediately.) I bought the console at Toys R Us. I just bought the vanilla SNES package without Super Mario World, because I didn’t need Super Mario World; I needed Street Fighter II, which I also bought that day. I was practically counting pennies in to the clerk’s hand.
I mostly played against the computer at first. I beat it on super-easy and easy and arcade difficulty and Hard and then Super Hard and then Super Hard. I only knew one character, Chun Li, but I learned her inside and out and also played her at the arcades as well when I got the chance. I got good at the game – not great, but pretty good, enough that I could beat most of my friends and usually my dad and sometimes my brother. Then Super Street Fighter II came out and they added – wow, another girl… which weirded me out a little at the time but I’ve never had anything against Cammy per se. And there was Mortal Kombat and I really liked that but discovered I liked Scorpion better than Sonia for whatever reason – his fatality was easier to do – I liked his story … and then there was Time Killers and that’s even MORE violent than Mortal Kombat because you can rip off people’s limbs and stuff? And then there was Killer Instinct but it just kinda made me mad at first because the design of the woman character was so ridiculous with her huge bullet breasts… and so on.
In High School I was playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 and there was this strategy guide for it, this tremendously crunchy guide that I didn’t entirely understand that talked about tournament tiers and vulnerable “frames” and the attacks for everyone, and I realized that to get good at the game it wasn’t enough to learn everything about just your favorite character, but you needed to know a bit about the others as well. And though I was so proud that Chun Li was a top-tier character, as if I was somehow sharing in her tournament victories, I also liked Ken and Ryu a whole lot.
We used to write these little play scripts as if pretending that Ken and Ryu had a talk show and they would invite other video game characters on the show to interview them and/or kick the crap out of them. They were basically comedy fan-fic and I guess it’s been something like fifteen years now but darned if they still aren’t as funny as half the trash on Newgrounds and hold up pretty well so many years later considering the point was only “random Street Fighter jokes and violence.” One of the running gags was that Megaman, for example, couldn’t count, you’d ask him to count to ten and he’d never make it because he’d go “One, Two, Three, I, II, Four, III, Five, X…” and never make it up there. (He finally made it to ten this year! Good on him.) Then of course you’d ask Ken to count to ten, and he’d never make it either: “One, Two, Super Two, Super Turbo Two…”
In 1998, I wrote an “episode” where the whole point of the joke was the guys from the game teasing Chun Li for turning 30 years old. Chun Li’s birthday via her original profile is March 1, 1968. If she were a real person and that profile still stuck she would be 42 this year. I remember the date of her birthday because it used to be on March 1 every single year in high school I would go to school wearing little double buns in my hair as a way of celebration. They would often fall out a few times by the end of the day. This year, I will be turning 30 years old. Chun Li will always be now both older, and younger, than me, simultaneously.
I also, by the way, started taking karate lessons in high school. Shotokan. This last bit was almost an accident. The only thing cooler than realizing that what Ken and Ryu do is actually technically a real martial art, is going to your class as usual, seeing someone do a move, thinking “oh, that’s what Ken and Ryu do,” then realizing that the art they are supposed to be doing is the same one you’ve actually been taking classes in all along. I’m currently taking lessons in Kung Fu, and my teacher said, he started, because of “a video game,” though he did not specify which and I did not pry. Kung Fu is of course what Chun Li does. That’s kind of an accident too. I just like taking martial arts classes and that’s the class that seemed to suit me best while being close to my apartment. I’m having a wonderful time with it.
In the back of that big crunchy strategy guide for Street Fighter Alpha 2 there was an art section. I remember browsing through it a few times and seeing some pictures I really liked, and it’s great to be able to see them in the 20 year anniversary book again. There’s a piece I particularly remember that has Chun Li, leaning forward, with her back up against the character Rose. I love both of these characters and I love this picture. I had it scanned to my computer just to study it, though I don’t have it scanned right now and may have to repost it later. It shocked me a little to read the footnote on this picture – that the original artist isn’t entirely pleased with it and sees only his regrets when he looks at this picture. I always feel that way about my art too but I feel sort of humbled seeing someone say that about a picture I distinctly remember admiring.
(Incidentally, my favorite picture of the character Charlie is not in the 20th anniversary book as far as I can tell. I remember actually redrawing this picture just to have a larger copy and for once in my life doing it almost perfectly. I don’t know if I have it anymore though so I’ll have to go diving again for that one.)
I remember going to see the original Street Fighter movie and being so excited because, hey, it was a movie about Street Fighter, so I have to like it! I still sort of like it, while realizing intellectually of course that it is bad, but it’s the good kind of bad. A movie was made more recently about Chun Li and I was very excited for this, but of course it was really bad, the bad kind of bad. I knew of course that they would screw this up, but I still am baffled as to how they managed to screw this up. Because it would’ve literally been less effort to do it right than to screw it up. I remember when Chun Li in Turbo first got her fireball, and it was a little harder to pull off, and I daydreamed about how she must have trained so hard to learn this trick after watching the men who could do it. They tried to have this scene in the movie also but got it all wrong! They screwed it up in so many interesting ways! Please get a person to play Gen who looks like Gen instead of just reminding us that he was better when he was Liu Kang in another franchise! Chun Li is supposed to already be a cop, going in to the tournament undercover, because… and that’s why the silly, frilly outfit, there was already a reason for it that didn’t involve seducing a lesbian cougar in a nightclub. Please never see the Chun Li movie; it was a profound disappointment to my 14-year-old self even if my 29-year-old self knew exactly what to expect from it.
The Street Fighter anime movie is pretty good though, if a little long on that final fight with Bison at the end. (What I just linked, there, is a great movie fight. People get hurt. Stuff gets wrecked. Sure, panties are flashed, but that’s been part of the Chun Li allure from day one. I don’t like fights in movies where it feels like nothing is really at stake. This is not a fight like that.)
This is the year of Super Street Fighter IV. I’m excited for this game. I’m not really very good at Street Fighter IV though. I blame it on old age, lack of knowledge of the new combos, trying to get the right controller, but, really it’s just an overall lack of practice, something I could and should correct. I play as Rose these days; Chun Li’s pull-back style moves are too hard for me to do with the silly X Box controller, but now that I have a “real” fighter controller I should probably go back to trying to use my old favorite again too.
I don’t have much more to say, except, I’d like to thank Street Fighter for being part of my life even if I’ll never be world-class at Street Fighter. It doesn’t have much to do with the game mechanics in the end: it just has everything to do with grabbing that arcade stick and playing as the girl that could beat up all the boys on the digital playground.
Yatta!
Leave a Reply