35 YEARS OF STREET FIGHTER A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Have you ever come across one of those brands that just seems to be everywhere?
You probably remember kids doing Fortnite dances at each other, and if you’ve got a young daughter, you’ll doubtless be familiar with the Japanese icon Hello Kitty. If you have any interest at all in films or geek culture, the dominance of Marvel characters is overwhelming. All of these properties are united not only by their popularity, but by their association with another pop culture phenomenon – Street Fighter. Yes, Capcom’s series is best known for 35 years of excellent digital fighting, but its influence reaches far beyond the realm of videogames and into film, comics, music, crossovers and more.
You don’t have to look hard for proof of this, either. You might have been a fan of the band Hadouken, or picked up the Champion Edition version of Sonic Boom Six’s EP Sounds To Consume. Plenty of people saw Peter Griffin name drop Blanka and Guile when naming his children on Family Guy, and others will have spotted Zangief and M Bison in a support group for videogame villains in Wreck-It Ralph. Even other videogames have cheeky nods here and there – if you take a close look at the fighters that Rugal has defeated and turned to statues in The King Of Fighters ’94, you’ll see some very familiar faces.
It’s fair to say that 35 years ago, nobody would have predicted the future success of the series. “I first encountered the original in a corner at a local pizza place,” says Joseph K Garrahan, a 3D character animator with credits on and the 2013 reboot. “The large character sprites were interesting but the controls felt a bit clunky.” That’s an assessment that wouldn’t have been out of place in any UK magazine of the time – was considered to be graphically exciting and momentarily diverting, but also something of a novelty due to the pressure-sensitive rubber attack buttons. Nick Kelly of voiced a common concern in questioning whether it would amount to “much more than a novel experiment in coin-op technology”, and while it wasn’t a bust, it wasn’t a revolution either.
