Do you remember the first time? We imagine you do. Perhaps your first contact with Street Fighter II was in your local arcade – the special-move sound effects booming around the hall, finding you through the sweat and smoke, drawing you in like a coin-operated tractor beam. Maybe it was the US SNES conversion on the shelf of your favourite import shop, a gurning Blanka mid-Rolling Attack on a shocked Chun-Li. (You were probably shocked, too, when you saw the price tag.) Or perhaps you were taken in by the videogame magazines of the time that collectively lost their marbles over that immediately iconic cast, and the boundary-breaking, industryshaking gameplay they made possible. In the run-up to the release of SNES Street Fighter II, Capcom US didn’t take out a single print ad – there was no point. It was already on the cover of every magazine going.
first encounter with came, appropriately enough, in issue one, with the debut Testscreen section awarding 9 to the SNES release of and giving Capcom UK’s marketing department a dream pull-quote:games have been refined gradually, in ways only the most passionately engaged players will even notice.
