Polygon has an Oral History of Street Fighter II from various development staff that has a lot of interesting tidbits and brings back some memories.  Definitely worth reading.

Some personal recollections:

- I remember actually playing the original Street Fighter (1) a few times in the arcade, and besides being too inexperienced to master complex button combinations, being completely unable to focus on the controls while trying to punch those huge buttons.  (Also I'm just finding out in this Kotaku article that Sagat was the final boss.  That explains a lot.)

- I spent a good bit of time in the arcades with the first Street Fighter II, but Champion Edition was where countless quarters went.  Character of choice was Chun Li, followed by Guile, M. Bison and Vega.  (Never played the main two protagonists much till later on.)

- The game was pretty much the sole reason I bought a Super Nintendo.  Even bought one of those huge (and quite expensive for the time) arcade controllers.

- Chun Li's theme was the only one that stood out to me at the time (this was before I took much notice of VGM).  Nowadays the SF Alpha 2 Underground Mixxes remix of Ken's Theme and the SFIV OST arrangement of Guile's Theme would be my favorites.  Still not sure if I've heard that one perfect arrangement of Chun Li's theme.  Any suggestions?

- I never cared for the faster speed in SFII Turbo and had only a passing curiosity in Super SFII (mostly Fei Long).  Was more into Mortal Kombat II by then.

- The dub in the Street Fighter II Animated Movie may have been awful but man a couple of those fight scenes were sick.

American OST was infinitely superior to the Japanese OST, too. I made a thread that had an extremely rare download link, but I'm sure it's dead now. Soundtrack was f---in' boss, I can't say it enough

As for my own memories? I preferred it to Mortal Kombat at the time of it's release, but even then didn't play it terribly often. Cousins has a copy of Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, or something, and I remember not being able to play as the charging characters worth a damn, wondering how in the hell anyone ever beat the game as Guile/Chun Li. As far as renting on the SNES, I tended to gravitate towards Capcom games, but even then, Megaman titles often took precedence.

To this day, I am still bloody horrible at Street Fighter II. I reached my own personal zenith for Street Fighter with Third Strike and IV (which isn't to say I'm confident in my ability to beat anyone on this board).

I still think it's hilarious how the announcer says the name of each move in the same voice.TIGER KNEE TIGER KNEE HADOUKEN HADOUKEN I'DLIKESOMEPOUNDCAKE

I don't care much for Polygon, but I'll admit they do some great features like this. Good read.

Hah, I was the same actually. The first time I got into the series (with the original SF2), Chun Li was my go-to character, and I didn't move to the pajama brothers until much later. I was never one for Guile personally, but Charlie is still probably my favorite character in the SFA series.

Honestly, I've never been blown away by the original SFII soundtrack, or by SF music in general until the PSX era.
Chun Li's remixed theme from the console version of SFA is still my hands-down favorite version. I love the jazzy interpretation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBHDAxD3ogI

And it had a wonderful piano rendition for her ending credits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBFTNVaGWUg

I never got into SFII Turbo either, but not because of Mortal Kombat II (which I did enjoy, despite myself), but because of Turtles Tournament Fighters which was released around the same time and which was, dare I say it, the better game.

I played the living CRAP out of Super SFII though. I spent MONTHS with that thing.

You'd expect me to have more to say about this subject, but truth be told, my time with Street Fighter II was extremely limited. I read about it in Nintendo Power (anyone remember the SFII feature?) and then I played it in the arcades (remember, I was 12-13) and mostly used Chun Li for her speed. I would actually beat people much older than me and it was pretty satisfying. The one major fight I remember was I used Chun Li's Spinning Bird Kick to blow through a fireball of a Ken player and won and the guy's girl was watching the whole time. He was pissed.

Then the sequels started. My arcade stopped at Champion Edition. I could afford basically 1 SNES game per year if I was lucky and Turbo Edition and Super weren't getting my $70 when I had the original (Turbo was a rental for me). I had zero interest in Mortal Kombat, which some people moved to. And people in the neighborhood stopped playing because they couldn't deal with walk-up throws with Chun Li. So I was done with most fighters until around 1998, when I bought Alpha 2 for my Playstation (it was a $15 impulse purchase, which was a far cry from paying $70 for Turbo or Super...at the time, I thought it was yet another sequel to the original SF2! Shows how out of touch I was with the series) and started playing Marvel vs Capcom in the arcades. I do regret missing the prime for a couple games (Alpha 2/3, Capcom vs SNK 2, Vampire Savior...3rd Strike is still played at tournies, amazingly).

Even nowadays, I prefer the craziness of the Vs games. I'll play some light SFIV (although a lot of diehards legitimately hate on IV), but rarely serious. I do like the fact that, love the game or hate the game, 2D fighters came back to the limelight after nearly a whole decade of hearing how outdated and dead they were.

I didn't really play Street Fighter II back in it's heyday. I played Mortal Kombat more (played the hell out of Mortal Kombat 3 even though it is terrible) and the original Killer Instinct which is still actually pretty good (IMO) despite being scaled down from the arcade. I only got aboard the Street Fighter train when Capcom ported Alpha 2 the SNES. I find it absolutely hilarious that it was like $70 compared to the PS1/Saturn versions which weren't handicapped when it came to speed. Unfortunately, that lack of speed screwed me up BAD. Years later when I played a better version of Alpha 2 it was WAY to fast for me

I think fighters were more important for me on the PS1 however. Soul Blade (which NO ONE EVER talks about when talking about the Soul games) and Rival Schools were big games for me. After this point (1998?) fighters kind of took a back seat to many other genres.

That seems to be the plight of a lot of 3D fighters...When the new versions come out, they render the older ones obsolete to a lot of players. What little I remember of Soul Edge, I remember enjoying it far more than the Tekken games. With 2D fighters, the fanbase will still play the older games. Just something I've noticed over the years. A group of us were talking the other day and people were talking about how great SF3 Second Impact was, compared to 3rd Strike. I can't imagine a competitive scene where people are actually playing Sean (who was one of the best Second Impact characters, apparently).

In the case of Street Fighter II, the definitive version is largely considered to be the final version, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but a lot of people quit long before that. Is why regular SF2 Turbo is consistantly rated so high, it was probably where a lot of people stopped (although Super Turbo didn't have an SNES release and wasn't available on anything besides 3DO until 1997 or so).

Good old Capcom, milking players since 1992...

Yeah, I tend to like weapon based-fighters more than hand-to-hand fighters which is why Soul Blade pretty much eclipsed Tekken in my book. However, I did recently purchase a copy of Tekken 3 on amazon. It was the game in that series I played the most and, while I'm not really a big graphics guy, that game looked really good for its time. It definitely pushed the console.

Wow so you're saying you liked the U.S. soundtrack better?  Back in the late '90s you'd probably have been banned from most anime sites for saying something like that.

I agree with you though.  Not that the U.S. soundtrack was great but half the Japanese anime OST was bad Jpop and the other half bad '80s instrumentals.  And that KMFDM track in the U.S. version for the Chun Li - Vega fight is wicked intense. (Albeit a bit misogynistic in a scene that's somewhat misogynistic to begin with. At least she kicks his ass, though.)

Speaking of the Street Fighter II animated movie, am I the only one that was glad the DVD version was uncensored? I remember watching the VHS and the language was cleaned up... but when I watched the DVD I thought that F-Bomb that Guile drops near the end when talking to Bison was awesome....

The DVD took so long to come out I never got it (I had the laserdisc ) but it would have taken more than some explicit language to salvage the English dub... like a whole new dub altogether.

While we're on the subject of the animated movie, the Wikia article lists a few interesting ways in which it supposedly influenced the Alpha series games.

I was going to mention this; I had heard the movie did in influence the Alpha series in some ways. I'll have to check out the article.

My experience with SFII started with an article in Nintendo Power. I had never heard of the thing so I went to an arcade and tried to play it and  had no idea what I was doing. I later rented the SNES version (with the console itself) to learn how to play it and fell in love. Later, when I actually got an SNES of my own, I bought SFII Turbo which I played intensely with friends for years. Been an SF fan for life since then, playing SFA and SF3 in the arcades followed by buying pretty much every SF game released for the PSX, PS2, and PS3. These days, I don't play too much, but you may occasionally find me online with SF3-3 or SF4. I'm not good enough to be competitive with most online players, so I usually just play for a little bit for fun.

I believe I first discovered Street Fighter II simply by wandering into the nearest arcade during a summer vacation. I couldn't have been older than nine at the time. Even though I essentially lost the quarter within 30-120 seconds, the beautiful action (and, well, the beautiful Chun-Li--again, I was about nine) kept me plunking them down; I was mesmerized. Not long afterward, it became the first SNES game I owned.

Despite getting in on the ground floor, I never was, nor ever became, very good at SFIIor fighting games in general (my brother would go on to make a name for himself in the competitive fighting game tournament scene, though). Sagat and M. Bison gave me my first bouts of gamer's rage. Even after it became clear I'd never hold my own against most human opponents, SFII and its descendants (both literal and spiritual) held my interest with strong character design, art direction, music, and (laughably, now) storyline/lore.

I actually have stronger memories of Street Fighter Alpha. I happened upon it in the very same arcade, but tucked away in a corner, billed at one quarter per credit--by then, practically unheard of. Given that I've never heard of it before, the complete lack of cabinet art (it didn't have so much as "Street Fighter Alpha" scribbled on the marquee with a Sharpie) and the 'budget' pricing, I momentarily wondered if it was some kind of knockoff using a combination of SFII characters and some others. If it was a knockoff, I didn't care--I fell in love with the art style and animation. If this was some kind of "reboot," I embraced it fully. I think most people consider Street Fighter Alpha 3 to be the best Alpha, and I'm sure that it is superior in many technical/gameplay aspects, but Alpha 2 has been my all-time favorite for all the "wrong" reasons: beautiful character portraits, backgrounds, and the best soundtrack to date.

These days, I don't bother keeping up with fighting games as a consumer or player--and I think that's in large part due to the lack of two-dimensional animation that I loved drinking in--but I find myself Googling their rival battle dialogues or ending synposes every once in a while, curious about what's new in the lives of my old friends.

I like Alpha 2 more than 3. Alpha 3 went kind of character crazy and while there is a wide range of characters I don't think the game is stronger for it.

I think Alpha 3 has more depth overall (the custom combo system is extremely versatile), but I never liked the juggle system it had, fireballs are crappy (you're better off walking into them at far range than blocking them) and it essentially doesn't have links in it. Give me Alpha 2 anyday, I prefer the more grounded combat it has.

Also, the music of Alpha 3 is...good god, it's like all the great Capcom composers got together and went into autopilot electronica mode. I still have my copy and enjoy the occasional track here and there, but a lot are just unbearable. Alpha 1 and 2 are strong through and through, on a character basis, almost to the extent that the regular SFII games are.

When my family was coming back from a weekend trip sometime in the mid 90s, we stopped at a restaurant where they had Street Fighter II Championship Edition. But it was different. You could do most special moves (fireballs, spin kicks, etc) in mid-air, and there was a red hadouken that moved in a wave pattern.

This was a mystery to me for years, since I never saw it again, but much later I learned that it was a pirated mod. Did any of you ever see this? I've heard that Capcom later incorporated some of these features into sequels, but this was definitely SF II Championship Edition.

I too fell in love with Alpha 1 and 2. After five games with essentially the same art style, these were enormously refreshing. The younger characters, the origin stories, and lovely battlegrounds, the jazzy music, and the best version of Chun Li. I adored these games. My only complaints are that I could never pull off an alpha counter and I wasn't skilled enough for custom combos, but I sure had fun anyway.

I don't know... was there really an upside to performing an Alpha Counter in the first place? Didn't they take one level off your super meter? I think being able to perform an Alpha Counter on an opponent was more of a sly statement of how slow they were (hey, you're so slow I can counter everything you throw at me!) than a real defensive tactic. Unless there is something I'm forgetting...?

Much like Adam, I knew of Street Fighter II, and I watched a lot of people play it in the arcades. I didn't start until Champion Edition for a few reasons...

Suffice it to say, back in 1991, the closest thing we had to an arcade joystick in a console household was an NES Advantage. Hardly the standard considering that SFII's controls were unique and complex to some upon initial release. Remember: SFII came in a world of TMNT, the Simpsons, Thunder Cross, and Magic Sword games. Lot of hack and slash, shoot 'em up, but nothing like what SFII was bringing to the table.

So with no genre to adapt to, the only way to play it was 'at' the arcade. The main arcades that had SFII were unreal because a lot of them only had one machine. In it's absolute prime, if you lost, you literally had 10-20 people ahead of you with quarters lined up from left to right until the place closed down. I had to get my feet wet at some point, but unless you hopped on board from almost day one, the original SFII was not the place to start. I had to find the game at an area with less traffic, and that didn't come until Champion Edition.

Games in the following years up to 2002 were all good, and many of my best memories came through the fighting game genre, including running local and regional tournaments for about 7 years. But between 1991 to around SFA's release in 1995 was a completely different breed. Super Turbo, which is highly regarded now, got little attention when it came out. Partially because it got old to the general public (Super SFII bombed outside of its first week; especially due to the slow speed), but mainly the likes of Mortal Kombat II completely DOMINATED the scene and got mainstream attention. Ah, the good ol' days I would still play in arcades if they were still around to the extent of yesteryear.

Who is this? I might know him.

He goes by krost, and is primarily a Super Turbo Ken player. He plays on the east coast, and treks to Vegas for EVO.

All the love for SFII Alpha kinda makes me regret I missed that series.  I remember the younger character roster and extra bits of series history seemed interesting but I was burnt out on the series and expecting more graphic-wise by that point - something along the lines of SFIII's animation (though the roster in SFIII itself turned me off).

I'd be interested if Capcom were to release a visually less bulky, more cell-shaded 3D take on the Alpha series once they're done going through SFIV updates.