Games that Influenced Me: Street Fighter II

The Super Nintendo system was the first big purchase of my life. I saved up my non-existent allowance for months; I didn't ask for anything. Once my parents realized that I was saving up for something, they started keeping track of how long I had saved for. I think I saved my money for about six months in order to buy a Super Nintendo (give or take a few months; I honestly had no idea how much anything costed back then.) Once I did make my purchase, my brother, Doug, made his own purchase. One of the first games we ever owned for the new system was the breakthrough game that legitimized the "Fighting Game" genre: Street Fighter II.


Street Fighter II has very little to do with fighting on the streets. While there are streets, and there is fighting, the people that do said fighting are rather legendary. They throw fireballs out of their hands, they jump 20 feet into the air during suplexes, they teleport around the boundaries, and their limbs stretch to three body lenghts at will. This is obviously all ignored, or even embraced, by the youngsters who are playing the game, because to us real fighting was boring. Heck, I did that from time to time with my brother or other kids, and it just ended with me getting grounded.

I do remember the day that my brother brought the game home. Unbeknownst to me, the game was rather familar to him. He had already played for many an hour at friends houses, or more likely, The Tilt. The Tilt was a gigantic arcade housed inside the old Fashion Island Mall. I wasn't allowed to go to The Tilt when I was young; Mom said that gangs hung out there. Admittedly, all arcades house a certain amount of seedy activities due to how dark and impersonal they are, so she was probably right to some extent. Regardless, the day my brother bought the game, he immediately set it to its hardest difficulty. The difficulty meter in the game would make the computerized opponents more intelligent depending on how high you set it; sort of like how in chess you can set it to make really stupid moves, or you can set it to be a grand master a la Bobby Fisher. Doug blasted that baby up to Level 7 Hard and beat it without flinching, and then just left to go to his baseball game.

I was floored. It took me about a month just to beat it at level 5; to see Doug beat it right after buying the game at its hardest difficulty was art in action. I remember going to his baseball game later (I was too young to stay at home by myself) and bragging to the other kids that my brother had beaten the game on Level 7 Hard. Doug was the epitome of cool in my mind; the thing I wanted to do, he was "da best" at. My brother is seven years older than me. We shared a room together until my sister went to college, which was up until I entered Jr. High basically. A lot of my early wisdom was shaped around what my brother told me. I learned from him that if I failed at something while another person was talking that it wasn't my fault, but rather that "You broke my concentration." I also remember that I wasn't allowed to pronounce the name of the ONYX tape he owned, "BACDAFUCUP" even though it wasn't a word (Doug just told me not to say it; even though I had no idea what it meant.)

That day though, the day he beat the game at its most difficult, Doug was the best. He could've done anything in my mind. He could've leapt off the Eiffel Tower and lived and I wouldn't have been surprised. Doug had beaten Street Fighter II on Level 7 Hard; everything else paled in comparison. I wonder if this image will be stuck in my mind of what Doug means to me: "Brother, Friend, Destroyer of Level 7 Hard." That needs to be on a plaque in his room one day.