Street Fighters, Too

"I heard you were talkin' shit about me! You wanna fight?"
"Yeah! Let's go down to the market district!"
"Should we wait until they close?"
"No! Let's fight during regular business hours!"

Roy Wood, Jr.

Just a little levity before I begin what will likely be a very pedantic blog entry that will make all but the biggest Street Fighter fan's eyes glaze over. Picture it, Sicily America, early 1993. The Sega Genesis was starting to pick up steam, with major publishers like Acclaim and Konami already making games for the system. After years of licensing their arcade games to Sega, Capcom decided they wanted to be more directly involved with the Genesis, and signed up to become a third party licensee. 

You've seen that wonky picture of Mega Man
and Sonic shaking hands about a million times,
so here's something that's a little easier
on the eyes, courtesy of Archie Comics.

Naturally, Capcom's megahit Street Fighter II would be the first game they'd publish for the Genesis. Unfortunately, because the designers at the company were already stretched thin making games for the Super NES (or they just didn't care...), Capcom handed the game off to Opera House, an outside developer that had previously ghost-written the Genesis ports of Midnight Resistance and Captain America and the Avengers. 

Those games were okay (Midnight Resistance moreso than The Avengers), but "okay" wasn't going to cut it for a high-profile title like Street Fighter II, and the press and attendees of that year's Consumer Electronics Show had told Capcom as much after playing Opera House's beta build. The site Hidden Palace goes into more exhaustive detail, but the bottom line is that the game felt like a mid-tier release, noticeably compromised and unworthy of one of the biggest arcade hits of the 1990s. 

Pressured by criticism, Capcom decided to scrap what Opera House had given them and handled the port themselves. Special Champion Edition is what was ultimately brought to store shelves, and while it got a lot of grief from players who couldn't stand the rough voice samples and the need to switch between punches and kicks on a three button controller, it was nevertheless vastly improved over previous builds of the game. 

The characters were more cleanly drawn, the colors had more of the vivid "pop" that they had on the Super NES, and the letterboxing that turned the top and bottom of the screen into a black void was largely removed. As an added bonus, there was an extra "hyper" mode that helped it achieve parity with Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES. Was it perfect? No. But anyone who was paying attention to the game's development understood that it could have been much, much worse.

That's not the end of the story, though! Over the last few years, a hacker named Pyron had been busy sharpening up Capcom's port of Street Fighter II with patches, culminating in the release of Street Fighter II Remastered. Meanwhile, Hidden Palace has uncovered and released the two beta versions of Street Fighter II by Opera House... which seem to share DNA with a bootleg version of Street Fighter II called SF II' Turbo that's been available online for years. Nostalgia Nerd thoroughly covered that game on his YouTube channel... you can watch that video by clicking here.

Phew. You can already see this rabbit hole gets pretty deep. Hidden Palace and Nostalgia Nerd have already covered the history of these games, so let's look at their overall quality. Here's a handy comparison shot of the five games, in the same stage, with the same fighters.

One thing that stands out right away is that the colors in Opera House's two games are rather raw, lacking the subtlety of Special Champion and Pyron's later hack of that game. The carpet in Dhalsim's stage has fewer gradients, the image of Ganesh in the distance isn't as detailed, and the text at the top of the screen is flat, without the lustrous shine in Capcom's version. You see a lot of this in the Opera House games... the colors just aren't as warm as they are in the finished game, an issue that SF II' Turbo tries to address. The colors are a bit richer in that port, especially for the fighters, but it still skimps on the details. The introduction with two random guys battling in front of a skyscraper is missing, as are the brief bios for each character in the attract mode.

The sprites are entirely redrawn in Special Champion, and this quickly becomes evident in close-ups. Here now is Ken's victory pose, with Capcom's game on the left and the July build of Opera House's conversion on the right.

Ken, are you okay there, buddy? You look like you should be cracking open pecans on Christmas. The weirdness continues in the portraits before each match, with Zangief taking on an almost feline appearance in SF II' Turbo, which reuses assets from the Opera House games.

You start to wonder if Opera House based its own characters on the original Street Fighter II, where the designs were slightly off and didn't get revised until the arcade version of Champion Edition was released a year later.

It may take a sharp eye to notice some of the visual differences between the five games, but the differences in sound are pretty obvious. On the plus side, Opera House's two builds and SF II' Turbo has superior voice samples; a bit high pitched but nevertheless better than the rough, labored speech in Special Champion. However, practically everything else in Opera House's two games is worse, particularly in the earlier March build. The woosh of fists flying through the air sounds like a garbage bag flapping in the wind, the roaring of jet engines in the character select screen is missing entirely, and the background music is thin and cheap despite louder, more bombastic percussion. The July build and SF II' Turbo have improved sound effects, but the music regrettably remains the same.

Despite their subpar audiovisuals, the Opera House versions of Street Fighter II still offer solid if unexceptional gameplay. The control is tight, no attacks were omitted to conserve space on the cartridge, and advanced techniques like two-in-ones still work. Feel free to rip into a stunned enemy with Ken's devastating hard punch to hard shoryuken... it doesn't burn through as much health here as it does in Special Champion, but it's still just as easy to perform. Fighting games on the Genesis are a mixed bag, and the beta of Street Fighter II crushes the worst of them under its heel. 

The problem is that this is a pretty low bar... people expected Street Fighter II for the Genesis to be better than Deadly Moves, Fighting Masters, and Power Instinct. They also expected it to be on par with the Super NES version, but Opera House's game just... isn't. It plays well enough, but it looks cheap, sounds cheap, and lacks the hyper mode of Special Champion. A direct comparison between the outsourced betas and the finished version designed in-house makes it clear why Capcom felt the need to start from scratch.

Pyron's hack of Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition, titled Street Fighter II Remastered, further enhances Capcom's solid conversion, with over a dozen tweaks to the original. Some of these, like cleaner speech and brighter colors, absolutely improve the game, while others seem included just for completion's sake, and others still are slightly bewildering.

Here's one example of a change that wasn't strictly necessary. The fighter on the left in the opening sequence- the one who's always clobbered by the guy on the right- has been changed back to an African-American man. Frankly, having two blonde men battle, removing any possible racial subtext, was one of the edits Capcom made to the home version that I completely understand. At the same time, the switch back to the original design does make Street Fighter II Remastered more faithful to the arcade version.

Then there are the changes to the in-game elements, like the status bar at the top of the screen and the typeset. Capcom's classic serif lettering from the CPS1 era has been changed to fonts from Street Fighter Alpha, which are admittedly easier to read but are also slightly jarring in a game which predates that series. It may take some adjustment, but it's worth it when the rest of Street Fighter II Remastered looks like this...

In case you've forgotten, this is how Suzaku Castle looked in the official release.

Special thanks to Hidden Palace for releasing the Opera House betas and for its extensive research on the subject. Thanks also to GDRI for being a handy resource, and Pyron for his dedication to improving the Genesis version of Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition.