My Ghost Vapes

Here comes a new challenger

Street Fighter II saved the arcade in 1991 with a quarter on the glass. Friday, Hollywood takes its third swing at turning it into a movie.

, 4 minute read

In February 1991 a machine showed up in American arcades that made grown men line up behind kids.

Arcades were dying by then. Home consoles had been eating them for years. Then Capcom put out Street Fighter II, and for about three years every arcade, bowling alley, pizza place and convenience store with an outlet in the back had one. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in America in 1991. Capcom sold more than 200,000 cabinets across all its versions.

The trick was the second joystick. Before Street Fighter II, you played the machine. After it, you played the guy next to you. Anybody could walk up, drop a quarter in, and the screen flashed that they had joined the fight. The winner stayed on. The loser walked to the back of the line.

I first played it at Fun & Games, the arcade in Virginia Center Commons, when the mall opened in 1991. I was seven. My grandmother used to take my brother and me there after church. We’d shop and eat in the food court.

That mall is gone now. It closed for good on Halloween 2022, and most of it has been torn down for redevelopment.

Who you picked said something about you

Eight fighters at the start, plus four bosses you couldn’t play until later versions. Ryu and Ken were the same guy in different colors. Guile had the hair and the flash kick. Chun-Li was the only woman, and the fastest kicks in the game. Blanka bit people and electrocuted them. Dhalsim stretched his arms across the whole screen, and nobody understood him.

Nobody planned the combo. The players found out that if you timed it right, one hit could cancel into the next before the other guy recovered. Capcom kept it in, and every fighting game made since has had combos.

My go-to was Blanka. I was seven and I wasn’t very good at video games, so I just mashed buttons. With Blanka, mashing punch is the move, so I’d accidentally get off Electric Thunder a few times before I got beat.

Then it came home

The Super Nintendo version came out July 15, 1992. It sold 750,000 copies in the United States in about ten weeks. It stayed Capcom’s best-selling single game for twenty years.

That changed things. You didn’t need quarters anymore. You needed a friend with a Super Nintendo and a second controller, and a mom who would let you stay until dark.

I didn’t have it at home. My cousins had a Sega and a Super Nintendo. The best we could do at our house was the regular Nintendo, until the N64 came out.

Hollywood’s first swing

In December 1994, the movie came out. Jean-Claude Van Damme played Guile,, a U.S. Air Force colonel with a Belgian accent. Kylie Minogue played Cammy. It cost about $35 million, and Van Damme got almost $8 million of it. Critics killed it. It sits at 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

And Raul Julia played M. Bison, and he was the best thing in it by a mile. He was sick with cancer the whole shoot and died two months before the movie opened. He took it seriously anyway. His Bison is pure ham, and it is the only reason people still quote that movie. “For me, it was Tuesday.”

I definitely saw it, and I thought it was awesome. I was eleven. I didn’t know any better.

Friday

The new one opens Friday, October 16. Kitao Sakurai directed it. The cast is a strange mix: Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken, Jason Momoa as Blanka, 50 Cent as Balrog, and two pro wrestlers, Roman Reigns as Akuma and Cody Rhodes as Guile. The box office trackers think it opens around $25 to $35 million, which is fine and not great.

Video game movies have mostly been bad, and Street Fighter’s track record is worse than most. But the game was never really about the story. It was about the line, the quarter on the glass, and the kid you had to beat to stay on.

Am I going Friday? Probably not. I don’t go to the movies anymore unless it’s a release that really matters to me.

In my opinion the movie theater is dead. You can watch almost anything at home a few weeks later, and the overpriced food and snacks make the trip even harder to justify. If theaters want to stick around, they need to become an experience you can’t get on your couch, like airing live events. Otherwise they won’t be around much longer.

Which is funny, because that’s exactly what the arcade was. Nobody needed Fun & Games to play a video game. We had the regular Nintendo at home. We went for the line, the noise, and the older kid you had to beat to stay on. Street Fighter II gave arcades a few more good years because it turned a game into an event. The theaters could learn something from that.

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