Today is the official 35th anniversary of Street Fighter and we wouldn't be here without it

The day has finally come. Street Fighter has officially turned 35 today, which is certainly a big milestone worth celebrating.

Years before the franchise would take over the world, Street Fighter started life as an experimental arcade game, which none of us would now be without.

Now Street Fighter was far from the first fighting game to be made when it was released on August 30, 1987, and it even borrowed many aspects of titles that came before.

While the genre’s roots can be traced all the way back to the late 1970s, 1v1 fighters of the era never really set or expected standards for how they would actually play, what the win condition was, and whether there were more than 1 type of fighter was needed.

In addition to apparently taking inspiration from previous games like Karate Champ and Shanghai Kid, Takashi Nishiyama and his team at Capcom started working on the original Street Fighter under the idea of ​​”what if we made a game that just fights for beat them?” bosses up?”

The influence of those older karate and kung fu games would shine through in the designs of Ryu and Ken’s white and red gi, although of course that wouldn’t be where the similarities end.

Street Fighter took many of the good concepts like special moves, multiple rounds, and reluctance to block from its predecessors and brought them together in an experience that was faster and more engaging.

The game also offered the arcade ladder that is still used in the genre to this day, where he fights a large number of opponents back to back for a boss boss to try and get a high score.

Capcom experimented not only with fighting games, but also with the way they could be played.

Street Fighter’s Deluxe arcade cabinet had only 2 buttons and a joystick. Players could determine the power of their attacks by how hard they pressed these buttons.

It wasn’t the best idea for pretty obvious reasons to have a bunch of kids and teens smashing your analog buttons as hard as they could, so Capcom would go further with their fighters using the 6 separate buttons to get light, medium and control heavy attacks, which became a staple of the franchise and many other fighting games over the years.

Even though the original Street Fighter is one of the most monumental and influential video games in the history of the medium, going back and playing it now doesn’t offer the smoothest ride through time.

Attacks are slow to land, specials only work when they want them to, enemies do a lot of damage and you can usually only play as Ryu.

You can see and feel the skeleton of something amazing there, but the developers still had no grasp of the magic they were creating.

Capcom would learn from those initial weaknesses and work even harder to make Street Fighter 2 for 1991.

The smoother action, responsive buttons, more characters and tons of extra style exploded in the fighting games boom at the beginning of the decade, making Street Fighter and Capcom household names around the world.

That second game is the one that went out the door to show everyone what fighting games could be, but it wouldn’t have been without the outline of the original Street Fighter.

35 years later, Ryu still uses a lot of those same punches and kicks from SF1, and he definitely still throws those Hadokens out too.

The franchise has gone through mountain peaks and painful lows over the decades, but it shows no signs of slowing down in the short term as Street Fighter 6 brings together aspects of everything that preceded it into one hopefully grand experience.

To help celebrate the occasion, Capcom’s Official Artwork Page shared a handful of pages of Street Fighter’s early design documents, revealing a sketch of the famous logo, a concept of how the wall-breaking intro would turn out, and confirming that Ryu and Ken would be the main protagonists early on.

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Let’s give Capcom and Street Fighter kudos for having played a huge part of our lives all these years, and if you have any memories of the original Street Fighter (or Fighting Street), let us know in the comments.

Video via Vinsanity.