Warheads or Street Fighter II?
As I sit here typing this yarn it’s June 6th in the year two thousand and twenty-three. Street Fighter VI, the latest installment of the long running video fighting game series where pixel-ized characters from around the world go toe-to-toe in hand-to-hand combat, was released in to the waiting arms of the world by Capcom Entertainment Inc just four days prior and over one million punch-crazed video game enthusiasts have been fighting it up since, myself included.
The Street Fighter franchise holds a special place in my fist-sized heart, and while I may not have been there for all of it’s ups and downs, it was there for me when I needed it. While I could wax poetic about every game in the series (and I just might) from Street Fighter II (we don’t talk about the first Street Fighter) and all it’s various, turbo-charged iterations, the prequel, anime-frenzied chaos of the Alpha series, the freaks and weirdos of the Street Fighter III series, my complete missing out on Street Fighter IV saving the fighting game industry, and my late-to-the-party, pandemic appreciation of Street Fighter V.
While I’ve spent the better part of the last four days play the new installment and listening to the new album by the band of Punk Rock stalwarts, Rancid, released the same day as Street Fighter VI, in a double-punch attack on the part of my brain that stores my nostalgia, I’m reminded of how Street Fighter Hadouken-ed itself into my life.
The year was nineteen hundred and ninety-one-ish. I was a rapidly growing ten year old boy hooked on a steady diet of comic books, horror movies, and video games. Everything a growing child needs. My family resided at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a literal square mile subdivision named “Mission Viejo,” (which means “old mission,” I guess) in the Denver, Colorado suburb of Aurora. Myself and my swarm of school chums rode our bikes across it’s length on the reg when we weren’t plugged directly into our Nintendo Entertainment Systems.
Just outside of the subdivision, at the top of our cul-de-sac, resided a Circle K convenience store. I sat on the other side of a major street, Chambers Road, which I was recently granted permission by my parental units to cross on my own provided I do so at the designated, street light covered cross walk. Inside the Circle K was an entire double-sided row filled to the brim with salted, sweet, chocolatey, and candied sweets, which was the stores main attraction for me.
Requiring provisions for a long night of Nintendo Entertainment System pixilated frivolity, and having recently acquired my weekly allowance, a trip to the Circle K was imminent. I hopped on my trusty bicycle and peddled my way up and out of the cul-de-sac, to Chambers Road, and successfully safely across to the Circle K.
Laid out before me was a seemingly endless aisle of candy choices but I knew what I craved: Warheads Extreme Sour Hard Candy, a curious little circular candy that had recently entered the scene boasting of it’s candy apple flavor being so sour your head would explode into a mushroom cloud of surprise, according to it’s cartoonish packaging art. Candy of this extremity enticed ten year old boys across the square mile of Mission Viejo and we’d often dare each other to eat more than one at a time to see if the head-exploding promise would be delivered on. It never was but maybe we just didn’t reach the proper amount of Warheads contained in a human boys mouth at a single time.
Having located the sour candy’s aisle location I suddenly became aware of an interesting noise emanating from the far back corner of the Circle K. It sounded like the tap, tap, tapping of an arcade cabinet’s buttons, an unmistakable sound to my ten year old ears. Accompanying the click-ity clack was an exciting sounding music, crunched into a digital sound wave, hitting my ears. I followed the sounds to the source, which indeed was an arcade cabinet machine, with two, possibly teenager boys, concealing the screen with their torsos while they frantically worked the buttons. Clack, clack, clack-ity, clack.
This was a new addition to the Circle K. No arcade game had been there before. What game could entice the store enough to purchase it’s massive bulk and plop it here, next to the Coors Light beer cooler section and the shelves of automobile windshield wiper fluid? I snuck to the right of the machine so as to get a clear view of the arcade machine’s screen, and see what was causing all this frantic button smashing.
Now, keep in mind, this was, what did I say? Nineteen hundred and ninety-one? I was, at ten years old, firmly entrenched in video games, and had played quite a few but I’d never seen anything like what was on this screen. This was way before the rise, and domination, of the Information Super Highway. The only way to see new video games was to go to the rental store and pick a game based solely on the boxes art, patronizing the local arcade to see if any new machines had magically appeared, have on of those friends who always managed to have the latest games, have a subscription to Nintendo Power, the official Nintendo licensed magazine that kept America’s youth abreast of all the latest Nintendo happenings, or wander into a Circle K, which was the path I chose this day. I had no precedence for this kind of game. It was completely new to me.
What I saw with my wide eyes were two, brightly colored, almost cartoonish, but still somehow the best video game graphics I’d ever seen, standing opposite each other on the screen. They seemed to be some sort of martial arts expects based on their stereotypical karate class garbs. One was white with a red headband, the other was a blond, cocky looking fellow with an entirely red outfit. Both were sleeveless, standing at the ready, fists up, in front of a cheering crowd of onlookers, perhaps located on some kind of army base because there was a fucking jet just chilling there. Neither of these characters moved. Then, suddenly, the game screamed from it’s speakers “FIGHT” and the teenage boys at the controls sprung into action, thwapping buttons and jostling joysticks. Their digital counterparts reacted with each command and began jumping, punching, and kicking each other. They were fighting. It was a fight they were having. This is a game where you fight other people. A fighting game. It soon became clear to me that each player was trying to knock the other one out. Atop the screen were two bars, one on each side, that depleted incrementally each time a character received a punch to the face or a kick to the stomach, which the white-clothed player was doing much more affectively and very soon the red player’s bar was gone and he was on the ground. I was amazed, but it wasn’t over. The red player was back up as game fairly screamed “ROUND TWO” in it’s loud, digitized voice. The fighting commenced again as kicks and punches battered each fighter. In short order, player white had won again, ending the seemingly best two out of three match.
I was enamored. The teenagers didn’t seem to share my feelings as they both looked at each other lackadaisically shrugged, turned, and left, leaving just me and the arcade game, whose now clearly visible cabinet read in bold red and yellow writing “STEET FIGHTER II.”
I made a b-line to the cashier and demanded four, twenty-five cent discs in exchange for my American one dollar bill, twenty-five cent discs being the standard agreed upon cost for one turn operating an arcade machine. Once I had the discs I dashed back to the machine, slid one into the vertical slot on the machine and hit the “player one” button.
The screen displayed a map of the planet Earth and all it’s continents. Below the map was a grid of eight boxes, each containing a different, pixelated face. I’d get to choose my digital counterpart, and there wasn’t just the red and white fighters, there were six others. I pushed the joystick to the right to navigate the face grid. They all looked so amazing to my ears. All unique and distinguishable from each other. This one guys hair was a flat-top jutting out like a curve, a gravitation impossibility. This one guy looks like he might wrestle bears. Before I could decide, the game grew tired of waiting for me and made a selection on my behalf, which to my joy was a hairy, green beast man named “Blanka.” A monster even!
The now familiar round start appeared on the screen. My opponent was the red fighter from before.
“FIGHT!”
Having no real understanding of what any of these six buttons laid out before me did I frantically started hitting each of them and wiggling the joystick around. This Blanka character started kicking and punching but the red guy, now being computer controlled, had no patience for my greenness and proceeded to pummel me, unrelentingly, until my monster man lay defeated on the ground. It took mere seconds, but I still had the second round. I’d surely have mastered this game by rounds end.
“ROUND 2!”
You’d be surprised to find that I did not in fact master the game, more so the game had mastered me. However, in my frantic, button mashing frenzy tactic the best the red opponent I was “shocked” to discover something else… my green monster man suddenly exploded in a burst of electrical current that consumed his entire body, and when the red play got to close, was electrified by the effect and knocked away from Blanka.
”How the hell did I do that,” I excitedly wondered. It turned out repeatedly, and quickly, smashing one of the three buttons dedicated to punching would produce this electric result. There was nowhere on the arcade cabinet that explained this, nothing to clue me into the fact that this game also had secret abilities. There’s more to this game than meets the eye. Did Blanka have more secret tricks. I started mashing the three kick buttons producing nothing more than a flurry of kicks. Maybe Blanka was the only one with this secret ability. I soon found that to be false as the red player was delivering a thorough ass-whooping upon me, his killing blow was placing his outstretched hands palms together to launch a blue fireball at Blanka. That was my first time seeing, and being defeated by the now legendary “Hadouken.”
Another mad dash to the cashier to exchange all of my American dollar bills for twenty-five cent discs and forsake the Warheads sour candy I originally came here to buy. I pumped disc after disc into that arcade, each attempt selecting a different character. From Japan, Ryu, the white fighter from earlier. Ken, the American in the red outfit. Dhalsim, the Indian, stretchy, yoga master. Chun-Li, the high-flying, kicking expert from China. Zangief, indeed, a massive Russian bear wrestler. Guile, the flat-topped American army man. E. Honda, a Japanese Sumo wrestler, and Blanka, the Brazilian jungle monster. The “World Warriors” of Street Fighter II.
Through random button mashing and joystick flinging I managed to perform a Hadouken but I had no way of knowing the exact combination of joystick and buttons that produced it. I kept going, determined to learn all the secrets this game had to offer, until my last disc was gone, which given the automated difficulty level of the original Street Fighter II arcade machine, happened quickly.
Fresh out of money discs, my candy funds depleted but my head abuzz with the excitement of a completely new type of video game to explore, I left the convenience of the Circle K, hopped on my bicycle, head back across bustling Chambers Road, and down the cul-de-sac home. I’d spend all my free time scrounging for loose twenty-five cent discs, or trying to con my folks into letting me do extra chores for more discs, then pleading with them to let me venture back across Chambers Road to the Circle K, to the place that contained the arcade machine of Street Fighter II.
I spent many hours at that Circle K, trying to unlock the games secrets, trying to make a Hadouken fly at my whim. Lurking just on the horizon, unbeknownst to me, was something that would give me unfettered access to Street Fighter II. The popular home-based video game machine, the Nintendo Entertainment System, was at the end of it’s “8-Bit” graphics life and taking it’s spotlight would be the shiny new, loudly proclaimed SUPER Nintendo Entertainment System, bringing with it “16-Bits” of graphical power presentation. Available to be played on the “SNES” would be Street Fighter II, Circle K-less.
SNES May be where I truly became on with the Street Fighter series but without meeting it in person under the florescent glow of the Coors Light beer cooler section at the Circle K, that relationship would not have happened. Rarely do I get to experience something random like walking into a convenience store and being impacted so profoundly by something. That’s just not how this floating rock in space spins anymore. Everything is telegraphed and promoted endlessly through every possible source, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, multiplied by a million screaming voices all trying to be louder than the rest. Discovery of something, hell, discovery of something new, is not so common, but I suspect it can still happen. It’s got to still happen. Whatever the modern day equivalent is of spending all of you sour Warhead candy money to play a new arcade machine in a convenience story is, I believe is out there. Or else, what the fuck are we doing here?
