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Hugo and Haggar make yet another cameo appearance in the background of Super Street Fighter IV's North America (Metro City) stage. Hugo can be seen hauling a steel girder and further away in the distance, a statue of Mayor Haggar can be seen holding up a Metro City sign. The car-break bonus game in Super Street Fighter IV contains an additional appearance of Haggar, this time on a billboard advertising Metro City. Hugo became playable in the IV series with the release of Ultra Street Fighter IV in 2014 yet if he is fighting on the Metro City stage he can still also be seen in the stage background. How to make sense of this? It's probably easiest to explain the 'second Hugo' as another one of the Andore brothers; mutiple Andores were accepted on screen at the same time in Final Fight so why not in Ultra IV!
Rainbow Mika has an extremely obscure cameo in the 2001 PlayStation game Kuusou Daibouken X3, (a.k.a. Startling Adventures) a minor release in Japan only. The X3 part of the title seemingly refers to the three different adventures contained on the disc. R. Mika appears in the the Space Rescue Joe section of the game offering advice to the player. The scarcity of information on this title is such that a transcript of R. Mika's dialogue is unobtainable at this time.
Capcom's Street Fighter and Rival Schools series of games are linked together by the character Sakura Kasugano. Sakura made her debut in Alpha 2 (1996) but she is also a playable character in Rival Schools (1997), representing Tamagawa Minami High School. Rival Schools sees students from six different high schools in Aoharu City squaring off to uncover the mystery of a number of recent kidnappings and attacks. Sakura is close friends with Hinata Wakaba from Taiyo High School (centre of picture) and Natsu Ayuhara from Gorin High School (sat on the right). Despite her popularity she does not feature in the Rival Schools sequel Project Justice. Perhaps she was too busy pursuing Ryu? Her time in Rival Schools is referenced in Alpha 3 with a tongue-in-cheek win quote:
I like street fighting better than sparring in rival schools!
Abandoned character designs for Street Fighter II include a clone of Kenshiro (Fist of the North Star), a riot policeman, a Tiger Mask rip-off, a rope-carrying, face-painted wrestler (broadly similar in aesthetic to the WWF's Legion of Doom and Demolition factions), an older fighter carrying sansetsukon who resembles Gen (minus the robe), a generic ninja (similar to Geki) and a stereotypical Ugandan shaman bearing the same body paint as WWF wrestler Kamala! Even more bizarre is the sketch of proto-Dhalsim that portrays him, essentially, as the Hindu deity Ganesha.... Note also the anchor tatoo on 'Zangief's' arm, this also appears in a famous, official illustration for World Warrior (drawn by Akiman) but is never seen again.
M. Bison's Dolls are a group of twelve brainwashed young women who act as his elite personal guard. They are each named after a calendar month in their respective native languages. Cammy is a former member of the group, where she was known as Killer-Bee and cloned from M. Bison's own genetic material. Later she (re)gains self-awareness and is rescued by Delta Red in England. The remaining dolls are, from left to right: Février, Aprile, Xiayu, Satsuki, Juni, März, Santamu, Noembelu, Decapre and Juli. Not pictured are Enero and Jianyu, both of whom play a more important role in Udon's Street Fighter comic. Juli and Noembelu were both kidnapped from T. Hawk's Thunderfoot tribe and Juli (real name Julia) is, by some accounts, T. Hawk's lover and by others the daughter of a German doctor who provided care for the tribe (although the two histories are not mutually exclusive). Due to their physical resemblence, the masked character Decapre is thought to be either a prototype or a clone of Cammy, an idea furthered by the Udon comic series.
Two different types of cabinet exist for the original Street Fighter arcade game. Besides pioneering the now typical six-button configuration (LP, MP, HP, LK, MK, HK) the 'Deluxe Upright' versions of the game used pneumatic controls that were connected directly to the game board via air hoses. Depending upon how hard the input was hit, the game would choose the strength of attack Ryu or Ken would perform. Inevitably these controls rapidly wore out and required frequent adjustment due to abuse from over-exuberant players.
Zangief's Alpha 2 stage has an interesting LED sign in the background. Two phrases scroll on repeat: 'сон......сон....сон... немного сон' and 'раоотать! раоотать! служащий'. The first phrase translates as 'sleep......sleep....sleep... just a little sleep' but as Russian doesn't differentiate between sleeping and dreaming the phrase could equally refer to 'a little dream'. The second phrase is, 'work! work! worker', to be understood as referring to a white-collar worker rather than a manual labourer.
