Street Fighter Miscellany: Trivia, Cameos and Secrets
A scrapbook for Street Fighter fans
Street Fighter Miscellany collects the small curiosities that surround Capcom’s long-running fighting series: odd cameos, unused data, hidden commands, translation slips and other Easter eggs. It is meant as a scrapbook rather than a reference work. Every page of the main volumes holds seven short entries, each paired with a picture, and none of them depends on another, so you can open any page and start reading.
Newcomers will find plenty here that is new to them. Long-time players will recognise a good share of it, but may enjoy the reminder of the strange and offbeat details that give the games their colour. The material covers the whole run of the franchise, from the first game in 1987 up to the present day, and it also reaches into related media such as comics, cartoons and films.
How the pages are organised
- The four volumes hold the trivia entries themselves. Start with Volume I, then move on to Volume II, Volume III and Volume IV.
- The series guides give a quick technical profile of each game family: Street Fighter, Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III and Street Fighter IV.
- The timeline lists the main release of every game that belongs to the Street Fighter world or merely winks at it.
- Open questions gathers claims that could not be confirmed.
- Sources and further reading names the books, films and websites behind the material.
A note on naming
Throughout the site, “Street Fighter” in plain type refers to the series as a whole, while the first game is the one that carries the same name. “Street Fighter II” means the whole family of games that grew from the original World Warrior release, and the same convention applies to Alpha, III and the rest. The first title in each family is identified by its subtitle, so World Warrior is the start of the II line and Warriors’ Dreams is the start of Alpha.
Titles are often shortened to their taglines for readability, so “Champion Edition” stands for the full name of that update. Likewise, “Super” means Super Street Fighter II, whereas “Super IV” means Super Street Fighter IV. Context makes the intended game clear in every case. The site also uses the international names of games and characters rather than the Japanese ones. If the many revisions are hard to keep straight, the timeline and the series guides lay everything out.
Where the site came from
The first pages went online in April 2011, around the middle of the Street Fighter IV period. The author enjoyed that game to a degree, but found that the real pull was the artwork and presentation of Street Fighter II, which made a strong impression in childhood. Coverage aims to be broad, yet it leans toward the nostalgia of that early-1990s era of arcade gaming, and readers should expect that bias.
Something to watch
A good place to begin is the redrawn introduction that Udon produced for the 2008 HD Remix of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. It was left out of the finished game for reasons that were never explained, but it later turned up online and is a fair taste of the series’ visual flair.
