Street Fighter II is a one-on-one fighting game developed by Capcom. Despite not being the first of its kind, it achieved a massive amount of success and was extremely influential in the industry, which saw fighting games rise to become one of the most popular genres of the early 1990’s. Street Fighter II was so successful that Capcom just kept releasing more of it. From 1991 to 1994, there were 5 versions of Street Fighter II released.
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, which included eight playable characters.
Street Fighter II’: Championship Edition, which made the previously unplayable four boss characters playable, and also refined the balance of the characters.
Street Fighter II’ Turbo: Hyper Fighting, which increased the speed of the game, added a few new moves, and made further refinements to the character balance.
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, which introduced four new playable characters, raising the total to sixteen. Graphics and audio were updated along with the usual character balancing, but the speed was reduced.
Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which added super combos, air combos, and a choice of speed settings.
Many estimates of the arcade income are in the billions of dollars. The original SNES version of Street Fighter II sold 6.3 million copies, making it Capcom’s biggest selling game until Resident Evil 5 in 2009 sold 7 million. Taking into account the 4.1 million for Street Fighter II Turbo, and the 2 million for Super Street Fighter II, the three SNES versions of Street Fighter II sold 12.4 million copies. With another 1.65 million for the Megadrive version of Street Fighter II’ Plus, we have over 14 million copies sold.