Street Fighter II/Trivia

• Cash Cow Franchise: A cash cow within a cash cow, the II series is the most well-known and successful sub-series in the Street Fighter franchise. The SNES port of the original remains Capcom's best-selling game.
• Fan Nickname:
  • E. Honda's Sumo Squat is also known as the "Ass Slam".
  • Guile, "The Family Man".
  • "The First Lady of Gaming" for Chun-Li, which became canon as of Street Fighter IV. Also "Thunder Thighs" and Chunbuns.
  • More like Fan Abbreviation, but many fans just call Zangief as plain ol' Gief. Also "Blue/Green hand" for his Banishing Flat.
  • Balrog, Vega and M. Bison are called "Boxer", "Claw" and "Dictator" in international tournament play to avoid confusion caused by the name switchups from the Japanese to the English versions. In Japan, they were known as M. Bison, Balrog and Vega. When Capcom was localizing II for America, there was worry that Mike Tyson might sue them because of Balrog's resemblance to Tyson; thus, the name switch. Also, Vega wasn't a very menacing name, so it went to "Claw" (Vega/Balrog).
    • Balrog has Rog and Barlog.
    • Vega has "Matador", "Bull-Fighter", "Cage Fighter", and "Assassin".
  • Thawk for T. Hawk, doh.
  • Bruce for Fei Long.
  • Deej for DeeJay.
• Market-Based Title:
  • The full title of Street Fighter II′: Champion Edition in Japan is Street Fighter II Dash: Champion Edition. However, the word "Dash" is not spelled out, but represented on the game's logo by a prime mark (an apostrophe-like symbol used in mathematics to indicate derivatives). The prime symbol still appears on the overseas version's title screen, but Capcom USA didn't understand its significance and simply referred to the game as Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on promotional materials.
  • Likewise, Street Fighter II′: Hyper Fighting is known as Street Fighter II Dash Turbo: Hyper Fighting in Japan (the word "Turbo" did not appear in the overseas releases). The SNES version is simply known as Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting in all regions.
  • The first of the two Mega Drive/Genesis ports is known as Street Fighter II Dash Plus: Champion Edition in Japan and Street Fighter II′: Special Champion Edition everywhere else.
  • Super Street Fighter II Turbo is known as Super Street Fighter II X: Grand Master Challenge in Japan.
• Port Overdosed: Ported to every platform in existence at the time, and continually re-released since then. Even the ZX-freaking-Spectrum got a version.
• Retroactive Recognition: Yoko Shimomura, the woman behind the music of Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, Legend of Mana, Kingdom Hearts and Mario & Luigi, originally composed almost the entire soundtrack of the original games. The only tracks she didn't do were Sagat's theme and the round start/new challenger jingles.
• Talking to Himself: The laziest case of the series. Everyone not named Chun-Li had the same voice set in that game. This was fixed in Super.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Zangief was originally going to go by the name of Vodka Golbalsky. He was also going to be replaced in the early stages of II by Mike Haggar, but Capcom backed up because a quarter of the original roster was already comprised of American fighters. (Ken, Guile and Boxer)
  • One of T. Hawk's prototype names was... Geronimo. Luckily, a member of the American development team predicted the Unfortunate Implications and suggested that his name be changed. Else, the big guy might have ended up being renamed "Beetlebomb" and given a British accent in the Western versions.
  • Two of the four new characters in Super Street Fighter II were going to be head swaps of each other: namely Fei-Long and an unnamed rival. James Goddard, a Capcom USA employee who previously worked on Hyper Fighting and Saturday Night Slam Masters, was against the idea of having another pair of head swaps, since he believed that having a completely unique character instead of another head swap would add more variety to the game. The character he came up with to replace Fei-Long's rival was none other than Dee-Jay, who was originally modeled after Billy Blanks.