Even if you have never played in your life, you know Street Fighter. It’s no wonder: the saga has been going strong for almost 40 years with punches, combos, extravagant characters, and a lot of fun, both solo and competitively. The curious thing is that almost everyone mentally adds a “2” when they hear about the video game because, after all, the first part was not as huge a success as the one they had four years later, with a sequel polished to perfection that delighted an entire generation. However, not everyone knows that before Street Fighter II there was another sequel that even Capcom wanted to bury underground. For good reason.
Ah, yes, the distant year 2010
We may not fully believe it, but right now we are living in the future. In Back to the Future II, they imagined that by 2015 we would have self-lacing shoes and hoverboards, because of course it sounded so far away that none of us would make it there alive, right? The same happened to Street Fighter 2010, which in 1990 imagined the world twenty years later in an action platformer that has more in common with Streets of Rage than with Street Fighter. Of course, if we also take a mistake and magnify it even more, the result can only be catastrophic.
Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight was not born as a proper sequel to the 1987 game. In fact, in Japan, it was called Kevin Straker, a cyborg police officer who fights against the Parasites, intergalactic criminals with powers. At the end of the game, Dr. Jose (the villain who created the Parasites) tells Kevin the truth: he is also a parasite, and all his cybernetic armor was created by an insect that was implanted in his brain. None of this was seen in the international version, where Kevin became Ken (yes, that Ken), Dr. Jose was called Troy, and the story could not be more different.
It all starts when Ken, who won the Street Fighter tournament 25 years earlier, has become a scientist who has created a substance (Cytoplasm) to give superhuman strength to any living organism. When Troy, his lab partner, dies, Ken decides to find his killer. In the end, it turns out that Troy faked his own death to steal the substance and create an army of superpowered warriors. What’s more: he implanted cytoplasm in Ken’s body and is about to die! In the end, he wins, of course, and returns to Earth to control his own substance. Oh, yes! Typical Street Fighter!
The game is difficult, a madness that has nothing to do with the saga, and frankly, quite bad. In fact, if it hadn’t had the name Street Fighter, it’s very likely that no one would have even approached it in the first place. Of course, the following year the disaster of this game was forgotten with the release of Street Fighter II, which was an absolute hit in arcades and ended up being ported to all the consoles that existed: the saga never tried to be a shabby platformer again and focused, from that moment on, on what it did best: the beatings and the hadoukens.
It’s not that the journey has been perfect, of course: the older folks around here will remember how, after adapting it for theaters, they tried to sell us Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. And that was indeed a disaster for which they have no excuse.