With six mainline entry installments across almost 40 years (not counting spin-off titles like Marvel vs Capcom), it's a little hard to understand what the landscape of fighting games looked like before Street Fighter. Players fought to beat previously attained high scores instead of other players, attacks were stiff and lacked the input chains that we now know as “combos,” and rosters were often filled with identical clones and lacked the kind of variety we take for granted. The eclectic personality of later games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken couldn’t even be fathomed in the early days of the genre; there was a rigorous presentational formula that most, if not all, fighting games clung to.
But that all changed drastically in 1991 when Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior landed on arcade systems: It absolutely decimated the old style of fighting games like a nuclear warhead and paved the way for not just four additional sequels (and a host of ports and special editions) but a new golden era for the genre, allowing for entries like Killer Instinct and The King of Fighters. In 2026, Street Fighter is absolutely ubiquitous in pop culture, transcending games to earn two prior (critically derided) live-action adaptations and a brand new reboot from Paramount Pictures and director Kitao Sakurai. And while the film is a far cry from the revolutionary game-changer it’s based on, it’s certainly the closest any filmmaker has come to bringing the franchise’s signature verve and bombast to the big screen.
