Street Fighter Artwork

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, released in 1991, was the first true sequel to the original Street Fighter, following an unsuccessful attempt to brand the 1987 fighting action game Final Fight as a Street Fighter sequel, and an officially commissioned spin-off Human Killing Machine on the ZX Spectrum and other home computers. It was one of the earliest arcade games for Capcom's CP System hardware and was designed by Akira Nishitani (Nin-Nin) and Akira Yasuda (Akiman), who were previously responsible for Final Fight and Forgotten Worlds. The release of the game had an unexpected impact on gaming and was the beginning of a massive phenomenon.
Street Fighter II was the first one-on-one fighting game to give players a choice from a variety of player characters with different moves, an option which created hitherto unknown levels of depth and replay value for an arcade game. Each player character had a fighting style with approximately 30 or more moves (including then-new grappling moves such as throws) as well as two or three special attacks per character.
In the single-player mode, the player's chosen character is pitted sequentially against the seven other main characters before confronting the final four 'boss' opponents, who were CPU-controlled characters not selectable by the player.