Fighting Street (TurboGrafx-CD) Playthrough

A playthrough of NEC's 1989 fighting game for the TurboGrafx-CD, Fighting Street.

This video shows four back-to-back playthroughs in order to show the secret ending. The first two, beginning at 0:31 and 21:46, are played as Ryu. The third (43:55) and fourth (1:06:34) are played as Ken.

Fighting Street for the TurboGrafx-CD is the sole console adaptation of Street Fighter, a reasonably successful Capcom arcade game that released at the tail-end of 1987.

Before the 1991 release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, the Street Fighter name didn't carry much weight. The original Street Fighter drew some attention with its novel control scheme - the rarely seen "deluxe" version of the cabinet featured large, pressure-sensitive pads that the player had to hit to make their on-screen character attack - and its graphics and sound were impressive by 1987 standards.

The game did end up turning a profit for Capcom, but at a time when technology and game design sensibilities were evolving at a breakneck pace, Street Fighter was, at best, a minor hit that was quickly forgotten by the masses.

That's not to say that it didn't leave its mark, though. Street Fighter is historically significant for a few reasons.

It was the first game in the Street Fighter series, it was Capcom's first stab at the fighting genre, and it was the first fighting game to feature "special attacks" that required the player to input a specific series of carefully timed button presses.

Takashi Nishiyama, the project director, intended for Street Fighter to expand on the foundational ideas that he'd seeded in his role as lead designer for Irem's Kung Fu Master (Spartan X) - much like how he intended Fatal Fury, his first fighting game for SNK, to build on what had been done in Street Fighter.

The home version of Street Fighter is particularly notable for the place it occupies in the history of optical media. When the PC Engine's CD-ROM² add-on debuted at the end of 1988, it became the world's first piece of consumer-level hardware to read game data from a compact disc. The machine had two games available at launch - Fighting Street and No-Ri-Ko - and so they became the first games to ever ship on CD. Fighting Street was also one of the two games made available for the 1989 North American release of the CD-ROM².

None of that fancy tech needed to play a CD-ROM version of Street Fighter at home in 1989 came cheap, though. To get started, you'd have needed the base TurboGrafx-16 system ($199), the TurboGrafx-CD add-on ($399), a copy of the game ($49), and if you wanted to play with a friend, you'd also need a TurboTap ($20) and a second controller ($20). That's an initial outlay of $685 USD in 1989. Adjusted for inflation, that works out around $1680 in 2023 money. Oof.

And unfortunately, it's hard to imagine someone being super satisfied with their pricey investment when Fighting Street represented 50% of the system's library until new titles slowly began to dribble out several months later.

But either way, the NES was the standard at the time, so Fighting Street would've been extremely impressive to see on a TV in the late 80s. The characters and backgrounds were far closer to arcade quality than anything we would've been used to seeing at the time at home, and the remixed CD soundtrack is fantastic.

The music is actually good enough to make you want to endure the gameplay, and that's good, because the actual gameplay is anything but. There are a lot of good ideas at play, but it's a fighting game that predates Street Fighter II by four years, and it feels like it. The movement is jerky and awkward, the special moves require a ridiculous amount of precision to pull off, and the CPU will eagerly stomp you into the ground if you fumble an input trying to pull one off. It's manageable after a ton of practice, but the game is so slow and clunky that I think most people would likely just give up and move on.

I suppose that's to be expected from a fighting game that was attempting to reinvigorate and elevate an entire genre, though, and it deserves credit for its lasting contributions. It also introduced the world to Ryu, Ken, Sagat, Balrog, Birdie, Adon, Gen, and Eagle, so major props for that.

Street Fighter 6 came out today, so I thought it'd be neat to take a look back at the series' humble roots.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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