The Golden Age of Arcade

Chapter 2: The Rise of Competitive Play

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The Golden Storm - When Lightning Struck Twice

THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH

Nobody plans a revolution. Sometimes it simply arrives, quarters in hand, ready to change everything.

THE PERFECT PUNCH

February 1991. A single Street Fighter II cabinet appears in a suburban Japanese arcade. Within hours, a crowd gathers. Within days, legends are born. Within months, the arcade industry would never be the same.

TECHNICAL MASTERY

Street Fighter II represented a quantum leap in arcade technology, running on Capcom's revolutionary CPS-1 (Capcom Play System) hardware. The system featured a Motorola 68000 CPU at 10 MHz alongside a Zilog Z80 for sound processing, with sophisticated sprite capabilities that allowed different characters to occupy different amounts of memory - Ryu could take up 8Mbit while Zangief required 12Mbit.

Development took approximately two years with a team of 35 to 40 people and a budget estimated at $2.45 million. The CPS-1 hardware represented Capcom's investment of about $9.8 million in custom chip development, equivalent to the power of ten normal arcade circuit boards at the time.

THE MASTER SPEAKS

"The basic idea at Capcom was to revive Street Fighter, a good game concept, to make it a better-playing arcade game."

• Yoshiki Okamoto, Producer

The development team was led by producer Noritaka Funamizu, with Akira Nishitani handling game design and Akira Yasuda in charge of character design. Music was primarily composed by Yoko Shimomura, with sound programming overseen by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.

PROGRAMMING POETRY

Street Fighter II's technical innovations were revolutionary for their time. The game featured the most accurate joystick and button scanning routine in the fighting genre, allowing players to reliably execute multi-button special moves that had previously required an element of luck. Each character's animations were painstakingly crafted, with the development team prioritizing appealing animation patterns over perfect game balance.

THE PERFECT BALANCE

Eight characters, each a universe of possibility:

• Ryu: The fundamental warrior
• Ken: Speed and flash
• Chun-Li: Lightning legs and agility
• Guile: Defensive power
• Dhalsim: Range and surprise
• Blanka: Unorthodox assault
• Zangief: Grappling dominance
• E. Honda: Precision strikes

THE INITIAL STRUGGLE

Street Fighter II was not immediately successful in Japan, as most arcade players initially played it solo rather than the intended multiplayer versus mode. Producer Yoshiki Okamoto was disappointed with the initial performance. However, after the Japanese arcade magazine Gamest began publishing articles explaining the "battle play" feature, the game gained considerable popularity.

The game topped Japanese arcade charts by April 1991, becoming the highest-grossing arcade game of both 1991 and 1992 in Japan. In the United States, individual machines were earning $1,300-1,400 per week, far exceeding expectations and giving a substantial boost to the struggling arcade industry.

REVOLUTIONARY IMPACT

Street Fighter II's success sparked what many consider a renaissance for arcade gaming. It established the template for fighting games that remains influential today, featuring highly detailed characters and stages that took full advantage of Capcom's CPS arcade chipset. The game allowed players to compete against each other in ways that previous fighting games had never achieved.

THE ARMS RACE

As controversy raged around Mortal Kombat, innovation accelerated across the industry.

THE PERFECT EVOLUTION

Mortal Kombat II arrived in 1993 as a direct sequel featuring significant improvements. The development team used a broadcast-quality $20,000 Sony camera instead of the Hi-8 camera from the original, and later switched to blue screen techniques for more efficient processing.

Actors were lightly sprayed with water to create a sweaty, glistening appearance, while post-editing highlighted flesh tones and improved muscle visibility. The sequel featured an increased roster from 7 to 12 characters, improved graphics and gameplay, and introduced multiple Fatalities per character along with new finishing moves like "Babalities" and "Friendships."

Mortal Kombat II proved to be an enormous commercial success, with WMS Industries reporting that much of their revenue gain in late 1993 was related to arcade sales of MKII. It became America's highest-grossing arcade game of 1994, selling approximately 27,000 arcade units and grossing $600 million.

THE BASKETBALL REVOLUTION

While fighting games battled for supremacy, Midway asked: What if we applied digitized technology to basketball?

THE PERFECT SHOT

Mark Turmell and his team at Midway faced a challenge in 1993 after their previous arcade release Total Carnage failed to meet sales expectations. Turmell wanted to develop a game with wider appeal and decided to mix digitized graphics with basketball, creating a successor to Midway's earlier basketball game Arch Rivals.

NBA Jam became the first NBA-licensed coin-operated arcade game, though the NBA was initially reluctant. As Turmell recalled, the league was concerned about putting their logo in arcades, worried about the association with some of the seedier arcade locations of the early 1990s.

TECHNICAL MASTERY

NBA Jam featured digitized likenesses of real NBA players, though the graphics were actually created from video footage of amateur basketball players, including future NBA player Stephen Howard. The game was written entirely in assembly language and featured team rosters from the 1992-93 NBA season.

Lead designer and programmer Mark Turmell wanted to create spectacular dunks and two-on-two basketball gameplay, but noted that "the whole game was very much a team effort." The development team came up with the idea of giving different players different attributes, creating strategic depth beneath the exaggerated action.

THE PERFECT CALL

NBA Jam's audio became iconic, with announcer Tim Kitzrow's memorable calls like "He's heating up!", "He's on fire!", and "Boomshakalaka!" The script was written by Jon Hey, though Kitzrow has stated that many lines were largely improvised during recording sessions.

THE ECONOMICS OF EXCELLENCE

NBA Jam was a massive commercial success, earning profits of $1 billion during its original arcade run - roughly three times the box office take of the movie Jurassic Park. The game held the world record for most money earned at one location in a single week: $2,468. Individual machines were so profitable that some required their coin boxes to be emptied multiple times per day.

Midway paid the NBA royalties of $100 for each arcade cabinet sold, a small price for what became one of the most successful arcade games of all time.

THE HIDDEN TRUTH

In 2008, Mark Turmell revealed a long-held secret about NBA Jam: as a Detroit Pistons fan, he had programmed the game with a bias against the Chicago Bulls. The game was coded so that Bulls players would miss last-second shots in close games against the Pistons. As Turmell explained, "If it boiled down to a last second shot, forget about it - the Bulls would never score."

THE FIGHTING GAME EVOLUTION

As Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat dominated arcades, other developers pushed the boundaries of what fighting games could become.

TECHNICAL ADVANCEMENT

The success of these games drove rapid hardware development. Capcom's CPS-1 system proved so successful that bootleggers created more unauthorized copies of Street Fighter II than official versions in some countries. This piracy problem led Capcom to develop the CPS-2 system in 1993, featuring encryption technology and "suicide batteries" to prevent unauthorized modifications.

SNK responded with the Neo Geo MVS system, designed as a premium platform for high-quality 2D graphics and CD-quality sound. While more expensive per play, operators found that players willingly paid premium prices for the superior experience.

THE COMPETITIVE SCENE

Fighting games transformed arcade culture from individual high-score pursuits to community-based competition. Players developed their own terminology, studied frame data, and organized informal tournaments around Street Fighter II cabinets. Mortal Kombat created its own community focused on discovering and sharing secret moves and hidden characters.

The games attracted different types of players: Street Fighter II drew martial arts enthusiasts and technical players, while Mortal Kombat appealed to those seeking spectacular violence and hidden secrets. Both communities shared techniques, strategies, and a dedication to mastery that redefined what it meant to be an arcade gamer.