See more posts like this on Tumblr
#street fighterMore you might like
GI Joe lasted a surprisingly long time. By 1993, they made Street Fighter crossover Joes.
Red Earth, 1996.
A good way to describe this very rare arcade game is “He Man and the Masters of the Universe meets Street Fighter II.”
Red Earth is one of only a few Capcom fighting games from the 1990s that was never released on home consoles, so if you can find a working machine, you’re in for a real treat. The game is set in a mythical 1400s that looks more like He-Man’s Planet Eternia (in fact, everything about this game reminds me more of Masters of the Universe than Street Fighter II), and it has a single-player mode with two unique attributes: 1) you acquire attributes and more damaging weapons as you continue in the game, including things like immunity to poison attacks or a cooler sword, and 2) it has a single-player mode where you fight monsters instead of just other playable characters.
The signature character is Leo, a warrior-king who turns into a monster, like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and who longs to be human again. Personally, I think he is making a big thing out of nothing, since all the Disney fangirls I’ve met think the Beast was far more interesting looking before he turned human, and his restored human looks were something of a letdown.
The other characters include a ninja, a Chinese martial artist who might just be Chun-Li’s ancestor, and a cute girl-witch. As the appeal of the game is the single player (which may be why it was never a famous tournament fighter), it has Ninja Gaiden-esque cut scenes where each character experiences levels out of order and has a different story. Nowadays, a story mode is expected for fighters, but it was quite revolutionary then. If anything, the game suffered from being too ahead of its time.
“Karate Bear Fighter” (1975) was based on the actual exploits of Sonny Chiba’s teacher, Mas Oyama, a real life karate expert of Korean birth who was not only Chiba’s teacher, but also the inspiration for Ryu from the Street Fighter games.
Ryu is a sanitized version of the very eccentric and insanely tough Mas Oyama’s real personality. Oyama would not only fight bears and oxen publicly with his karate for attention, but would also go into the wilderness to train extensively as a hermit. He also lived, simultaneously, with his wife and girlfriend.