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In my mind, Street Fighter II was the last really hugely popular arcade game. Sales numbers would seem to back that up as Street Fighter II was behind only Space Invaders and Pac-Man in terms of number of machines sold. Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II are also high on the list but by comparison, the original Street Fighter II sold 60,000 machines (Street Fighter II Championship Edition sold even more at 140,000 machines). By comparison, the Mortal Kombat machines only sold in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 units. See https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/the-25-best-selling-arcade-games-of-all-time.htm for more sales info.
Being one of the most popular arcade games, it was also one of the most anticipated home conversions of all time. This was in the 16-bit era of home gaming so home systems were significantly less capably than arcade machines at the time. It was all about how close to arcade perfect you could get but there were always some sacrifices. Graphics quality, sound quality, and sometimes game play were all at least somewhat below arcade standards.
Nintendo managed to get the first home conversion on the Super Nintendo system. The Super Nintendo had better graphics hardware than the Genesis but it also had a slower CPU. Many early games on the Super NES suffered from problems with slow-down when a lot was going on on-screen at the same time. As programmers became more familiar with the hardware, this became less of an issue over time.
As arcade version for the Super NES go, Street Fighter II was quite good. It wasn’t perfect but no arcade conversions at the time were. The slow-down issue did occur but it was relatively minor and didn’t impact game play much. Background animations were also reduced among other slight changes. As far as home conversions go, it was about as good as you could get. There was a Genesis port that came along a little later and it was ALMOST as good but didn’t quite match the graphics quality and control of the Super NES version. The PC Engine also had an impressive port of the later Championship Edition but it was really too late for the U.S. market and the TurboGrafx-16 was pretty much dead here by that time and this game never saw a U.S. release. I’m not sure what licensing issues may have existed but if they had decided to release a Turbo Duo bundle in the U.S. at that time that included this game they probably could have sold a ton of units and extended the life of that system.
One challenge with the home conversion of Street Fighter II and its sequels was the controller. The arcade version used a joystick and two rows of three buttons. The Super Nintendo controller actually had enough buttons though they weren’t really arranged in the ideal way for this game. Other systems didn’t even have enough buttons. Needless to say, this spawned an entire market in various six button controllers.
While not arcade perfect, this arcade conversion was probably the most impressive there had been up to that point. Even to the casual player today, this version is perfectly fine to play instead of the arcade version. Of course, these days you can emulate the arcade version or play arcade perfect conversions on newer systems. It’s still worthwhile to check out the Super NES version or even the other conversions at the time to see how impressive they were considering the hardware they were running on.
