Street Fighter is the long-running franchise of fighting games started by Capcom in the late 1980s. The earlier installments in the series - particularly the second one alongside it's updates - played a part in shaping up the fighting game genre as we know it to the point that even the modern games make use of the conventions brought up by this series.
Installments[]
Street Fighter - 1987[]
The original Street Fighter arcade game does share a bit of a feel with the very early fighting games, that said it already introduced the 6-button layout (punches and kicks of three different strenghts) as well as command-based special moves, although performing them is a lot trickier compared to the later games (the button have to be pressed at the exact end of the command motion rather than shortly after it).
The game revolved around Ryu - the sole playable character for the Player 1 side - competing in an international tournament to prove his strength. Some of the series' mainstays like Ken, Gen, Birdie, Eagle, Adon and Sagat were also introduced in this installment.
Street Fighter II - 1991-2017[]
The most well known sub-series and perhaps the one that received the most updates (even to this day, having recently received the Ultra Street Fighter II installment for Nintendo Switch), Street Fighter II have improved upon many of the concepts introduced in the previous alongside introducing some of it's own ones (like grapples, being able to go from a basic attack to a special move as well as being able to hit the opponent with another attack before one recovers), both with itself and it's updates (including Super Moves activated through gathering a power stock) and have effectively popularized and defined the genre, inspiring a number of developers to create their own fighting games.
Revolving around an international fighting tournament as before - this time hosted by a dictator M. Bison, this sub-series served as debuts for a lot of the series' mainstays like Guile, Chun-Li, Blanka, Dhalsim, Zangief and E.Honda. SF2's final four opponents like Vega, Balrog, the aformentioned M.Bison as well as the returning Sagat would end up being human-playable characters with Champion Edition, and Super would also introduce Fei Long, Cammy White, T-Hawk and Dee Jay.
Street Fighter Alpha - 1995-1998[]
Started in order to help shorten the wait for the all-new Street Fighter III, Street Fighter Alpha is an interquel set between the first and second entries that features the younger version of the SF2 cast, crosses over some characters from Final Fight (in itself intended to be the sequel to the original Street Fighter), shifts the art-style to the cartoonish one similar to the one featured in Capcom's Marvel fighting games and further expands on SF2's systems, introducing chain combos/custom combos guard cancels, mutliple levels for super moves and - as of the second update Street Fighter Alpha 3 - selectable fighting styles.
Street Fighter III - 1997-1999[]
The long awaited Street Fighter III features an almost all-new cast - keeping only Ryu and Ken from the previous games, with Chun-Li returning by the second update - gave the ability to chose one out of three super moves - now named Super Arts in this series - per character and also introduced parries - an ability to deflect the opponent's attacks with precise timing of taping forward/down - in addition to revamping many of the mechanics. The series's graphics are noted for being among one of the most-elaborate-looking 2D games.
Post-sprite based installments[]
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