That title sounds like a bad Electronic Gaming Monthly April issue cover blurb, I know. The difference is, here it is real. While EGM would have hired an artist to fake the screen shots, this port is quite real. A team of several developers are working on making a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) port of Street Fighter 2 (SF2) by Capcom. Interestingly, this fan port may be capable of running on actual NES hardware from a real NES cartridge.
An arcade phenomenon comes home
It is not for me to argue the merits of Street Fighter 2, you either love it or hate it. The final say goes to sales figures. Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior (the original SF2 game) sold about 60,000 arcade units. This is quite an astronomical number for an arcade machine. Not all machines were purchased by arcade owners though. Gas stations, if they had one arcade machine it was going to be a Street Fighter 2 unit.
The following year, the original Street Fighter 2 game would come home to the Super Nintendo console. This was quite a coup for Nintendo as they were able to get Capcom to release the 1-on-1 fighter as an exclusive. This version of the popular fighting game would sell over six million copies.
Over a year later the Sega Genesis would receive a version of Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition. This release would not break two million copies sold.
Bringing the experience to the NES
Officially, SF2 has never been released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. There are hacks and imports from unlicensed developers of varying levels of quality.
Street Fighter 2 Deluxe NES as the development team are referring to it, is being spearheaded by ROMHacking.net user “sebastianangel”. In development for about a year according to Eventhubs.com, this port makes cunning use of another NES game.
The team behind Street Fighter 2 Deluxe NES are using the same mapper as Castlevania 3 by Konami. This means technically, fans could see a physical release. Of course, Capcom would put a stop to that so do not hold your breath on that happening.
Final thoughts on Street Fighter 2 Deluxe NES
On Twitter Fox Cunning posted a video of the game in action. We get to see Chun-Li take on Ryu on her level. Of course there are no line scrolls, no parallax scrolling, etc. What is here though, great animation, bright colors, and it appears the flow is just right.
It remains to be seen what the other characters included will be. I am unsure of any cuts that may need to be made either.
What is shown is freaking awesome though. If you could have any demake made, what would it be and on what platform would it be on? Let me know in the comments below.
This article was originally published on Retro Gaming Magazine