The History:
Manufacturer: Capcom- Release Date: 1991
- Production: ???
- Design by: Capcom
- Artwork by: Capcom
- Notes of interest: This sequel to Street Fighter II – The World Warrior allows the player to choose “boss” fighters and is the first game in the series that allows players to compete using these characters.
The Story:
Some of my best memories of the 90’s would be walking into the many arcades in the area with my little brother and my dad and seeing a long line of players over at the Street Fighter 2 machine. Though we barely knew any of the super moves, my little brother and I made many players sacrifice their hard earned money in attempt to beat us. Usually their attempts were met in vein and standing next to the side of the machine with a huge smile on his face was my father. He got quite a kick at watching his kids dismantle a crowd of teenagers.
Fast forward about 20 years later and I’m still a huge fan of Street Fighter, I have all the games on the console platforms and play the arcade versions via MAME quite often. The yearning for a true Street Fighter arcade machine though has always been on my mind and if I could find one for the right price, I would dedicate a spot to it in growing but quickly running out of space arcade. My Craigslist finds were quite poor, either the monitor didn’t work on one or the person wanted a ridiculous amount of money for the machine. (1250?!) I wouldn’t pay anything more then 300 bucks for the cabinet and even that was pushing it. A listing for one eventually popped up in my general area, but it was sold before the seller could even reply back to me that it was gone.
Luck was in my favor for getting this machine though, I did some in house work for client on his game console and sitting next to a Beer Tapper machine was a Street Fighter 2 cabinet! After I finished up with my work, the client asked what he owed me and I responded by saying “How much do you want for the Street Fighter 2?” He looked at the machine and then frowned. As it turned out the machine worked fine for years, but he suddenly had an issue with the board and the game wouldn’t start anymore. He gave the board to someone to try to fix and sadly the game was never returned to him. The client then told me that he was looking to get rid of it for awhile, but he just never got around to it. He said if I wanted the cabinet, I could take it…FOR FREE! After getting it home and hooking it up, it was time to see if this machine still worked at all.
What was REALLY wrong with it?
- No PCB board.
- Smelled like smoke
- Push buttons were dirty
- Overlay glass was not correct size.
The fixes:
The first and important fix was obviously the need to replace the missing PCB board to play the game. A quick call over to Arcade Adventures and that issue was solved within a few hours. I now had a Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting board in my possession and after getting it home and hooking it up, it power on with no issue. The stench of smoke was cleaned up quickly with some Simply Green and I just ended up replacing the buttons on the cabinet to get rid of the old dirty ones. The bad news is that all the connections are soldered on instead of using terminal hookups, but things could be much worse. The glass was easily replaced by a quick visit to ACE Hardware with the proper fitting glass only costing me 13 bucks.
Was it worth it?
Having an actual Street Fighter 2 machine in pretty decent shape is something I’ve always wanted and you can’t beat free. The fixes were cheap and quite easy to do and if I get bored of the game I can always switch it out with another JAMMA game. Well worth it in my opinion.
Would you sell it?
If someone was crazy enough to offer me a CPS 2 machine…maybe.
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