Author: Stephen Kleckner / Source: VentureBeat
If you’re a Street Fighter fan, yet you don’t own a Nintendo Switch, the upcoming Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection may trigger you. Capcom is adding one slightly rare chapter of the Street Fighter series to the 30th Anniversary Collection, Super Street Fighter II : The New Challengers – Tournament Battle … and it’s a Nintendo Switch exclusive.
Before you other platform loyalists edit that gif to create an angry meme directed at Capcom, do me a favor; have a seat. Relax for a few minutes. Let me explain to you what Super Street Fighter II : The New Challengers – The Tournament Battle is, why you may have not seen or heard of it, and why it may not be a great fit for the other platforms.
Let’s talk about The Tournament Battle
Tournament Battle was one of 1990s’ Capcom’s few well-intentioned arcade flops. On paper, it sounds like a fantastic idea: An arcade operator can link up four arcade machines running a special version of Super Street Fighter II : The New Challengers, which features a tournament mode. This tournament mode would enbale eight players, two per machine, to participate in a single-elimination tournament. When a round in the tournament has completed, the game will instruct players to move to a specific spot on a specific machine to set up the next round of the tournament.
There would be no need for a player to bust out a pen-‘n’-paper to seed and draw out a bracket, because the game will figure that all out automatically.
Yes. I said, “draw out a bracket.”
This was the 1990s. We didn’t have apps or online tournament software to seed and run brackets for us. Tournament Battle, as a concept-of-convenience for event organizers, was ahead of its time. But Tournament Battle also had some significant hiccups that seemed a bit too out-of-touch with what both arcade operators and players needed.
The reality for arcade operators
For Western arcade operators, the concept of Tournament Battle was a hard sell. Supporting Tournament Battle meant purchasing four new CPS2 board kits, which back in those days were not a cheap investment. Those four boardsets would then have to have four Street Fighter-ready arcade cabinets, sitting next to each other, to drop into.
The advertisement Capcom put out to arcade vendors to advertise Tournament Battle show the game running on four of Capcom’s deluxe “Big Blue” cabinets. Capcom’s Big Blues weren’t just expensive pieces of equipment back in the day — they were humongous beasts as well!
The floor space required to support a Tournament Battle setup like that made the game unfriendly, and unrealistic, for operators with pizza parlors and liquor stores on their game route. The Tournament Battle concept only really works in a large dedicated arcade with significant floor space.
Keep in mind that Tournament Battle hit during the height of the first fighting game explosion. Developers were flooding the arcade market with their own fighting game titles, and for an arcade operator to…
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