Hadouken! That’s an exclamation that, to many Prospect readers, will mean exactly nothing. To the rest of us it means duck, jump or block. It’s the sound with which a character in the computer game Street Fighter announces that he’s just thrown a fireball at you.
If we’re serious about paying attention to emergent cultural forms, the release this spring of Street Fighter 4 deserves a moment of our attention. The Street Fighter games are a significant part of the culture. A good portion of my generation spent adolescence and young adulthood hammering away at SF2 in the arcades and, later, on consoles. Its roster of playable characters is more familiar and resonant to many than the character line-up of Chaucer’s general prologue. And the game essentially established the model for a whole genre: the two-player “beat-em-up,” where each player controls a character with his or her own set of special moves and attacks, and these characters beat seven bells out of each other in two dimensions.
What’s interesting about this new version is that, 20-odd years on (with all that implies for Moore’s law), and running on some of the most sophisticated hardware available, Street Fighter 4 is in all its important essences exactly the same as its predecessors. This is curious because the history of videogame evolution is generally one of advancing complexity. First-person shooters, for instance, have gone from two dimensions to three, acquired elaborate plots, complex artificial intelligence routines and realistic physics. Street Fighter—which went through a couple of unsuccessful 3D iterations before returning in more or less canonical form—has done the reverse. Like Tetris—that other obdurate triumph of simplicity—it runs best on the flat.
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