![]() King Hippo was vaguely Polynesian, obese, and threw fruit into the air when you defeated him. There was Great Tiger, who was from India and wore a turban on his head with a jewel that glowed when he was about to uncork his special move. Don Flamenco was yet another vain, effeminate Spaniard. There was Piston Honda - again with the Japanese characters named Honda! - who was a stoic boxer from Tokyo. ![]() In Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!!, a classic from the early Nintendo days, your fighter, Little Mac, took on a constellation of opponents from around the world - note the theme - whose defining traits were somehow always linked to their putative ethnicity. ![]() The landscape of popular games from the late 1980s and early 1990s was littered with crazy ethnic caricatures. It's not hard to imagine the alternate universe in which that particular game mechanic launched a million women's studies essays and blog posts.īut, alas, Street Fighter II was hardly alone. We both had legitimate reasons, but then we came to an agreement to not make it shorter." ![]() "You know how each character has a life bar? At one point, I wanted to make the power gauge for Chun-Li shorter than for the other characters because women are not as strong. We were coming to this realization two decades too late: Street Fighter II was racist as hell. Vega, a ponytailed Spanish fighter, was so vain he wore a mask to cover his face. Guile, the blonde-haired, camo-clad American soldier, fought on a military base in front of fighter jets. Zangief, a musclebound Russian, had scars from fighting bears.īlanka, who was from the Brazilian rainforest, was a beast-man who growled and grunted. He was fond of shouting "Yoga flame!" as he spat a fireball. You fought with Dhalsim in a temple as elephants watched. His fighting stage was a bathhouse.ĭhalsim, a skinny Indian fighter with shrunken skulls around his neck, could stretch his limbs really far to punch or kick, because his fighting style was based on yoga. Polygon's piece got us talking about the Street Fighter characters that we preferred to play with (As I said before, I was a Ryu guy). I rarely had money left over for lunch, but I was nice with Ryu, so it was basically a wash. ![]() The grocery store across the street from my middle school had a Street Fighter console, and all the other boys and I would play it before the school day began. ![]()
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