Capcom Re-Releasing Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo Cartridge, Celebrating 30th Anniversary in Style
Capcom are working the nostalgia strings quite hard. Previously they did a special release for Ducktales on a NES cartridge (it was just a cartridge shell, didn’t contain the game) to celebrate their remake of Ducktales launching at the time. Now, Capcom has teamed up with IAM8Bit.com to launch a special edition Street Fighter II cartridge for the Super Nintendo. The kicker is, this time it contains the actual game. That is also a reason I am not exactly excited for this announcement.
First, this feels like a cash grab to capitalize on the retro gaming market. Why? Because this is the vanilla Street Fighter II game – nothing is being added, tweaked, or fixed, in this re-release. The only thing that is different is that the label now reflects that this is a re-release (minus the official Nintendo Seal of Quality). There will be two limited editions made available – totaling 5,500 copies.
4,500 copies will be made available on a “Opaque Ryu Red” cartridge while 1,000 copies will be released on a “Translucent Glow-in-the-Dark Blanka Green” cartridge. Both will share the same label.
The colored cartridges will be randomly mixed together – best of luck getting that green one outside of Ebay.
There will be some goodies in the box too. A “premium” instruction manual, a foil stamped box and apparently some pieces of art among possibly other items.
The price for this deal is $100. This is quite high for a Super Nintendo cartridge containing a game that can be purchased off eBay for quite a bit less. Of course, that is for the game on a plain gray cartridge though.
If Capcom wants to push this hard and make it a truly memorable release they should add something. Maybe expand on the old EGM Sheng Long character trick and make him a real playable character if you manage the steps they detailed (nearly impossible even for the best players). Something, anything, Capcom!
Source: Kotaku
Not to mention a lot of people just download emulators and roms for a lot of retro games, or they scoop up one of the all in one retro game systems with built in games.
Nice post!
Honestly, when a legit re-release like this costs $100 I can hardly blame people for going the emulation route. It is not like the original SNES games are expensive either.
Yeah. That was one of the top selling snes games for a long while. They made a lot of them.
You bet they made a few of them. According to this Wikipedia article Street Fighter II: The World Warrior is the fifth most bought SNES game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_video_games
Weighing in at just under 6 and a half million copies sold. That is not counting how many they created that were not sold. So yeah, they made a lot of them. lol
I guess they will sell every one, though, and it becomes a million-dollar project. Work out all the costs around it, be tight with the budget, and rake in a great net profit for it. I can see why they're doing it, from a business standpoint.
I figure this is a license deal by IAM8Bit and Capcom simply are cashing a flat rate licensing check off this.
Capcom is one of those publishers that embraced digital licensing early on. I remember fully licensed arcade cabs by various companies as far back as 2001 having Street Fighter II and other Capcom games in them.
This is just the first time I have seen someone license it for an actual cartridge release though.
That's what I call dropping some knowledge. The retrogaming community on steemit has officially replaced the rest of the Internet for my go-to place to read about retrogaming.
Even replacing Retro Gaming Magazine for you? Protip: I am co-owner of RGM. Lol
Just checked out your website and bookmarked it. It is definitely in the fold for me now. I did not know there was an Earthworm Jim TWO! (From SNES on the Cheap article).
Thank you, I have a team working over there (I drop in from time to time) covering a lot of bases. I will pass along your comment to the author of the article.
The only positive thing I have to say about it, is that it gives our community something to talk about. If they put some new characters in it or some significant new stuff in the actual ROM then I'd be all for it.
This is a completely missed opportunity for Capcom. They could have made this the defacto version of Street Fighter II to own. How? By including Sheng Long. That is how. Even if they had to remove a character (bye Balrog) I would have had no problem with it happening. It would also create an extremely limited edition version of the game.