The Long, Strange History of Street Fighter and Hip-Hop

It's an odd choice for a favorite series. Street Fighter II, the series' biggest hit and the game that comes up the most, doesn't share any obvious affinity with hip-hop. It's over two decades old, its music takes cues from 80s dancepop, and its sole two black characters are outrageously square: One has a hairline that looks like it was shaped up by a velociraptor and the other is Billy Blanks reimagined as a kickboxing rapper. Yet Street Fighter II and its progeny endure, appearing in lyrics, instrumentals, music videos, movies, merchandise, and concert fonts. Even as rival fighting games and eventually racing games, sports games, and crime games have come to firmly embrace hip-hop (e.g., Midnight Club, Grand Theft Auto, Shaq-Fu, NBA Jam, NBA Street), Street Fighter has remained king.

To trace its reign, I talked to musicians, Capcom employees, a former record executive, and the founders of a creative production company. I also pored through three decades' worth of artwork, marketing, games, music, and movies. What follows is a tale of coincidences, nostalgia, some very wack rhymes, and some surprisingly good rhymes. It turns out that Street Fighter and hip-hop don't have an inherent affinity. But they do have history, and in hip-hop, history is always possibility.

Pouring the Asphalt

Hip-hop has a unique way of elevating elements of everyday life into new realms of being. Shoes become mission statements. Nicknames become personas. City boroughs become island nations. Ad infinitum. Street Fighter isn't immune to this alchemy, but its relationship with hip-hop is more concrete. Street Fighter isn't just another piece of pop cultural debris that's been picked up and turned into gold. Street Fighter and hip-hop go back.

Before Street Fighter was being referenced by Nicki Minaj and Lupe Fiasco (and Dizzee Rascal, Lil B, Sean Price, Madlib, etc.,) it was doing its own sampling. The original Street Fighter is sprinkled with graffiti and the swagger that comes with it. The game's logo is introduced via a nameless punk who punches a hole through a tagged-up wall and then turns his back to reveal a Street Fighter logo on his jacket. He literally fights the streets. Within the game, the home stage for the character Joe is a trainyard that features a train car with a top-to-bottom tag. The game's overall engagement with hip-hop is superficial, but somebody at Capcom had clearly been watching Style Wars.

Hip-hop became a bit more than a sample during the development of Final Fight, which was originally intended to be a sequel to Street Fighter and for a time was titled "Street Fighter '89." Final Fight takes place in a barely fictionalized New York City that's awash in graffiti, garbage, gangs, and an unfathomable supply of metal barrels. Its character designs and gameplay are more directly informed by Guns N' Roses than Run DMC, and its plot elements are directly lifted from the bizarre neo-noir musical odyssey Streets of Fire, but its vision of New York City couldn't exist without hip-hop. The streets are simultaneously threatening and thrilling, most of the stages are set on the peripheries of the city which hip-hop made cool. One of the bosses is even a crooked cop. Final Fight is basically a Spike Lee-directed Beastie Boys video.

Street Fighter II would go on to abandon these elements of hip-hop, trading the gritty streets of Final Fight for scenic, globe-trotting vistas. But the foundation had been laid, and as Street Fighter II became an arcade and console hit, the streets began to do their own sampling.