Before Street Fighter II: The Brutal, Beautiful Mess of the Original 1987 Arcade Game

A new Street Fighter movie hits theaters worldwide on October 16, 2026, but decades before Hollywood got involved, the whole thing started with a Capcom arcade cabinet nobody quite knew how to play safely. The original 1987 Street Fighter is barely remembered today next to its sequel, yet almost everything the series is known for — special move inputs, the six-button layout, even Ryu's name — traces back to this one strange, punishing machine.

• Street Fighter (ストリートファイター) · Arcade (Capcom) · released August 30, 1987 · directed by Takashi Nishiyama, designed by Hiroshi Matsumoto
• Original "Deluxe" cabinets used two giant pressure-sensitive punch pads instead of buttons
• The game's protagonist, Ryu, is named after director Takashi Nishiyama himself
• Its six-button, release-to-input control scheme became the template for every fighting game that followed, including Street Fighter II

Why Did the Original Street Fighter Have Giant Pressure Pads?

The first "Deluxe" cabinets didn't have buttons at all — they had two large rubber pads, one for punches and one for kicks, that players struck with their fists. The harder you hit a pad, the stronger and faster the on-screen attack. It was a novel idea that turned out to be a bad one: arcade operators found the pads wore out fast, and players kept hurting their hands trying to land the strongest hit possible. A former Capcom USA executive later put it bluntly to Polygon: those cabinets "had to come off the market because everybody was getting injured."

Capcom's fix became one of the most influential design decisions in gaming history. A "Regular" cabinet version replaced the two pressure pads with six ordinary microswitch buttons — three punches and three kicks, matching the three strength levels the pads used to measure by force. That six-button layout is still the standard for fighting games nearly four decades later. Series co-creator Yoshiki Okamoto, who later became a producer on the franchise, has also recalled in interviews on his YouTube channel that clearing out leftover control panel stock played a part in how quickly the six-button version reached arcades — a smaller, practical detail behind a change usually credited entirely to player safety.

Where Does Ryu's Name Actually Come From?

Street Fighter's iconic protagonist owes his name to his creator. Director Takashi Nishiyama's given name is written 隆志 (Takashi), and the first character, 隆, can also be read using its on'yomi pronunciation as "Ryu." Ken Masters, meanwhile, was originally planned to be named "Yu" after a character in co-designer Hiroshi Matsumoto's own name before the team settled on "Ken" (拳, meaning "fist") instead. Both origins are confirmed in an interview with Nishiyama and Matsumoto published in the book The Art of Street Fighter.

It's a rare piece of the developers' own identities baked into characters who otherwise draw more heavily on martial arts influences — Ryu and rival Sagat are both widely understood to take cues from the manga Karate Baka Ichidai and its portrayal of karate master Mas Oyama.

How Can You Play the Original Street Fighter Today?

Finding a working 1987 arcade board outside Japan is a project in itself, but the original game is far from lost. Capcom's Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection (2018, developed by Digital Eclipse) includes an arcade-accurate port of the original 1987 Street Fighter alongside eleven later series entries. In Japan it released on Switch and PlayStation 4 (it's also available on Xbox One and PC outside Japan). Since this collection had an official Western release, it's also easy to find secondhand on marketplaces like eBay under its English title.

Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection International · ストリートファイター30thアニバーサリーコレクションインターナショナル · PlayStation 4 · 2018 · Capcom · product code PLJM-80264

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by product code) · Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee