This is JPN RetroAd Archive, a series exploring Japanese video game magazine advertisements.
Meet the Street Fighter II Family
This time we're doing something deliberate: all four ads are for the same game. Or more precisely, the same game sold four separate times. Street Fighter II Turbo on Super Famicom, Dash Plus on Mega Drive, Super Street Fighter II released simultaneously on both consoles a year later, and Dash on PC Engine. This is a page tracing exactly how many times Capcom milked one fighting game, told entirely through print ads.
1. Street Fighter II Turbo (Super Famicom)
Under an open sky, on a runway, the fighters are arranged almost flush against a massive fighter jet — the composition alone is a small marvel. Against the huge silhouette of Bison on the left, the tension radiating off Ryu, Chun-Li, and the rest of the cast in the center almost feels refreshing by comparison. "How strong can you become?" — one line of copy, and it's the finishing touch.
Released July 10, 1993, this was the console port of the arcade's Dash Turbo revision. Interestingly, the release lineup actually skipped a proper Dash and jumped straight to Turbo — the game's "NORMAL" mode effectively stands in for the Dash version instead. The four bosses, unplayable in the previous entry, became selectable here. Worldwide sales hit 4.1 million, roughly 2.1 million of those in Japan alone — by this point, Street Fighter II wasn't really a game anymore so much as an industry.
2. Street Fighter II Dash Plus (Mega Drive)
Twelve characters, each cropped into a tall, narrow color-block panel, lined up side by side. "The Mega Legend Begins," reads the copy — for a Sega-side release, this is an unusually lavish, all-in spread. It would be a few years before I learned the name behind that stunning artwork: Kinu Nishimura.
Released September 28, 1993. There's a backstory here: this was originally announced under the name "Street Fighter II Dash" around the same time as the PC Engine version, then delayed, bumped up to a 24-megabit cartridge, and reworked to match the screen layout of the other console ports before shipping under the new name Dash Plus. It ended up being the last home port to arrive, but its content was adjusted to land almost identically to the Super Famicom's Turbo. A 6-button pad shipped ahead of the game itself — a sign of just how seriously this release was being treated.
3. Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (Super Famicom / Mega Drive)
Ryu and Ken glare straight out of the page, side by side. "Can you surpass me?" runs the provocation across both pages — Super Famicom on the left, Mega Drive on the right. Same day, same tagline, two different consoles: the intent to not lose either audience is right there in the layout.
Both versions released on the exact same day, June 25, 1994. Same price too: 10,900 yen. Four new characters — Cammy, Fei Long, Dee Jay, T. Hawk — brought the roster to sixteen, and new modes like group battles and tournaments were added, but... reception was mixed, honestly. Players who'd gotten used to Turbo's speed reportedly found this one felt sluggish, and the four new characters apparently didn't land as big a splash at launch as hoped. Between the two versions, the Super Famicom port generally gets the nod for graphics and sound — though on the Sega side, plenty would still argue theirs held its own.
4. Street Fighter II Dash (PC Engine)
A menacing M. Bison bears down from above, Ryu squares up with a fist forward — an illustration everyone already knows by heart. "The arcade champion, coming to PC Engine." The copy and every line beneath it are selling one thing hard: port accuracy.
Released June 1993 on a Hu-Card packing a 20-megabit high-speed ROM. The bottom of the ad proudly lists "what makes PC Engine amazing" — the large-capacity ROM, the high-speed CPU — but the actual situation was a lot messier. The opening demo was cut, and the bonus stages were trimmed down to two, leaving this port thinner than its console rivals by most later accounts. The stock 3-button pad couldn't map all three punch and kick strengths, making the 6-button pad advertised right below it essentially mandatory. And the bottom half of the ad isn't even about the game — it's promoting NEC's new CD-ROM machine, the PC Engine Duo-R — a joint NEC-and-Capcom spread selling an entire gaming ecosystem, which honestly wasn't unusual to see even back then.
Closing Thought
Lining these four up, what stands out is Capcom's strategy (call it what it is — a sales pitch, repeated). The same core content, repackaged differently every time to fit each console's character and its audience — and yet the sheer craft it took to pull that off at high quality across machines with such different capabilities is honestly impressive. And the illustration work, whichever one you look at, still hits just as hard. The content got recycled. The care that went into selling it never did. How is it that Capcom's stubbornness from this era still makes my heart race, every single time?
Repeating a re-release this many times should have gotten old fast, but strangely, back then it never did. In an era with far fewer things competing for your attention, every new version of Street Fighter II landed like an earth-shaking event — the biggest topic of conversation at school, every single time. I still remember spreading these magazine ads out with friends, marveling at the illustration work all over again. Among friends who could actually draw, Capcom's art from this era was treated like scripture. People would copy it into their sketchbooks, flipping back to the page over and over. The content underneath was the same game recycled yet again — and somehow the art always found something new to be stunned by. Even now, that still strikes me as remarkable.
All promotional images used in this review are sourced from 1990s video game magazine advertisements for review and commentary purposes.
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