**Summer of ‘92**

It is in!  After seeing that arcade crowd (tight-packed, shoulder to shoulder, louder than anything he’d ever heard around a cabinet) faces lit like something amazing was happening on that screen, it is in.  After putting down quarter after quarter on the top right hand side of the control panel to signal that he was next, it was in.  After doubting even as trustworthy a source as Nintendo Power that it was being ported over, it was in.  
At this very second…  
Street.  
Fighter.  
II.  
For.  
The.  
Super.  
Nintendo!  
is now available for him to purchase! It’s a mere ten miles away at his local Toys Я Us.      
JR rushes to his lock box, he’s far too old to have a piggy bank, and starts counting out all the money he has in the world.  Twenty, forty, sixty, and …. Eighty dollars.     
It’s a good thing he’s swimming in cash because SFII costs more than any other video game ever has.  That doesn’t please him, but rising video game costs just seem to be a fact of life.  He can remember when video games were forty dollars, then fifty dollars, then sixty, and now he’ll be paying the unheard of amount of seventy dollars for one cartridge.  It sucks but he’d better get used to the cost of gaming going up and up because it won’t remain at even seventy dollars for long.   
But while he accepts that, it’s not as if he takes spending seventy dollars lightly.  Chore after chore, watching every penny, and resisting temptation …. all of that doesn’t come naturally to him but he doesn’t even blink as he shoves the cash in his wallet.  He’s been waiting too long for this day.    
He picks up the phone to call his friend Zach but as he does so he hears his sister droning on and on about some GUY to her friend, Lindsey.   He uses all the tack and diplomacy his 14 year old mind can muster,   
“Ray-ANN, get off the phone!”  
“I’m using it!”  
“I need to call Zach!”  
“Well I had the phone first!”  
He hangs up.  The house rules are clear; whoever has the phone first has “dibs” and the other person just has to wait.  Period.  No arguing, no excuses.  It’s just the way it is.  It’s not like there are two different phones in the house.  So he just has to wait.  And wait.  He pauses until he can take no more and…  
“Are you off yet?” he yells.  
“No!  Be quiet!”  
He waits some more.  Finally, after what seems like a decade, she hangs up.  He quickly punches in Zach’s phone number, from memory.    
“Zach, it’s in!”  
“No way!”  
“Way!”  
“No WHAY”  
“WHA-AY!”  
“Ask you Mom if you can come over, OK?”  
They simultaneously hang up and JR goes bouncing into his Mom’s room.  “Mom, mom!  Toys Я Us just got Street Fighter II in and we need to pick it up right away and can Zach come over?  It will be so cool if he comes over. We've been waiting forever and ever for it and it won’t be the same if we can’t play against each other!  That’s half the point so can we go pick up him and then pick up the game please, please?”  
JR’s mother obviously doesn’t quite understand the importance of what he is saying because she looks at him strangely and then some light dawns in her eyes.  “Is this about that game you’ve been talking about for the Nintendo?”  
“It’s the SUPER Nintendo Mom,” how anyone can not grasp the difference JR doesn’t fully comprehend but he’ll just keep correcting her until she gets it.  “But yes, it’s that game and it’s really important to me so can we, please?”  
“If it’s OK with Zach’s Mom, it’s OK with me.”  
JR rushes to the phone.  “Zach, it’s OK with my Mom if it’s OK with your Mom.  Is it OK with your Mom?”  
“It’s OK with my Mom if it’s OK with your Mom!”  
“YES!”  
“YES!  
JR fidgets with his barely restrained excitement the whole ride over to Zach houses.  He jumps out and bounds up the familiar steps to the door.  He knocks three times before Zach opens up; he’s already got his overnight stuff thrown in a backpack.  
“Ready?”  
“Ready!”  
The two rush into the car and for most of the ride to Toys R Us chat back and forth and back and forth about what characters they should play.  As they get closer, it’s time for the really important discussion; what are the ground rules for the night ahead?  
“OK, I won’t play Dhalsim all the time if you won’t play Chun-Lee all the time.”  
“That’s cool, we’ve got to mix it up.”    
 “Do we want to only play against each other or do we want to try and see all the end screens?”  
“Oh my gosh!  What if we win with every character?”  
“Win with every character??!!  Is that even possible?”  
“Not in the arcade, but we’ve got unlimited quarters man!  Unlimited quarters!”  
“Excellent!”  
The two give a guitar rift.  
“Do you think I’ll finally learn how to do the How-You-Do-Ken?”  
JR’s mother stops the conversation with a glance and a question, “You two are going to do something other than just play video games, right?”  
The two look at each other in silence for precisely two heartbeats.  
“Of course we will!”  “You bet!” they say simultaneously.    
They rush into Toys R Us so fast that they have to screech to a halt and wait for the automatic door to fully open.  JR turns right and sees a kid heading to the checkout stand.  That other kid probably isn’t going to pick up the last copy of Street Fighter II, but why take the chance?  JR pumps his legs as fast as he can and rushes past the stranger.  Panting and out of breath he arrives before a wide-eyed white haired elderly lady behind the counter.  
“I’m…’ puff puff puff, “Here to pick up my copy,”  puff puff puff “of Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo.  Please!”  
The lady has a pursed lip smile and ever so slowly goes back, pulls out a copy of the game, and places it on the counter.   
“You must be a very excited young man.”   
“I am!”  JR takes out his hard earned cash, pays for the games and then . . . then it is his!  He owns it!  The best game ever made, maybe the best game that ever WILL be made, is now his to play whenever he feels like.  It’s almost like magic.    
The two read the manual on the way home, flipping pages too fast, hunting for anything new and they quickly find it: the timer. They can turn it off. Completely off. No sudden deaths, no scrambling because the clock says so! Just two health bars and the simple, brutal rule that someone has to actually finish the other.  
“Dude… that means we can just keep going.”  
“Yeah. No timeouts. Ever.”  
That alone changes everything. Then another line catches.“Handicap.”  
They both lean in. You can lower one player’s strength. Raise the other’s. Tilt the fight before it even starts.  
“Oh that’s for you,” JR says instantly, not even looking up.  
“Shut up.”  
“No, seriously! When I beat you ten times in a row, we’ll turn it on.”  
“NOT.”  
The two try to memorize all the special moves on the drive home.  Before they get there though…  
 “Mom, can we stop at Albertsons?”  
“Only if you use your own money.”  
“OK Mom!”  
JR doesn’t have a lot of cash leftover, but he’s got enough.  He goes into Albertson to get three things; pretzels, ice cream, and root beer.  
But not just any brand of the above, he knows that this night is going to be epic so he’s after the good stuff.  For Root Beer it has to be IBC Root Beer, the kind that comes in glass so he can pretend he’s drinking a real beer.  For ice cream it’s Snickers ice cream bars because he likes to first eat the chocolate shell, then the ice cream, then the gooey nougat center.  And finally he searches for Mr. Salty brand pretzels, the kind he used to eat as a kid, but they don’t seem to sell those anymore so he settles for some Rold Gold.    
As he chews, JR is vaguely aware that calories exist but they aren’t emotionally real to him in the slightest.  He eats what he wants to eat (or what he is allowed to eat) and that’s that.  As he’s eating his first (and he knows it’s just his first) ice-cream Snicker’s bar of the day he doesn’t feel the slightest bit of trepidation or worry; the only sensation he gets from eating is one of pure pleasure.  No guilt.  No thought to how they might add fat cells to his body, just unfiltered joy at a delightful sensation.    
The two get home, rush to the tv, pull Link to the Past out of the Super Nintendo, and hear the satisfying click as Street Fighter II boots up.   
The music starts up and the two boys scream.  They have an arcade game in their house!  JR and Zach are living in the future.  It looks EXACTLY like the arcade game with ZERO differences at all and this judgement is in NO WAY being influenced by the cascade of hormones an excited 14 year old produces!  
Zach picks Ken, JR picks Ryu.   “Round One, Fight!”  It said it!  The SNES actually said human words!   
Weak, medium, and hard kicks fly all over the place.  The two characters jump and dodge and flail and fight and in a minute and a half the match is over.  The two friends turn to each other and smile, both knowing that they are not bound by the number of quarters in their pockets and that there are no other people waiting in line.  This is no limits gaming.    
Match after match follows one and other.  JR pulls out his tattered copy of EGM with all the tricks from the arcade version and the two work on perfecting their moves.  Moves that cost money in the arcade but that they can now practice with impunity.    
It doesn’t take long before the first friction of the night blossoms.   “No cheap shots!”   
“That was a cheap shot!”   
“That’s not fair!” one of them says.    
And it did seem cheap.  There seemed to be a way that if one of them did a certain move it would be impossible for the other to defend against it.    
They set out a new bunch of ground rules, and keep playing.  
Every character.  Every stage.  Every possible combination is tried as the hours fly by.  Fueled on adrenaline and soda, and sugar, and carbs, the two push on.  They defeat M. Bison with one character.  Then another.  Then all of them!     
JR’s bleary eyes look at his thumb.  A blister began to grow a couple of hours ago.  It had been getting worse and worse as the night wore on, but not enough to make him stop playing, but it just popped open.  JR looks in mild surprise as some blood trickles out.  He didn’t think that was actually possible, but it happened.     
It’s at that moment that his mother walks in.  She looks at the two in surprise.  “Did you guys get up early?”  
“Um…..”  
“Have you been up ALL NIGHT???”  
‘Um…”  
“Go to bed, right now!”  
The two trundle up off the floor.  Even their 14 year old knees crack a little bit after a full night of sitting. With the thrill of the game gone it’s a struggle to brush their teeth and fall into their beds.  As JR closes his eyes, Street Fighter II matches dance behind his eyelids as he falls into unconsciousness.  

**Spring of ‘26**  
I hadn’t seen him in 18 years but when Zach mentioned that night in an offhand way, I instantly knew what he was talking about .I never had any game nights later on like the ones I had when I was thirteen. Jesus, does anyone?

Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo was one of those nights you never forget