I remember the first time I laid eyes on Street Fighter, way back in 1992, when I was 11 years old. It was the arcade version, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, housed in an ugly, laminated chipboard cabinet in a video game shop at Joburg's Northgate Shopping Centre.
It's a game where two players each pick a character from a roster of colourful fighters with different arrays of combat moves and duke it out to determine a victor, with the winner getting to continue playing and the loser's game ending. My life was forever changed.
I could write a novel about that time: how I used to save up every big, round silver 20c piece I could find throughout the week to play the game; how the game slowly yielded the mysteries of its powerful special moves to the players who used to frequent the machine (there was no internet to look them up on, back then); and how, although I didn't know it at the time, the machine actually had three buttons missing - it was supposed to have six. I wouldn't trade that time for anything.
Street Fighter has come a long way, innovating many staples of the versus fighting genre - and nicking a few concepts from its competitors, who were also innovating in a sort of arms race to make the most popular fighting game. Today, Street Fighter V is one of the most prestigious games played in the big money e-sports arenas.
WATCH | The trailer for Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection..