So, this is part five of my adventures through the world of Blanka and E Honda and company, as I explore all the weird versions of Street Fighter games. In this part, I’ll be taking a look at a bizarre version that Capcom, who make the Street Fighter games, cannot take the blame for, but actually perhaps should be very grateful for. This is the deep dive of Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition!
Well…some may think this series has already reached rock bottom. In the first four parts, I’ve looked at truly unusual versions of Street Fighter 2 that appeared on the Sega Master System, Amiga 500, ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, but is this series already running out of steam to the point that I have to look at a bootleg version of the game?
Well, to begin with, I never originally said I’d only look at official versions of the game, but before you think the next dozen videos are going to be random homebrew games, I promise you, every game I look at will be with the purpose that there’s an interesting story to tell…at least in my judgement.
To be clear, Capcom didn’t release an arcade game called Street Fighter 2 Rainbow edition. But many people out there will have played it. I even remember being at an arcade when I was on holiday as a child and seeing one of these in the wild.
I knew there were games called Street Fighter 2 World Warriors, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, and by this point I had also seen Super Street Fighter 2. But the game I remember seeing and talking to friends about wasn’t any of those.
I watched on as people played a Street Fighter game where there were all kinds of new special abilities that made it different from the game I knew. I hadn’t realised it immediately, but later I learned the version I’d seen was what people now call Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition.
The reason for the subtitle is that the game’s logo is a bit garbled and looks like there is a rainbow running through the text.
Legend always has been that this hacked version was getting a lot of attention and inspired Capcom to create Street Fighter 2 Turbo in response.
Allow me to go over some of the things that make this bootleg version unique to the arcade original and how they potentially inspired the official Street Fighter games.
To begin with, this version, is crazy. The first time you play it, even if you’re a seasoned Street Fighter veteran, it will take you by surprise, seem wildly unfair and probably kick your ass.
The game is significantly faster than the actual Street Fighter 2 game and it’s not in a consistent or balanced way. Sometimes characters, both the opponents, and yours, go really fast, and other times they move at a normal pace. This turbo and hyper speed to the gameplay was unlike any fighting game that had come before in the still relatively new genre.
With people gathering around the arcade machines to see this version, the only thing Capcom could do is create their own sped up version which is why we have Street Fighter 2 Turbo. It’s a surprise really that this logic didn’t translate across to eventually see the creation of Super Mario Bros Turbo and Hyper Pac-Man.
Actually, on that note, Ms Pac-Man is a similar story to Street Fighter 2 Rainbow edition in that it also started life off as a game not made by the original company. But that’s a story for another day.
In addition to the speed increase, the game also allowed special moves to be pulled off in mid air. So you could jump up and pull off a hurricane kick or send a fire ball. This is something else that would become a part of later Street Fighter games.
Speaking of fire balls, most of the characters can now shoot off fireballs that were previously exclusive to Ryu and Ken. When I first played and E Honda was producing fire balls from his hundred hand slap I thought it was a sign of the apocalypse.
What makes these even scarier for an inexperienced player is that you can now have multiple fireballs at once, and not only can everyone shoot them at you, but they are either lightning fast or they act as homing missiles and will follow you across the screen so you can’t jump over them.
Not all of these changes have made it into future games, but it’s worth noting that Chun Li got a fireball in games after the original, but I can’t recall as I’m making this if Capcom had already given her a fireball move by the time of Champion Edition of which Rainbow Edition is a hack.
The last major, and arguably the weirdest change in the Rainbow Edition is that as you’re fighting an opponent and start to wear their energy bar down, they may suddenly transform into a different character and take you by surprise. So, E Honda may suddenly be Guile or Zangief may suddenly hit you with Bison’s flying attack and steal the victory.
This kinda reminded me of that scene at the end of Terminator 2 Judgement Day…spoiler warning if you haven’t seen the movie that came out the same year as Street Fighter 2 by the way…but when the T-1000 is finally defeated he suddenly starts to transform into all of the other people he’d previously taken the form of. In this game, just when you’re about to defeat an opponent they rapidly transform like an act of desperation to throw you a curve ball.
But the good news is you can send this curve ball back to your opponent. By hitting the start button mid fight, you too can transform into other characters. When I found E Honda was kicking my butt as Ken, I smashed the start button and transformed into Zangeif for a good old fashioned hoss fight.
So…does any of that sound familiar to something in Street Fighter? Certainly, in Mortal Kombat, Shang Tsung has always been a shape shifter, and you can say that in the Street Fighter series we eventually got the character Eleven who can shape shift and transform into a different character, but this happens before the fight begins. And this itself was many many years after Rainbow Edition, so it’s hard to draw a connection between Rainbow Edition being Eleven’s direct influence.
But if we look at X-Men vs Street Fighter which only came out a few years after Rainbow Edition, we see a Street Fighter game where you can pick two characters. Then with a tap of a button you can swap out between the two at will. It’s not exactly the same obviously, as in X-Men vs Street Fighter it’s a tag team fight like you’d have in pro wrestling, but it’s possible that Capcom first looked at the Street Fighter games and said ‘what if you could have more than one character in a fight?’ As a response to that ability in Rainbow Edition.
So, what are your thoughts on Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition? Do you feel this was a good influence on the series? And have you ever played this version? Were you lucky enough to experience it in the arcades?
We’ve opened the flood gates to the Wild West of hacks and bootleg versions of games here, and although I’ll the next part of this series is planned to look at an official Street Fighter game, we’re not quite done in bootleg territory yet, so be sure to get ready for the strange in another upcoming discussion in the weird versions of Street Fighter game series!
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