Quick note- 1st I love this video! Regarding my friction with my Japanese mentors, Mr. Nishitani was amazing and taught me fundamentals I expanded on and continue to use almost 30 years later. He was not a nemesis for me on Hyper, he had great points about the speed and real cause to be worried- I did not want to go faster either but our hand was forced. His later comments noted here (in the video) about the mechanics becoming more prediction based are perfect and true (for some setups & moves in the game). This shifted us deeper into Yomi territory (look up Sirlin's papers on this), which we would not know at the time would become a deeper part of fighting game theory across the decades. My conflicts with Hyper's creation was with the other lead stuck with doing a version no one wanted and totally, understandable dealing with a 25 year old version of me, pushing hard for the sake of our players and trying to make a version (I asked for) that would crush the competition. Ya, no easy road there, but we did it!
@@LadyDecadethere was more than one version of this “illegal” edition. In the one we grew up with when chun li did spinning bird kick her head was touching the ground and sonic boom came out
I remember being a kid , coming back from a holiday desperate to tell my friends about this crazy version of SF2 I played. Without the internet to back me up, nobody believed me.
Brooo same here I seen this version back in I wanna say 2007? At my local arcade that was going outta business with holes in roof buckets on floor collecting the water lol. I just thought there machine was busted
An old issue of GamePro had a letter from a guy who gave a small but accurate description of the "bootleg" SF2. This was WAY before the internet was mainstreamed. So how does the vindication feel, guys?
Bro, that's sad and funny at the same time. I was on the other side, a guy told me about this and I was like "sure you are on drugs" LOL... gotta say sorry to that guy...
@@christiangonzalez4017 to be fair , if some hyper kid told me Hoadokes shot out of your feet when you hurricane kick I probably would have called BS too.
This is known here in Brazil as "Bus station Street Fighter", a lot bus stations, bars/pubs and other places where you can play arcade games had this version.
@@josebrisenojr665 for me pizza hut was notorious for revolution X and the Simpsons pinball machine, also you could usually find a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail unit
Back in the 90s, there was an arcade cabinet at a pizza place in NYC I would frequent that had this version. Fireballs all over the screen. Sonicbooms. Shoryukens going through the ground. It was so much fun.
I distinctly remember playing this version at some dingy coffee shop. You could jump "above" the screen and appear on the bottom over and over again. Then, as Zengeif, perform a spinning-pile driver and "fall" each screen you'd "jumped over", getting faster and faster each time. It wouldn't do more damage, but it looked cool.
In Street Fighter EX 2 Plus, Zangiefs level 3 he flies you all the way in space and comes smashing down like a meteor with his pile driver. The first time i saw that at the arcade, i thought about what you just said about rainbow edition. Lol
Not just Rainbow Edition, there were so many bootleg CE variations, its crazy. The only one I ever saw in person had Zangief Yoga Flaming while performing his spinning lariat move. This was at an annual fair held in my city back around 92. I was so intimidated by the changes I was too scared to play it. I actually thought someone had broken the game.
I remember that one as well; looked like Zangief had some bad athlete's foot in that version with the Spinning Lariat/Yoga Flame move. I used to see it at the liquor stores and donut shops around the way
The first time I heard about it a friend said that it was "crazy Street fighter" that balrog threw hadoukens from his armpit and zangief farted fire when he did his spinning move XD
I remember a washateria near my house that had this. I thought being able to change your character in mid fight was the coolest thing I'd seen in a game at that point. Especially since it was THAT game. It cannot be overstated how big this game was by '92 here in the U.S
Not only it had influence over SF II Turbo, but you can see its changes as foundation of the later CPS2 games, such as SF vs X-Men, SF vs Marvel, Marvel vs Capcom, eg.: fireballs in mid-air... switching characters mid-fight, (only this time, switching places) etc...
It's all build up to that spectacular anime fight style of fighting game that we can still see on games like guilty gears, and Dragon Ball fighterZ, and many others
I remember playing this game. Cheapest thing u could do was hit someone with Zangeif and then jump, tornado, jump again, tornado, and keep doing that because they could never reach you way off screen and then time ran out 😅 its even crazier if you played the Rainbow Lightning Edition
I remember that one too (the M5/M7 version). Played it at the laundromat over a decade ago. I also picked Chun-Li and spammed her Lightning Kick to give Dhalsim a beatdown with Sonic Booms...until the game rebooted. Only reason that happened was because I was playing it on a rinkydink Multicade machine
I can remember going to London as a young lad on a youth club trip and hanging out with some londeners. After over hearing me speak about how good i was at street fighter 2,One of them said they would whip my ass at it. My jaw dropped as the screen flooded with fireballs and wiped me out instantly. Could never figure out how he did it...until now 🤣🤣
Back in 92 I used to go to a $1 movie theater by me in southern California. I was 12. And this theater had Rainbow edition street fighter!!! Omg I fell in love when I saw the screen full of Guile's sonic Booms! Then we went to the Movie theater everyday for 5 months (till they replaced it) to play this version and watch a movie or two for $3-$5
This is a kick ass topic. Im 42 now. I remember first seeing this evil wizardry at my local 7-11 and thinking ...how did sorry fools get their hands on something as dope as this??? And then I played it.....thats when even the dumbest kid will suddenly become wall street level smart in figuring out the amount-risk-reward of this trap. Lose a quarter in 2.5 seconds thanks to 18 simultaneous fireballs? No thanks....I'll grab a icee
I played a different hacked version that came out afterwards called Turbo Hyper Accelerated Edition. Very similar to rainbow but one difference was Ken and Ryu's hadoken released 2 fireballs that kept chris crossing each other and the speed change with type of punch. Also another difference was you could keep doing mid air fireballs until you came up from the ground!
I remember coming across this variant in a chip shop in England when I was a kid. I loved how crazy it was, and often searched for it over the years, not knowing until only a few years ago that it was a bootleg - though I did always remember the name all these years so I could continue my search for it. I had no idea it had such an impact on the franchise! Great video!
I remember playing this game when I was a teenager. Multple and mid-air launched projectiles at once om screen was mind blowing at the time. Great video!
My local laundromat had the original SF2 and Champion Edition was all the rage at this point. Then one day, they had the bootleg champion edition. Word got around school pretty quickly that this version had a bunch of crazy stuff and kids from school coming to the laundromat just to try and figure out how to do it all.
I remember this hacked version fondly from my local convenience store where it was labelled on the marquee artwork as "Black Belt Edition". I played the heck out of it. Fireballs from Chun Li's lightning kicks, Guile's rapid fire s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sonic boom, and Zangief repeatedly cancelling an aerial spinning piledriver with another spinning piledriver over and over, moving higher and higher until you finally dropped your opponent from 50 screens up. It was pure chaos in the best possible way.
Great video, Lady D! I remember a pirate version of MK2 that allowed some crazy stuff, like doing fatalities at any moment during the fight. Maybe you can dig some information about that game!
These kinds of videos are what got me to subscribe to this channel. It's not the same old "retro" stuff rehashed over and over again like the port on the bottom of an nes. Its well researched well delivered content that even those of us who lived through it can learn a thing or two from. Thanks for the content, and keep it up!
OMG! I saw this version once in a convenience store during a family vacation to California as a kid in the 90's. It blew my mind and I always wondered what mod of the game I saw that made the game look so crazy but after all the years and searching I never found out what that version was until now. Thanks!
I’ve read about this version through 90’s gaming magazines like EGM and Game Fan. One question to GamePro even asked the staff how Zangief could pull off his spinning pile driver while nowhere near him and the reply was that many arcades were not official. That the reader would have to tell the arcade manager about it’s piracy. This is first time I’ve seen it in action.
I do recall being in a laundry mat once back before Street Fighter was a thing and thinking how much those machines must cost to have in there. It was like 1987 so it was Pac Man and something already old too but it did get me thinking if people made their own stuff and sold it to places like that.
I remember playing this in the early 90's at a bowling alley in staten island NY called sunset lanes, and I was blown away that I could cycle through the characters in-game by pressing the start button. I haven't seen it anywhere since...
I have to say this is one of your best videos yet. I love it! I've been checking out your channel since you got on TH-cam, and you've definitely raised the bar with the amount of research and knowledge you put into this one. As a retro game enthusiast for over 20 years and collector, you have my thumbs up 👍 Just one little thing: I would normalize all of the audio. It protects from ear rape lol. Thank you for the awesome upload!
played it regularly back in the day, impossible in 2player once Guile's sonic booms filled the screen. What's amazing to me today is how the hacked version found it's way into a small town arcade in Ireland back in the 90's. There's a mad story in there somewhere.
Fun story, once years ago in 2010 at my job I ran into 2 guys and one of them had a street fighter 2 shirt. I mentioned as I walked by how I liked that game and we talked about it, the other guy said his favorite character was blanka and I said mine was chun li and we had some good natured trash talk and then someone walked by and said “congratulations on making the pro bowl mr suh.” It was ndamakong suh, the super bowl winning defensive tackle who was playing for the Detroit lions at the time.
When this version first debuted here in the states there was a big sticker on the arcade marque that said "Thunder Edition". I guess that sounded more appealing than Rainbow edition.
I grew up playing Rainbow Edition at this mall called Dragon City where I live. Loved it! Great video! Btw their was a couple of versions of Rainbow, One was Black Belt and the other was Black Belt 2
I grew up in inner city Baltimore and we had one of these at the local corner store. No idea how they got it, but man, did the local scene have a ton of fun with this. We used to put money in just to figure out strange combos and stuff, good times!
I played this version next to a laundry mat as a kid in Pasadena California! I always referred to it as Tropical edition but now o know!!! I’ve been telling my side for years that this version was real!!!! Thank you for this video!!!🙏🙏🙏
I remember playing this version at a pizza joint in BFE California. That was my first experience with SF2, and I was super disappointed with the vanilla versions and kept going back.
I've honestly never heard of this Rainbow Edition. Though to be honest, upon hearing the name I was expecting Zippy, George and Bungle to be selectable characters 😕
@Bernardes 0905 I don't know what the arcade scene was like in Brazil but in the states you could walk into an arcade and think the place was empty until you got to the SFII machines... Often right next to the office and way in the back...
There was a chain grocery store down the street from my house that had it back in the 90s. It was completely nuts seeing that as a young kid. It blew me away.
I remember playing this at a convenience store that had this in their cabinet. It was a AWESOME experience to say the least. Mid air fireballs. Zangief with yoga flame coming out his ankle. Not having to charge for Guile's moves. It was hilarious and super fun. Too bad they did'nt make a version like this or make some kind of Mario Maker like Street Fighter 2 version that would let you do some of these. I still don't know why after all these years they haven't giving up mid-air projectiles yet that go horizontal. Only air FB I could think of is from Akuma.
Never heard of it as Rainbow edition, when I was a kid we just called it the illegal version. Never liked it that much, but it was a fun novelty at first. I remember one machine I saw had homemade artwork on the cabinet to say Street Fighter 3, I am not kidding. It did take forever between SF2 and SF3.
@@theobserver4214 thats true, I think it grew in popularity over time as it was underappreciated when it came out. Most of the old favorites were out with a new cast of strange characters in. I originally didn't like it, but now I hold SF3 3S in the same high regard as SSF2T as the two best fighters I have ever played.
There were two main types of hacks back in the day. There were the one that boosted the speed and unlocked mid air moves, without changing much. Characters with air throws gained insanely broken cheese that let them ignore vertical distance when calculating throw eligibility (claw, chun-li, and Guile). you could jump over someone and throw them. or izuna drop from off of the top of the screen! zangief could cheese similarly with spinning pile driver. Mid air moves were also possible. Many of them also had blanka mysteriously temporarily changing into ryu on certain occasions, including the neck bite. some of them did minor tweaks to the projectiles Then there were the rainbow edition variants. these usually let you change characters mid fight with start, and gave all sorts of wacky properties to existing moves, and added new ones. People could teleport, shoot homing fireballs, blast out streams of fireballs during mash moves, do crazy high speed hurricane kicks, no charge sonic booms. Chun li coudl do a lightning legs that also launched a fireball WITHOUT mashing. It was crazy. everything was broken, yet it was somehow balanced because everything was broken, ad you could respond to crazy cheese with even crazier cheese. Some of them even had dragon punches that launched walls of fireballs. These hacks inspired hyper Figting, which did indeed beat them at their own game. but also marvel vs capcom.
Oh my God I was just thinking about this! As a kid I remember playing this at a grocery store and it blew my wig off just how crazy it was! I must've spent $10 in quarters one day just playing this version and could never find it again, because it got moved out of the grocery store it was in. It was the only time I've every played it and even now I could not find it at arcades nearby my the malls, or even at Chuck E Cheese's I frequented as a kid. Glad to know this was real and I want imagining it. I remember telling my friends at school about it and they never believed me. Lol Great video!
I went to a sports camp in NY back in the 90’s that also had an arcade. Street fighter 2 was so popular back then they had two machines and one of them was this version. You could easily beat the game (or your opponent) by flooding the screen with Guiles sonic booms. All this time I thought the machine was broken 😆
If you own a Street Fighter II Turbo PCB and really want to crank up the speed way more than the 15% put the game in debug mode then it really flys! You can do this with the dip switches. You can really mess with the game this way and do a lot of things. The mode bypasses the normal functionality of the switches and changes them. One time I even put back Ken's Chains and Chun-Li's garbage can & sign back into the background by messing with the switches but I forgot how I did it 😆. Basically USA worked on Turbo while Japan was working on what they considered to be the real follow up Super. But ironically Turbo made more money and was more successful.
In Mexico, arcades were more commonly found in convenience stores, which were usually opened in a person's house. So, most of my arcade playing while growing up over there took place in some neighbor's car garage, living room, or storage shed where their "store" was located, while eating chips and drinking sodas through a straw out of a plastic bag ... Good times :D Anyway, I remember visiting my cousin one day and going across his neighborhood to play a version of this that was modified even further, in which doing a Shoryuken would produce a near infinite number of Hadokens. We would call this the "magic" version of SFII.
Oh. This explains why I couldn't find anything on the Street Fighter wiki that matched the Street Fighter II: Champion Edition I remembered seeing in a restaurant in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. I think I was there on vacation in the late 90's or so, and the multi-fireball attacks left quite the impression.
Street Fighter de Rodoviária! Absolutely a classic! There was also a SNES bootleg that allowed Vega to move like the Spanish cage stage on any stage…… awesome stuff! Nice video!
There is another SFII' CE hack which is like Rainbow Edition, but with even more changes like Ryu and Ken shooting multiple fireballs per dragon punch, and Sagat doing a Yoga Flame for every Tiger Uppercut he does. That's the Koryu edition, or the Sheng Long hack. There's also unlicensed Street Fighter II DOS hacks that reduced load times, but made so many changes to the fighters to make the gameplay a little more exaggerated. I know one of them is the SFIBM 198 bootleg with Sagat shooting fast nonstop Tiger Shots standing and sitting alternatively.
Damn! That is absolutely fascinating! I have never heard of the Rainbow Edition before, getting to discover this whole thing along with how impacted Street Fighter proper was amazing. Also... Hi! I discovered your channel roughly 20 minutes ago! You know what that means? It's backlog time! Cheers!
I played this mad bootleg version down Leisure Time in Burnley, at Martin Mere in Blackpool and in a Taxi Rank in wales so it was definitely more prevalent than the internet remembered.
Quick note- 1st I love this video! Regarding my friction with my Japanese mentors, Mr. Nishitani was amazing and taught me fundamentals I expanded on and continue to use almost 30 years later. He was not a nemesis for me on Hyper, he had great points about the speed and real cause to be worried- I did not want to go faster either but our hand was forced.
His later comments noted here (in the video) about the mechanics becoming more prediction based are perfect and true (for some setups & moves in the game). This shifted us deeper into Yomi territory (look up Sirlin's papers on this), which we would not know at the time would become a deeper part of fighting game theory across the decades.
My conflicts with Hyper's creation was with the other lead stuck with doing a version no one wanted and totally, understandable dealing with a 25 year old version of me, pushing hard for the sake of our players and trying to make a version (I asked for) that would crush the competition. Ya, no easy road there, but we did it!
What an honour, thank you so much for watching and commenting!
Yeah, the previous comment I wrote on your channel was about this specifically.
@@LadyDecadethere was more than one version of this “illegal” edition. In the one we grew up with when chun li did spinning bird kick her head was touching the ground and sonic boom came out
I remember being a kid , coming back from a holiday desperate to tell my friends about this crazy version of SF2 I played. Without the internet to back me up, nobody believed me.
This happened to me in Colombia.
Brooo same here I seen this version back in I wanna say 2007? At my local arcade that was going outta business with holes in roof buckets on floor collecting the water lol. I just thought there machine was busted
An old issue of GamePro had a letter from a guy who gave a small but accurate description of the "bootleg" SF2. This was WAY before the internet was mainstreamed.
So how does the vindication feel, guys?
Bro, that's sad and funny at the same time. I was on the other side, a guy told me about this and I was like "sure you are on drugs" LOL... gotta say sorry to that guy...
@@christiangonzalez4017 to be fair , if some hyper kid told me Hoadokes shot out of your feet when you hurricane kick I probably would have called BS too.
This is known here in Brazil as "Bus station Street Fighter", a lot bus stations, bars/pubs and other places where you can play arcade games had this version.
"7-11 street fighter" in the states, at least in Detroit
Edit: "laundromat street fighter" is also acceptable.
Your right I've only played it in arcades
I CALL IT THE Jewel Version
Or Pizza Hut because Blanka threw fireballs
@@josebrisenojr665 for me pizza hut was notorious for revolution X and the Simpsons pinball machine, also you could usually find a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail unit
Back in the 90s, there was an arcade cabinet at a pizza place in NYC I would frequent that had this version. Fireballs all over the screen. Sonicbooms. Shoryukens going through the ground. It was so much fun.
What a fun that was
Don’t forget the infinity spinning pile-driver 😂
@@Don_Chiba which has sonic booms, this gotta be the most successful version of SFII from China lol.
Yea they had one in a brooklyn pizza shop near my house. Great memories
Gun Post Lanes on Gun Hill Road.
I distinctly remember playing this version at some dingy coffee shop. You could jump "above" the screen and appear on the bottom over and over again. Then, as Zengeif, perform a spinning-pile driver and "fall" each screen you'd "jumped over", getting faster and faster each time. It wouldn't do more damage, but it looked cool.
In Street Fighter EX 2 Plus, Zangiefs level 3 he flies you all the way in space and comes smashing down like a meteor with his pile driver.
The first time i saw that at the arcade, i thought about what you just said about rainbow edition. Lol
Not just Rainbow Edition, there were so many bootleg CE variations, its crazy. The only one I ever saw in person had Zangief Yoga Flaming while performing his spinning lariat move. This was at an annual fair held in my city back around 92. I was so intimidated by the changes I was too scared to play it. I actually thought someone had broken the game.
Zagat did it too!... Tiger uppercut and throwing the Yoga flame from his feet
Leave us a link o wana watch it
I remember that one as well; looked like Zangief had some bad athlete's foot in that version with the Spinning Lariat/Yoga Flame move. I used to see it at the liquor stores and donut shops around the way
The first time I heard about it a friend said that it was "crazy Street fighter" that balrog threw hadoukens from his armpit and zangief farted fire when he did his spinning move XD
I remember this too!
I remember a washateria near my house that had this. I thought being able to change your character in mid fight was the coolest thing I'd seen in a game at that point. Especially since it was THAT game. It cannot be overstated how big this game was by '92 here in the U.S
This game was the shit in 92 in arcades. All versions.hyper fighting is my fave version
Black Hat and Lady Decade the greatest retro gaming couple ever...would love to see you both in a crossover episode 💖
How about James Rolfe?
@@pedrokunkka4212 i mentioned couple for a reason... James Rolffe is single 😉
Not only it had influence over SF II Turbo, but you can see its changes as foundation of the later CPS2 games, such as SF vs X-Men, SF vs Marvel, Marvel vs Capcom, eg.: fireballs in mid-air... switching characters mid-fight, (only this time, switching places) etc...
It's all build up to that spectacular anime fight style of fighting game that we can still see on games like guilty gears, and Dragon Ball fighterZ, and many others
I remember playing this game. Cheapest thing u could do was hit someone with Zangeif and then jump, tornado, jump again, tornado, and keep doing that because they could never reach you way off screen and then time ran out 😅 its even crazier if you played the Rainbow Lightning Edition
I remember playing it. Chun-Li was amazing! Her lightning kick sent out multiple sonic booms and allowed her to move slowly across the ground.
I love how the comments all sound like people were high on something.
I remember that one too (the M5/M7 version). Played it at the laundromat over a decade ago. I also picked Chun-Li and spammed her Lightning Kick to give Dhalsim a beatdown with Sonic Booms...until the game rebooted. Only reason that happened was because I was playing it on a rinkydink Multicade machine
Played this version in my local arcade in England. It was all over the place in 92/93. Thank you for shining an insightful light on nostalgic times.
Great job, great to see these little bits of history been shown and known. Keep up the investigation on cool games.👍
I can remember going to London as a young lad on a youth club trip and hanging out with some londeners. After over hearing me speak about how good i was at street fighter 2,One of them said they would whip my ass at it. My jaw dropped as the screen flooded with fireballs and wiped me out instantly. Could never figure out how he did it...until now 🤣🤣
Excellent video. So informative. Very enjoyable.
In Brazil, had modified versions called 'SF de Rodoviária'!
Back in 92 I used to go to a $1 movie theater by me in southern California. I was 12. And this theater had Rainbow edition street fighter!!! Omg I fell in love when I saw the screen full of Guile's sonic Booms! Then we went to the Movie theater everyday for 5 months (till they replaced it) to play this version and watch a movie or two for $3-$5
This is a kick ass topic. Im 42 now. I remember first seeing this evil wizardry at my local 7-11 and thinking ...how did sorry fools get their hands on something as dope as this??? And then I played it.....thats when even the dumbest kid will suddenly become wall street level smart in figuring out the amount-risk-reward of this trap. Lose a quarter in 2.5 seconds thanks to 18 simultaneous fireballs? No thanks....I'll grab a icee
I played a different hacked version that came out afterwards called Turbo Hyper Accelerated Edition. Very similar to rainbow but one difference was Ken and Ryu's hadoken released 2 fireballs that kept chris crossing each other and the speed change with type of punch. Also another difference was you could keep doing mid air fireballs until you came up from the ground!
Haha, love this! Had one down my local video rental lol. It does make you wonder how many different versions are out there. Great vid👌
I remember coming across this variant in a chip shop in England when I was a kid. I loved how crazy it was, and often searched for it over the years, not knowing until only a few years ago that it was a bootleg - though I did always remember the name all these years so I could continue my search for it.
I had no idea it had such an impact on the franchise! Great video!
I played this rainbow edition at a movie theater in Brooklyn… it was awesome I’ll never forget it
I remember hearing about this on Whang's channel. I wanna play this version
WHANG
I remember playing this game when I was a teenager. Multple and mid-air launched projectiles at once om screen was mind blowing at the time. Great video!
This was one of the G.O.A.T's of fighting games
I remember playing this as a kid in 1992 in Detroit at the Chalmers Houston Whittier liquor store at the time. This game was extremely fun to play.
The game that gave birth to a million VS and Alpha games. Capcom had better be thankful for this pirate game.
My local laundromat had the original SF2 and Champion Edition was all the rage at this point. Then one day, they had the bootleg champion edition. Word got around school pretty quickly that this version had a bunch of crazy stuff and kids from school coming to the laundromat just to try and figure out how to do it all.
I remember this hacked version fondly from my local convenience store where it was labelled on the marquee artwork as "Black Belt Edition". I played the heck out of it. Fireballs from Chun Li's lightning kicks, Guile's rapid fire s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sonic boom, and Zangief repeatedly cancelling an aerial spinning piledriver with another spinning piledriver over and over, moving higher and higher until you finally dropped your opponent from 50 screens up. It was pure chaos in the best possible way.
Great video, Lady D! I remember a pirate version of MK2 that allowed some crazy stuff, like doing fatalities at any moment during the fight. Maybe you can dig some information about that game!
Huh, never saw this one! Could be very cool indeed!
These kinds of videos are what got me to subscribe to this channel. It's not the same old "retro" stuff rehashed over and over again like the port on the bottom of an nes. Its well researched well delivered content that even those of us who lived through it can learn a thing or two from.
Thanks for the content, and keep it up!
OMG! I saw this version once in a convenience store during a family vacation to California as a kid in the 90's. It blew my mind and I always wondered what mod of the game I saw that made the game look so crazy but after all the years and searching I never found out what that version was until now. Thanks!
I’ve read about this version through 90’s gaming magazines like EGM and Game Fan. One question to GamePro even asked the staff how Zangief could pull off his spinning pile driver while nowhere near him and the reply was that many arcades were not official. That the reader would have to tell the arcade manager about it’s piracy. This is first time I’ve seen it in action.
I do recall being in a laundry mat once back before Street Fighter was a thing and thinking how much those machines must cost to have in there. It was like 1987 so it was Pac Man and something already old too but it did get me thinking if people made their own stuff and sold it to places like that.
I remember playing this in the early 90's at a bowling alley in staten island NY called sunset lanes, and I was blown away that I could cycle through the characters in-game by pressing the start button. I haven't seen it anywhere since...
We had the M8 version here where you throw double fireballs waving up and down, loved it.
I lived above a pizza pizza as a kid that had a cabinet with rainbow edition on it. Nobody believe me at school lmao. This is such great vindication.
I have to say this is one of your best videos yet. I love it! I've been checking out your channel since you got on TH-cam, and you've definitely raised the bar with the amount of research and knowledge you put into this one. As a retro game enthusiast for over 20 years and collector, you have my thumbs up 👍
Just one little thing: I would normalize all of the audio. It protects from ear rape lol.
Thank you for the awesome upload!
No matter the enormous redundant torrent of videos that have retold the story time after time again,.it never gets old 🤣🤣🤣 keep it coming 😁🏋️♂️
I remembered Richard already mentioned this game glad you have a dedicated topic for this one
played it regularly back in the day, impossible in 2player once Guile's sonic booms filled the screen. What's amazing to me today is how the hacked version found it's way into a small town arcade in Ireland back in the 90's. There's a mad story in there somewhere.
Finally played it the other day at an arcade outside of Chicago... it was hella fun!
You're OG if you remember the Guile handcuff. Only worked on Zangief tho from what I recall
Respect to your collection and this vid. Subscribed.
i remember this version was quite fun back in the day , came across a local arcades that had this in
This version was actually in arcades for a while! LOL
I've been playing street fighter for 30 years. This game shaped my gaming life lol.
Fun story, once years ago in 2010 at my job I ran into 2 guys and one of them had a street fighter 2 shirt. I mentioned as I walked by how I liked that game and we talked about it, the other guy said his favorite character was blanka and I said mine was chun li and we had some good natured trash talk and then someone walked by and said “congratulations on making the pro bowl mr suh.” It was ndamakong suh, the super bowl winning defensive tackle who was playing for the Detroit lions at the time.
When this version first debuted here in the states there was a big sticker on the arcade marque that said "Thunder Edition". I guess that sounded more appealing than Rainbow edition.
Nice! I saw the fireballs floating around when I was young. Never saw that version again but never forgot it. This cleared up a 20 year question lol
You are a beautiful story teller. Thank you for this microdoc great work 🥰
Nice! Been really enjoying your content, and I can't wait to see what next!
I played it on a summer vacation trip....fantastic....the close by sf2 ww cabinet looked ancient by comparison...lol
I grew up playing Rainbow Edition at this mall called Dragon City where I live. Loved it! Great video! Btw their was a couple of versions of Rainbow, One was Black Belt and the other was Black Belt 2
WOOO NEW LADY DECADE VIDEO! I've heard about this bootleg before, it's so interesting to me!
Nice collection, cheers from the Videogames Museum!
I grew up in inner city Baltimore and we had one of these at the local corner store. No idea how they got it, but man, did the local scene have a ton of fun with this. We used to put money in just to figure out strange combos and stuff, good times!
I played this version next to a laundry mat as a kid in Pasadena California! I always referred to it as Tropical edition but now o know!!! I’ve been telling my side for years that this version was real!!!! Thank you for this video!!!🙏🙏🙏
I remember there being one of these machines at a laundromat near me, I remember being very confused
I remember playing this version at a pizza joint in BFE California. That was my first experience with SF2, and I was super disappointed with the vanilla versions and kept going back.
haha
Wow, great coverage! Loved this story :)
pizza king in Mississauga, Ontario had this. thanks for making an awesome doc!
Earnscliffe Recreation Centre in Brampton also had it. I wonder if it was the same machine moving around 🤔
I've added this to my watch list and will watch asap ✌ Thank you.
Rainbow Edition also inspired mid air attacks, mid air fireballs and the ability to tag in or switch characters mid fight as no fighter ever had thise
I've honestly never heard of this Rainbow Edition. Though to be honest, upon hearing the name I was expecting Zippy, George and Bungle to be selectable characters 😕
I got it on my Pandora's box it's mental
I'm starting to get the impression that it started as a cheap hack that just kind of spread naturally....
The first viral sensation.
@Bernardes 0905 I don't know what the arcade scene was like in Brazil but in the states you could walk into an arcade and think the place was empty until you got to the SFII machines...
Often right next to the office and way in the back...
Lovely video. Thanx for sharing .
"Champion Edition Blast processing" LMFAOOOO!!!!
I remember the Magic Kingdom in Disney World of Orlando, FL had this, none of my friends believed me when I told them about it.
There was a chain grocery store down the street from my house that had it back in the 90s. It was completely nuts seeing that as a young kid. It blew me away.
Damn, this was at my local corner shop but called Street Fighter II Alpha Rudeboy Edition! My favourite friggin game to play on the arcade!
I remember playing this at a convenience store that had this in their cabinet. It was a AWESOME experience to say the least. Mid air fireballs. Zangief with yoga flame coming out his ankle. Not having to charge for Guile's moves. It was hilarious and super fun. Too bad they did'nt make a version like this or make some kind of Mario Maker like Street Fighter 2 version that would let you do some of these. I still don't know why after all these years they haven't giving up mid-air projectiles yet that go horizontal. Only air FB I could think of is from Akuma.
Never heard of it as Rainbow edition, when I was a kid we just called it the illegal version. Never liked it that much, but it was a fun novelty at first. I remember one machine I saw had homemade artwork on the cabinet to say Street Fighter 3, I am not kidding. It did take forever between SF2 and SF3.
And then when SF3 did come out, a lot of people hated it.
@@theobserver4214 thats true, I think it grew in popularity over time as it was underappreciated when it came out. Most of the old favorites were out with a new cast of strange characters in. I originally didn't like it, but now I hold SF3 3S in the same high regard as SSF2T as the two best fighters I have ever played.
There were two main types of hacks back in the day.
There were the one that boosted the speed and unlocked mid air moves, without changing much.
Characters with air throws gained insanely broken cheese that let them ignore vertical distance when calculating throw eligibility (claw, chun-li, and Guile). you could jump over someone and throw them. or izuna drop from off of the top of the screen! zangief could cheese similarly with spinning pile driver. Mid air moves were also possible. Many of them also had blanka mysteriously temporarily changing into ryu on certain occasions, including the neck bite. some of them did minor tweaks to the projectiles
Then there were the rainbow edition variants. these usually let you change characters mid fight with start, and gave all sorts of wacky properties to existing moves, and added new ones. People could teleport, shoot homing fireballs, blast out streams of fireballs during mash moves, do crazy high speed hurricane kicks, no charge sonic booms. Chun li coudl do a lightning legs that also launched a fireball WITHOUT mashing. It was crazy. everything was broken, yet it was somehow balanced because everything was broken, ad you could respond to crazy cheese with even crazier cheese. Some of them even had dragon punches that launched walls of fireballs.
These hacks inspired hyper Figting, which did indeed beat them at their own game. but also marvel vs capcom.
This is a superb video and an extremely fascinating story. Capcom made their best game yet by responding to the bootlegs.
Oh my God I was just thinking about this! As a kid I remember playing this at a grocery store and it blew my wig off just how crazy it was! I must've spent $10 in quarters one day just playing this version and could never find it again, because it got moved out of the grocery store it was in. It was the only time I've every played it and even now I could not find it at arcades nearby my the malls, or even at Chuck E Cheese's I frequented as a kid.
Glad to know this was real and I want imagining it. I remember telling my friends at school about it and they never believed me. Lol Great video!
The father of fighting games no questions ask .
This was so interesting! Thank you
I went to a sports camp in NY back in the 90’s that also had an arcade. Street fighter 2 was so popular back then they had two machines and one of them was this version. You could easily beat the game (or your opponent) by flooding the screen with Guiles sonic booms. All this time I thought the machine was broken 😆
This has been on Mame for many years now, I didn't know it had a history.
Awesome video of my all time fav game.... nice one bird 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
This is the version that got you called a liar by other kids at school when you randomly came across it and told everyone about it lol
OMG I had forgotten about this, brought back great memories! 😃
Her breakdown on this game is awesome! I saw this game at truck stops.
If you own a Street Fighter II Turbo PCB and really want to crank up the speed way more than the 15% put the game in debug mode then it really flys! You can do this with the dip switches. You can really mess with the game this way and do a lot of things. The mode bypasses the normal functionality of the switches and changes them. One time I even put back Ken's Chains and Chun-Li's garbage can & sign back into the background by messing with the switches but I forgot how I did it 😆. Basically USA worked on Turbo while Japan was working on what they considered to be the real follow up Super. But ironically Turbo made more money and was more successful.
I found the version at a donut shop. There was a crowd of people gathered around the arcade we couldn’t believe what we were seeing
She said "Slice" as Leonardo did a slicing special attack... Thumbs up and subscribed
Ive just realised. I don’t think Desk has ever done a rainbow edition combo video. Can you imagine what he could come up with. Someone ask him.
Had one of these in a corner shop in Hounslow. Loved it
In Mexico, arcades were more commonly found in convenience stores, which were usually opened in a person's house. So, most of my arcade playing while growing up over there took place in some neighbor's car garage, living room, or storage shed where their "store" was located, while eating chips and drinking sodas through a straw out of a plastic bag ... Good times :D
Anyway, I remember visiting my cousin one day and going across his neighborhood to play a version of this that was modified even further, in which doing a Shoryuken would produce a near infinite number of Hadokens. We would call this the "magic" version of SFII.
Oh.
This explains why I couldn't find anything on the Street Fighter wiki that matched the Street Fighter II: Champion Edition I remembered seeing in a restaurant in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. I think I was there on vacation in the late 90's or so, and the multi-fireball attacks left quite the impression.
Street Fighter de Rodoviária! Absolutely a classic! There was also a SNES bootleg that allowed Vega to move like the Spanish cage stage on any stage…… awesome stuff! Nice video!
There is another SFII' CE hack which is like Rainbow Edition, but with even more changes like Ryu and Ken shooting multiple fireballs per dragon punch, and Sagat doing a Yoga Flame for every Tiger Uppercut he does. That's the Koryu edition, or the Sheng Long hack.
There's also unlicensed Street Fighter II DOS hacks that reduced load times, but made so many changes to the fighters to make the gameplay a little more exaggerated. I know one of them is the SFIBM 198 bootleg with Sagat shooting fast nonstop Tiger Shots standing and sitting alternatively.
Where there was a Rainbow Edition, there was a dumb kid going around pressing the player 1 or 2 button changing your character mid fight as a joke.
I’m 40. I remember kids at school describing a version of the game that didn’t sound real. Thirty years later...
Damn! That is absolutely fascinating!
I have never heard of the Rainbow Edition before, getting to discover this whole thing along with how impacted Street Fighter proper was amazing.
Also... Hi! I discovered your channel roughly 20 minutes ago! You know what that means? It's backlog time! Cheers!
There was also Koryu edition, wall of hadokens. Tiger flame.
I played this mad bootleg version down Leisure Time in Burnley, at Martin Mere in Blackpool and in a Taxi Rank in wales so it was definitely more prevalent than the internet remembered.
I played it in one of the arcades in Blackpool. Blew my 8 year old mind 😂
I also saw this in the fair that used to come to Burnley/Rossendale at the time. Also in Coral Island in Blackpool If I recall.
@@cameronashworth1981 I think it was a chip shop in Blackpool but definitely was in the funfair. Pikey af
@3:14 "This version of the game was crazy"
00:00 The "StreetS Figter series" and what a way to start a video!
Yeah, I remember playing this at a bakery near home. We still talk about it to this day.