Why special inputs are so frustrating in Street Fighter 1 

"Should beginners start with Street Fighter 1?" is a really easy question to answer. Absolutely not. Let's be real, SF1 has a very important place in history, but it's not a very good game and the inputs work so differently to every modern (ie., past 30 years) fighting game.

I managed to get fireball almost 100% of the time. Basically press punch, do the quarter circle, release the punch, and DON’T release forward. Just keep pushing forward until the fireball shoots. This worked perfectly and for the first time in 43 years I managed to finish Street Fighter I

Never knew about that odd "pressure sensitive" button on the original Street Fighter 1 cabinet. What an odd concept

When Street Fighter 1 says "Special moves" they really meant "special moves" - moves with cryptic inputs but game-breaking potential. The thing is Street Fighter 1 was an arcade game first, and a competitive fighting game second. Sure, it had 2 player mode, but it really wanted players putting coins in to get to the next fighter. If the special moves were easy to do, it'd be counter-intuitive to this arcade quarter-crunching mentality. Players would be able to breeze through from Retsu to Sagat on a quarter or two by spamming the OP special moves. However, having hard AI and special moves that, seemingly, came out at random, gave us players at the time an incentive to keep playing. Imagine being a kid, mashing punch for your life as you're getting mauled by Joe, only for a weird fireball to come out and take half his life bar away. How did you do it??? Well, you'd want to keep putting coins in and keep trying and trying, to hopefully crack the mystery and master the game.

Back in the late 80s I took out Sagat with one dragon punch on a 6 button version of the game. When the round started I immediately did the DP and he immediately charged at me and the DP connected 3 times. The round timer stopped at 99. It never happened again after that. I think it's possible to take out Birdie the same way since he also charges very fast with the head butt. I have KO'd Birdie with one DP numerous times back then but not with 99 left on the timer. It's worth noting that the Dragon Punch cannot be blocked in SF1. It also can still connect when the animation shows Ryu is facing away from the opponent in mid air.

I ran a few tests after watching Rubbish's video. From what I recall, SF1 was generally relatively lenient on direction inputs, but there were several complicating factors. The game only registering negative edge messed with people's timing expectations. Ground movement is done with a "hopping" animation that can only be cancelled in the first couple of frames, which can greatly reduce how much time you have to register the next input for a special. While the game had no issue with you releasing the attack button while still holding the final direction input, it was pretty tight on how long you were given to release the attack button *after* releasing the final direction. You could buffer the direction inputs, which was arguably easier, but then you had to learn to deal with stuff like the wonky fall speed or timings of the hop.

Small correction about the two arcade cabinets. This info comes from Matt McMuscles and his video on Street Fighter 1 on The Worst Fighting Game. Both versions of the cabinets were sold at the same time, with the pressure sensitive buttons being the deluxe version. However, most cabinets would end up breaking due to the buttons being punched so hard, so they stopped production of the pressure sensitive button variant and only sold the six button.

I grew up in Hong Kong. The way I was taught to do DP was doing 360 starting from df and pressing punch at the same time almost like ewgf in tekken. I managed to do consecutive 3-4 DP consistently but now I realize I've been doing it wrong all along thanks to your valuable explanation. Much appreciated!

I've been waiting for this level of scrutiny over SF1 inputs. THANK YOU.

I was about 9-10 years old when I first played this game in Hong Kong in an arcade beside this restaurant where my family goes for dim sum every weekend. I couldn't get my mind off it since then, I practice doing the srk motion in the air while in class. Anyway it was good times and I have no idea how I can do back to back srk continuously back then.

We need Super Street Fighter 1...

As a tournament SF1 player this is the most in-depth video I've ever seen on SF1. Well done, thanks for the video!

SF1 when it was released wasn't groundbreaking to me and my friends. It was just another game. It was absolutely cool, of course, but we weren't slobbering over it. It wasn't until SF2 came out that people started to crowd around the cabinet. SF1 was played about as often as any other game in the arcade. I regularly went to about 4-5 different arcades and did see SF1 fairly regularly in those and whenever I went to some other city's arcades. It never never ever had crowds around it. It was arguably the first 2d fighting game that had characters that big and looked cool, but there was also that one obnoxiously difficult kung fu game and some other ones that were older that had the same concept behind them. One memory of mine that I'll never forget is I was on the army base and there were these 2 kids about 10-12ish, and they started SF1 and for a full minute straight they just started doing the Hadouken over and over, trying to get one to work. Just constantly ramming quarter circle and punch over and over, and when you looked up at the screen it was just Ken and Ryu punching at each other from 10 feet away going "hap hap hap hap!" and they did literally nothing else. They had their whole bodies into it just leaning into the joysticks and punching the button as hard as they could. They were just trying to hadouken the entire time and it was just not working.

I love how this subject comes up every few years. I remember being 12-13 years old and playing this game at the corner store. It was so difficult to get those darn moves out. SF2 was amazing just because the special moves were so easy to pull off alone.

Ball fire !! - Ryu 1987

I'm surprised SF1 is at 60 FPS, because it looks and feels stiff as hell.

Awesome video!!! I'm glad you were able to use some of my clips. This also explains why I struggled so much playing this game. Haha. Good stuff!

Sad-to-say this is probably the one game in the Battle Hub I've come closest to beating on a single credit. 😅 (And I would have done it, too, if Sagat hadn't launched his Tigershot just before I knocked him out with my Hadoken in the third round. 😤 Had to sit there and watch as the Tigershot travelled across the screen and knocked out a "frozen" Ryu for a Double K.O… giving the win to _Sagat!_ )

This is great work. So happy you’ve done it!

This is the kind of incredibly niche yet fascinating fighting game content we need.

Always answering the questions I never thought about asking. Great video and I’m sure glad that overall games have gotten away from such complex inputs lol.

Thank you, would love to more especially SF1++

Thank you for answering this. Even all the SF1 experts I know mostly just told me "just justframe it lol" and that turns out to not be the case! The only fighting game I know where it's legitimately justframe input on every special is SF2 for the Sega Master System. As for fighting games for beginners, I strongly recommend you look into Koihime Enbu. When I was a beginner the thing that upset me the most was that it took me so long to understand even one special motion input, and people around me would just stomp me with combos. Koihime Enbu is the ideal grounded footsies game which requires very minimal combo theory, and I feel like if I had been able to start on that instead of KoF98/2000/2002 I would have had a much easier time.

I was playing it on The battle hub in sf6, I just kept spamming fireball and shoryuken motions hoping for the best. I was able to beat it lol

Thank you for your service for Street Fighter 1.

Thank God for this video. I came across SF1 in an old arcade a long time after SFII had been released. I thought I'd be able to blitz it, but instead was flabbergasted that I struggled to pull off a single dragon punch. I couldn't figure out why.

At some point I just starting spamming the hadoken motion like crazy and got hadokens or dragon punches like 1/3 of the time, and eventually manages to defeat sagat.

Growing up in the US, SF1 wasn’t a game that was very well known, in my experience. I played it once with the pressure sensitive buttons in 1989 and remember seeing the 6 button one at mall, but it didn’t seem to stick with many people and I’m the only person I’ve met who even remembers playing it back then. It was pretty forgettable IMO since there were games like Double Dragon that got far more attention. Good video! Always wondered about the actual inputs 😂

Amazingly, I remember the older kids being able to do it consistently, although I was never able to do it myself, even to this day. I recall one kid telling me you had to do a smooth circular motion though.

Those pressure buttons were an absolute pain in the ass. You'd wind up just wailing on them, so they'd break, or the rubber around them would get worn out and crack. A relic of a more gimmick-y time, I suppose.

All of this makes me want more than ever for Capcom to just remake SF1 in some form that gives it better gameplay.

Its very difficult to appreciate the rush that was this machine in the arcade. First the graphics and the sound was above the standard of that time period. The you literally are betting your money, your quarters, to any stranger, you can get to do this imposible special move before him. Its absurdly dated by today standards, but it was a show back then. Nothing else was like it.

Back when Capcom released the arcade Street Fighter game in 1987 there were very FEW one on one versus fighting games with complex moves. Sure there was boxing but the early versions were very basic or they had a particular camera perspective... believe it or not Nintendo's Punch Out! was a very popular game but it also showed at the time that it was not meant for two players to compete against each other. No matter what some may claim about Konami's MSX game, it was Data East's Karate Champ that sparked the imagination and was there first and also was being immediately copied by other companies for a time, plus the mid 80s had the phenomenon of the Karate Kid films among other martial arts films but the Karate Kid films actually highlighted the massive culture shock of martial arts and the countries it originated from as well as the western tournaments that were practiced back then so Data East's Karate Champ came out at the right time but it had it's own moveset issues that greatly limited how you as a player could pull off those moves. Takashi Nishiyama really sparked a fire when he proposed the concept for Street Fighter but lets fast forward to arcade players who existed back then and saw the arcade game and how they were more likely to see and play the six button layout version because the original pressure pads were being monitored by Capcom because the last thing you want is to sell an arcade cabinet that breaks down and becomes a liability to always be paying to have it fixed, thus the six button layout was far more effective and memorable to the average person lucky to see and even play the game at the arcade center or shop that had an arcade section of cabinet to play and experience. The first thing you saw and thought about was all of the martial arts films you may have seen which were not that many but the most recent was the Karate kid films, next you realize there is a tournament that takes you to either Japan or U.S.A., then if you survived those matches you realized it was a world tournament that would made Flat Earthers and Trump fanatics rage in the triggered section... so even if actual cabinet sales were not in the numbers of later units or even say Pac-man or Galaxian units sold, you could tell right away that a new generation of arcade games was about to begin only Nishiyama San and his team were cutting their teeth at it and even Data East was doing the same. Then someone else started playing against the computer and you heard a scream from the cabinet and saw a rising punch or the flying kicks or the hadouken and you as a witness would freak out at what just happened... the game had SECRETS... it actually had advanced moves beyond the six button layout levels and sure, there was only Ken and Ryu as playable characters and other arcade games showed up that sparked and captured the imagination but other brawlers and one versus one games did show up as other companies were also trying to figure out how to make that type of game work. Takashi Nishiyama then left Capcom in 1989 unbeknownst to us and joined S.N.K. where he had plans to make new attempts at that style of game which is why Fatal Fury 1 still holds up as a basic original fighting game even to this day but Capcom had waited from 1987 all the way to 1991 to make a second attempt.. currently the only other Capcom game to have had such a long wait and massive generational hardware changes to see a sequel is Capcom's Dragon's Dogma II released in 2024 from the original version released in 2012... and note that the latter game was released on PC which is not a suitable platform to release games at the same time for especially cutting edge games that are natively programmed to feature 4K, HDR and Ray Tracing but here we are and the idea of the criticism throwing at Dragon's Dogma II by toxic PC elitists is no different than current kids trying to claim that Street Fighter from 1987 somehow sucked.

Great analysis! I'm curious - which rom set did you analyze? I'd be curious to see if the code was revised at all over time, with regard to only negative edge triggering the special move. For instance, my US Set 2 PCB has no pneumatic input circuitry like you find on earlier PCB versions.

Start at SFII Hyper Fighting or maybe even X-Men vs Street Fighter.

Does anyone know if the special moves worked on the initial versions with the pressure sensitive pads? Wonder what it was like to play?

I would love for them to fully remake this game

I learned this from the PSP Capcom collection. Maximilian and Stuttering Craig did SF1 livestreams years later and couldn't figure it out, so I let them know. But I was like, "damn, even way better game players than me couldn't figure it out!" Still didn't make the game great, but it's playable. Thank you for highlighting this. I usually describe it as "like shooting a gun in MGS 1-3. It works on button release." Even that's a reference a lot of people don't get these days. 😭

That old arcade machine with the big button's use to hurt your hand so much after playing a few rounds. I remember going to my local swimming pool and it was in the reception area. Use to be 10p a go . 40p later and still on the 2nd round and your wrist swelling up and you felt like you had gone 10 rounds yourself, was all part of the fun. The thing is just as you started to get the hang of the giant buttons. Most of the machines got changed to the 6 button versions. And you had to learn the game all over again. Plus the big buttons over time would eventually split and the game would not work. I remember seeing the old cabinet missing it's screen in a skip out side a bowling alley on holiday. In hindsight should have saved it. Today it would be a rare piece to own. One thing no one seems to mention is back in the day you would play the game crossed hands .right hand on the joystick,left hand on the buttons for some reason it made doing the specials easier. This was true on the 6 button versions. That's how I learned to play it.

Nice video! I remember back in the days we played this game all the time and had no clue about the special moves, it just appeared randomly. We just speculated on it with weird guess. My friends and I could reach Adon and seldomly Sagat without any special moves. But never finished the game. then 2 years later I went to NewZealand and saw an arcade cabinet with SF1 in the corner of a coffee shop and asked my friend why nobody played it? And he told me that the game was boring because it was too easy! I was so shocked! How comes? And he played one game to show me... he was doing special move nearly all the time! I was going to ask him when I discovered the flyer on the bezel, it was written clearly all the special moves. 😋 When I went back to Europe to show my new skill, it was just when SF2 arrived in arcade there and no ones where giving a shit about it. 😅

Makes one wonder how the hell this got two different sequels being developed around the same time...

The first time I ever saw Street Fighter it had those pressure sensitive pads. I can tell you, nobody was doing any special moves with those.

There actually is a 4th special move in the game but it's only in the prototype version and was removed from the final version of the game and was replaced with the Tatsumaki. Since it's only in the prototype you'll have to try it on MAME. You simply jump straight up and press ⬇️+kick you think the moves are tough to get out wait till you try this one it's much harder to pull off than the other three. I almost gave up on it but once I got a feel for it was able to get it out on the fly. It's quite damaging to the enemy when it hits. Never tried it with negative edge technique. The final animation exists for this move in amongst the test menus on the board. As does the name of the move in the sound test. Ryu & Ken would have yelled out "Fire Kick" when the move was executed. This is also the move Ryu is seen doing on the game's poster.

I played the heck out of Street Fighter starting with the two big buttons that the harder you hit the harder the punch. The inputs were awful, even after the cabinet was switch to the standard 6 button lay out. From specials to blocking, brutal. And don't get me started on a dragon punch as it was basically impossible. Most people would just press punch over and over while moving the joy stick in a quarter circle up and down really fast hoping for a fire ball or dragon punch lol.

Great research!

I was fortunate that in the SF6 Battle Hub (in the game centre hub), I managed to complete the arcade mode twice which is crazy because in my younger days I struggled with SF1 but somehow played better as I got older now. Kinda the opposite 😅

I used to love Street Fighter 1. Especially with the pneumatic pads!

Yeah, the pressure buttons are the answer. With normal buttons, the best way to perform the special is doing the move, then press the button before finish it , and then release the button and then pressing it AGAIN at the end 🤣🤣 It makes sense if we think about those weird pressure buttons.

I came to the same conclusions while making my 1cc video. I talk about it in my video. I found that holding the final motion is even more important when doing a dp. Also i found it impossible to do specials reliably with a pad. Need that fight stick.

Double-tap the punch or kick buttons after performing the joystick movement, and the super moves will come out every time. I’ve been playing that game since 1989. This method has always worked.

8BITDO FIGHTSTICK SPOTTED how is it? I've been thinking of getting one for my gamer hands

I think they didn't intend for special moves to come out easily. They were supposed to be a rare "wow" moment, like supers today

When this game came out it was all about the quarters Hell, I remember in arcade version of this specific game, where it was literally just two buttons in an arcade joystick and the buttons were as big as my hand, and you had to punch them down, depending on how hard you hit them is what level of strength of punch you had so it was all about making money.

The inputs always drove me mad. Do a video on the first Fatal Fury next, it's very similar in terms of baffling inputs that sometimes you can get a good streak going, other times it's like pulling teeth. Would love to see the differences in how they were programmed/designed. Some of the same staff members worked on SF1 and FF1, and they likely thought this is how fighting games should have been to make the moves seem more "special".

I thought Street Fighter 1++ made a lot of more modern adjustments to the game, too. Smoother, more reliable controls, more balanced damage output, and a combo system?

On 6 button variants you can literally just be holding Heavy Punch the entire round. I haven't tried hitting the other Punch buttons while holding Heavy Punch but I can confirm that you can use Kicks. I don't think Tatsu is good enough versatility-wise to dualwield both Heavy buttons the entire run but it IS an option.

The most reliable way to execute these 3 special moves are to execute the motion and holding down the final direction, don't let go and then tapping the attack button twice. Releasing the direction to neutral before hitting the attack button is guaranteed to fail 100%.

This is like, more complicated than most speedrun glitch setups lmao

This is why the MUGEN remake is the superior way to play SF1.

This sounds like there's some kind of buffer overflow error somewhere.

8:00 its funny that you say this because I'm always surprised at the fact Street Fighter recieved a sequel despite how bad its first entry was.

Not sure if you tired Power Rangers Battle for The Grid yet. Simple inputs but complicated nonetheless. 2XKO seems to be very similar, with added complexity for sure, from what I can tell.

I've never been able to figure out the timing for the special moves, so I just spam them till they happen. It's hard for me to beat SF1 without the special moves. The Hadouken is especially helpful in this game.

Yes please make more videos of street fighter videos please for all sf please

interesting

Its sweet when you get 1 hit kos. Gotta admit that.

If I were Capcom, I would not just make a six-button edition. I would make a SUPER Street Fighter, remade through CPS1 hardware and it fixes every mistake on the original.

I hated those pressure sensitive plungers. It basically disallowed us little kids from playing cause you do need some force for the heavier attacks

What about people says doubling up on your punch of kick input working. I’ve certainly seen it work

Sf1 for begginers... No. Hell no. Start from V and VI. Then Alphas, 2, then 4 and 3. Forget 1.

Would be cool if this could be mastered, ive always spammed the move multiple times white hitting the attack button repeatedly for it to work. Thats how i played it and its how the game feels to me, spamming OP moves, not very nuanced but it works.

From what I saw during a quick test, it's not that complicated. There are 2 important parts: 1. The motion input timer isn't refreshed after each successful input Once you press the initial direction of the motion, you should finish it within around 18 frames. 2. The final input is always the stick/d-pad, and must be pressed exactly 1 frame after the punch/kick button release. One oddity is that you can release the punch/kick button at the same time that you press the second directional input. For example, the Hadouken can be executed either as ⬇, ↘, release P, ➡ or ⬇, ↘+ release P, ➡ Also Ryu can only hop, not walk. Hops can only be cancelled into specials at the very start or ending of their animation. This makes it more difficult to execute a shoryuken since it starts with ➡. It's relatively easy to press ➡ and time the ending of the hop with a shoryuken though.

Special Moves in this game are meant to be hidden moves, that's why the timing should be perfect and the damage is so OP. Thus became implemented in SF2 when the commands are a bit easier. I love Street Fighter 1 (not kidding) no matter how awesome or terrible it is, nice video BTW

absolutely not, imo the best jumping in point would be Dragonball FighterZ, pretty much capcom v Marvel clone but extremely accessible with enough depth for a beginner.

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I don't know what everyone is talking about. Special moves are the easiest part of the game. You can buffer them during normal attacks so there's no awkward animations or sticky inputs. It actually makes it really annoying because some punish counters can't even be seen unless you've done it many times. Rather than trying to hit your opponent (Because that's what they want you to do) practice on blocking and whiff punishing to actually make an improvement to your strategy. Everyone is different but we're all monkeys...

Since when did video games become this complicated? easier to throw the game in the bin and go to mcdonalds

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Great video. An artifact from the hit pad control code does sound like a plausible reason for the input difficulty. But it does seem strange that Capcom wouldn't adapt it for the 6 button config. Maybe it was intentionally ambiguous and difficult so you couldn't mercilessly spam it to kingdom come; it was a "secret" technique after all. The game didn't really have enough depth to keep on bringing people back - it was just an arcade fighting game, not a competitive fighter (as the guy below correctly said). Managing to pull off a special move made you feel like God. I remember an interview with Capcom when they were designing SF2. The designer first proposed they open the input window a few frames before and after the motion so that fireballs would be a standard part of the game , the rest of the team were completely against it, saying people would lose interest in the game quickly. As we all know, it worked a treat for SF2 due to how much better designed it was than SF1