Censorship
Register
Advertisement

Street Fighter II is a fighting game that was developed and published by Capcom. The game was first released in arcades in February 1991 as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. Due to Nintendo wanting their SNES port of the game to be family friendly, references to violence and drugs were toned down.

Censorship[]

International censorship[]

  • The boxer, who was named "M. Bison" in Japan, was renamed to "Balrog" to avoid a potential lawsuit from real-life professional boxer Mike Tyson.[1]
  • The Spanish masked fighter, who was named "Balrog" in Japan, was renamed to "Vega", since "Vega" is a Spanish surname.
  • The final boss, who was named "Vega" in Japan, was renamed to "M. Bison", since "Vega" is considered non-threatening for the main antagonist.
  • In Guile's ending, his deceased friend, "Nash", was renamed to "Charlie", his wife, "Yulia", was renamed to "Jane", and his daughter, "Kris", was renamed to "Amy". In later media, his deceased friend would be known as "Charlie Nash".

SNES censorship[]

  • The animation of the guy in a fedora and trenchcoat in Ken's stage in the World Warrior version has his right arm animation change in the non-Japanese version to avoid implication to masturbation.
  • In Guile's ending, "killing Bison" was replaced by "destroying Bison". Also, M. Bison tells Guile to "get it over with" rather than "kill him quickly".
  • In Chun-Li's ending, "his drug will surely collapse" was replaced by "his empire will surely collapse".
  • Zangief's ending removed references to Soviet Union and Russia. Also, Mikhail Gorbachev is "ex-president" due to the SNES port being released in 1992 and Gorbachev ended his term as president in 1991.
  • Balrog's win quote in the arcade version, "My fists have your blood on them!" was changed to "Get up, you wimp!" and "Hey, what happened? I'm not through with you yet!"

Genesis censorship[]

Note: The censorships apply to the SNES port above as well as additional censorships in the Genesis port listed here.
  • In the opening, the guy who gets punched was changed from an African-American to a Caucasian with blond hair in the non-Japanese version.

Where to find it uncensored[]

The Japanese releases have the original names intact. The arcade game and the Japanese versions of the console ports and the later console ports such as Capcom Generations 5/Street Fighter Collection 2 on the PlayStation and Capcom Classics Collection on PlayStation 2 and Xbox were otherwise uncensored.

References[]

  1. "Interview with Street Fighter II sound production senior staff" (in ja). Capcom. Archived from the original on April 9, 2004. 

External links[]

Advertisement