ah. advertizements. nowadays, they're relatively normal save for ads for sports events [what in the olympics or the super bowl awakens that shit in people anyway], but there was a time in history where advertizements were a little more...weird. especially in regards to video games. this is also another ''japan V.S. america'' article 'cause this is a website about street fighter, it comes with any series old enough to be huge as fuck in the 90's, so i didn't mean to pit the two countries at each other...but to be fair you can technically do that in the game proper. welcome to youtube embed land.
since i literally could not find a single video about street fighter 1 on the turbografix-16 [wherein it was named 'fighting street'], let's start with the superstar game, shall we?
no proper ads for the arcade game itself, but rather it's SNES port. just a cool shot of ryu in the desert...or chun-li in the desert, if you're so inclined.
this advertizement however tells you to leave your significant other for street fighter. but is that worthy of leaving your damn lover for?
and here's a ad announcing that vega has emerged into reality and there's nothing you can do to escape from his dives.
a night in the museum parody of a ad with ''wacky little kids film from the 90's'' orchestral music, if you please! besides, mortal kombat? they really were fucking beefing back then??
grouping these two together 'cause like the SNES SF2 port it's two variants of the same ad, but more cool shit! bison has escaped into reality too! and we see a member of the wild william F. guile species in it's natural habitat!
and in america, they got...who's this? i know i was born in the 2000's but i don't exactly recall rik mayall. should i recognize rik mayall? i don't think he's american judging by his accent. what is this? atleast i found it funny.
besides the probable generational shock i gave you by not recognizing somebody, we're back to more cool shit-abliet shorter than the last few ones. this time, it spoils akuma being in the game!
back to america...was there not a film with this exact idea of funny overdubs of preexisting martial arts films? kung pow something? i'm getting deja vu.
next up is not how anyone plays fighting games! what the fuck were they thinking!
meanwhile, this is a bit more accurate to how some people play fighting games. you and your waifus...
this is the most cutest out of the ads shown here, though-purely because of sakura. also, bison in a car.
M. bison unveils his most evil plan yet: teleporting the entire street fighter alpha 3 roster to everyone's houses.
...what the fuck is this ad? i mean what the fuck was the promotional material surrounding the EX games but especially what the fuck is this?
apparently, these are online ads instead. how'd that work? how do you advertize online?
oh yeah, japan named the live action street fighter film ''real battle on film'', like these are actually the characters instead of just actors. that's funny.
oh right, i'm not gonna cover the SF4 ads, purely because the game's ads are literally just normal showings of gameplay and some animations. it trickled out from the 90's, alright? what matters more for a showing here is...the street fighter x tekken ads.
yeah, right from the horse's mouth. someone worse than M. bison came into reality. no one wants to deal with kazuya mishima being real, let alone a kazuya mishima that looks like he's a political canidate. oh right, you wanna know WHY i mention these specifically? well, do you hear that music? why,
they sifted through some teen at the time's ipod and found this song, then made it the theme of the entire game. they will never do this again, this shit is fucking awesome. there's more songs they used! but stuff like this orchestrated the back of street fighter x tekken for a bit until it came out and it was so bad it nearly killed the street fighter producer but ended up letting the tekken producer live. i'd call that bias, or maybe harada is immune to the effects of bad games. i also believe SF4 had a similar scenario with it having it's own ''we had a 2000's alt band's song get used''? but i'm not entirely sure.
now, everything from this point on is TV spots and cinematic trailers...but i still want to show off SFV's trailers, purely because they're kinda tragic when compared to what we actually got with the game. aw yeah, it's ''game i actually remember seeing happen in real time'' time.
i still say the 3D artstyle for this series peaked at SFV. the reason why this is tragic is that in this, it implies that ryu and necalli would have an actual fight and that charlie nash would effectively kamikaze bison, maybe necalli would've been this interesting thing for ryu thematically...but in the actual game we got necalli getting dumpster'd by everyone he fights despite him being the new villain in town and charlie nash squeezing on M. bison's boobs really hard in a attempt to kill him only to get killed instead. permanently. only for ryu to step in and not kill M. bison either. who wrote this story, anyway?
another peice of false advertizing, i get that street fighter since 1991 or 1994 has a fairly grandoise story with 3 plots total, but looking at this after 8 years, holy fuck. apologies for the amount of a shadow falls bashing here long after this game released it's just that it's wasted potentional city, can we get lighthearted again for a second?
anyone remember this? i do. the amount of memes about wide ryu was staggering after this trailer...though i still can't get over the fucking adobe ass prototype logo. but you know what's crazier?
what you see here before you is critically acclaimed american rapper michael carter jr. don't recognize that name? well, how about 'lil wayne'? yeah. apparently he worked with capcom 8 years ago too, but he's been elected to the spokesperson for street fighter as a whole. infact, street fighter apparently has a history with rappers alike...according to this book i have. fairly interesting part of the history of street fighter.
backtracking to the 90's, here's a few non-game street fighter stuff...like toys!
the first commercial fucks me up so much. it's for a tiger electronics toy, and the condescending voice of trhe random ass guy that pulls up only for the camera to cut to the most saddest looking ryu and ken ever and a constipated guile is what sends me. what the fuck did i do, man? what did i do to not be a street fighter? there's also a ad for a strategy guide like every game had in this era, and a ad for a VHS.
there's also the street fighter G.I. joe toys. i've shown this before, but they deserve to be shown again. but did you know that there's MORE?
the fucking quotability of this.
you know who else is returning? the entire country of south korea, of course!
do you think they licensed that song? i bet you they probably didn't! oh and here's something even better,
yeah. i'm not making that up.
overall, for as much as we live in a ad-riddled world, face it-some of the shit companies come up with is fairly funny and worth checking out.