if you want to know just how successful something is, look to the amount of times it has been ripped off. street fighter, as you have learnt, is no exception-because with the lightning-in-a-bottle success of SF2 came 9,000 clones attempting to be it. i'm not going to cover every single one-i'm not even going to consider art of fighting or fatal fury a rip-off, either. that's cruel, though capcom thought art of fighting-or rather a particular character from there-was a knock-off. instead, i have chosen the most INTERESTING of the interesting. some of them well-known, some of them not. but the point is to illustrate and document just how big street fighter 2 was on the moment it came out, and how willing people were to cash off of it. if you're reading the title, you know exactly where this is going.
first...there was a SF2 rip-off before there even was a SF2 in the first place. this is a bit of a untold part in the history of this game but, SF2 wasn't supposed to be the way it is now for a while. instead, final fight was gonna be SF2-of course, things changed and they split it into two projects, but this is even BEFORE capcom touched upon the idea of a SF2. see, street fighter 1 had many PC ports produced by a british company named 'tiertex', and published by...publishing house 'U.S. gold', which is also british. see, they wanted to make their own SF2 before capcom could, especially since their PC ports were doing relatively well. hell, they actually approached them to try and make them consider it! alas, capcom refused them and released final fight and then 2 years later, SF2. it's also technically the street fighter game with THE first south korean fighter. i'm sorry, shin.
there isn't anything else needed to be said about this, as a coincidentally-also-british man named stuart ashens from 2007 youtube covered the game on his just-as-old web series. i don't want to entertain the thought of me being a year older than this video.
where the fuck do i even begin. so, this is not a SNK series of games technically, but rather a ADK one-but ultimately it's just a SNK game. it's less of a ''fighters coming together'' story but more like a mishmash of different historical figures from all over the world from different eras. it could've been worse, the roster could've been musashi, hitler, al capone, billy the kid, musashi and jack the ripper-like some fucked up version of records of ragnarok-but thankfully we wound up with whatever the fuck the game is now and a probable kinnikuman character. said probable kinnikuman character also has a minigame on his own where it's a sidescrolling shoot 'em up where he flies with fucking. boot jets. and firing from his fingers. there were also more games than just 1 and 2 but nothing much of note really. also, brocken, the stated probable kinnikuman character, for as much as he was sometimes seen the 'M. bison' of the game wasn't even the villain-he's just a cyborg experiment the actual villain of the game [who's just a odd scientist] made for nazi germany-so the uniform has it's reasoning as opposed to bison effectively wearing WWII japanese military uniform but with armor and a belt because he was inspired by two characters that wore WWII japanese military uniform.
the funniest one in this article, i assure you. so, upon seeing the fighting game boom of the 90's, taito, out of all companies to be invested in this, thought to make their own to see how it plays out for them. they then decided to set up shop and do some location tests. the result? everyone hated it so fucking much. why? the game was comically miserable to deal with, and it didn't even match up to the insane shit that was already being released at the same time, but there was also something else.
what probably contributed to the near unanimous hatred of the game was that the one difference that sets kaiser knuckle apart from SF2, is that taito effectively took M. bison, fed him ampethetamines, and put him in the game. thus, the general was born.
he is probably singlehandedly THE most well-known thing about kaiser knuckle, the stupidly fucking hard boss, the fighting game final boss to end all fighting game final bosses, not even fucking final bison from SFA3, the result of capcom's own experiments with feeding their prized fighting game's final boss character ampethetamines, puts up to it in terms of difficulty. that's probably a exxaggeration. due to the sheer reputation this game has, all of this might be the reason why it never got a sequel or literally anything...with one exception. from what i hear, they rereleased kaiser knuckle under a different name-dan-ku-ga, and it serves to be a more refined and easier version of kaiser knuckle. it even has a healthy community nowadays! so in the end, i suppose this game got redeemed.
there's more i want to add for the list, but this is all i could find. fuck you youtube search.