Developed by a company called “Sun L” (who are uncredited in the game itself), and published by Capcom in Japan, and Nintendo in the West, Street Fighter II on the Game Boy is a cut-down, monochrome version of the famous Street Fighter II arcade game. It was initially released in 1995.
The game features a single-player tournament mode, where you fight against CPU-controlled opponents over three rounds; a survival mode where you fight CPU-controlled opponents in single bouts, but only get one full life bar (which refills a little if you win); and a two-player ‘versus’ mode for human players to fight each other over a link cable.
The Champion Edition of Street Fighter II gave players access to the four CPU-controlled opponents in The World Warrior (Balrog, M. Bison, Sagat, and Vega), and you can play as Balrog, M. Bison and Sagat in this, but not as Vega. He’s absent from the game entirely.
Also missing from the game are Dhalsim and E. Honda. Ryu, Ken, Guile, Chun Li, Blanka, and Zangief are all featured and playable, though.
Background and character portraits are based on those from Super Street Fighter II, and some of the moves from Street Fighter II: Turbo are also included. So the Game Boy port is a bit of a mash-up.
The most important thing, though, is how Street Fighter II actually plays on the Game Boy, and unfortunately it’s not great. The fighters don’t move particularly smoothly around the screen, which is probably the biggest disappointment. Controlling them, and actually fighting, is okay, though. While it’s nowhere near as good as playing the real thing, Street Fighter II on the Game Boy is at least not terrible.
The game can be played at five difficulty levels, and the timer can be switched on or off. The lowest of the five difficult levels is pathetic, to be honest, and opponents barely even try to hit you, but the remainder do actually provide a challenge. Anything above level four will really test your mettle.
Street Fighter II does have colour enhancement when plugged into a Game Boy Color, and is also Super Game Boy compatible (with each opponent having their own border graphic). I’ve posted some screenshots of the GBC colour-enhanced version at the end of this article. Shots of the SGB version are here.
More: Street Fighter II on Wikipedia
The King of Grabs 
I love the pixelart in the monochrome GameBoy. There are some incredible games very well done. I worked with pixelart for more than a decade and rarelly created monochrome artwork… always in color. But this style as a place in my heart!
Talking about the game… so is it a “official” Street Fighter port? I never heard about it before! Thanks for sharing these amazing grabs!
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Yes, this is an official port! Capcom commissioned Sun L to create the Game Boy version for them (and took all the credit, because Sun L are not mentioned anywhere in the game itself).
The Game Boy also has a special place in my heart too. I bought one in 1989, the year I began university, so I played it a lot, but couldn’t afford many games (they were quite expensive). I sold all my Game Boy games in 2002 and really regret doing that! I wish I’d kept them. I still have my original Game Boy, though. 🙂
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I had a GameBoy classic too, but it was around 1995, when I entered university (I was 19 at the time). But in my small town (southern Brazil) there were absolutely no GameBoy games to buy, rent, to get from friends, etc.. I had few titles and ended selling the device to a friend.
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I was 20 in 1989, but because I was a poor student I couldn’t afford to buy games very often. I remember buying Final Fantasy Legend on the original Game Boy and playing that to death over the space of six months. Other than Tetris, I can’t remember what other Game Boy games I had. I had an Atari ST at home, and was playing Dungeon Master a lot. I won a SNES in a magazine competition (CVG magazine) in 1991, and that changed everything. 🙂
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I would love to hear the Tale of the CVG Magazine Competition in another moment! Regards!
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Haha. Sure… 🙂 I used to buy CVG regularly in the late 80s/early 90s and saw that in one issue they had a competition to win one of ten Super Nintendos. The task was to “design a video game character to rival Sonic or Mario”. When I saw this I knew I had to pull out all the stops to win, so I created and drew a whole comic called “Hapless Heroes”, where there were around twenty different superhero characters who were all rubbish, but meant to be funny. Characters like “Oven-Ready Chicken Man”, “Woman Man”, and others. I drew all the characters, scanned them in black and white, and created page layouts in Pagemaker on early Apple Macs (we had quite a few at university so I could use them quite well). I then printed the comic (I think it was 12 or 16 pages in total), and then coloured the entire thing by hand, carefully. When finished I sent it off and waited. And waited, and waited… After about three or four months of waiting I decided to call the CVG offices to ask them if they’d decided the winners of the competition. I remember it was Christina Erskine who took my call, and she checked and eventually came back and told me I was one of the winners. As you can imagine I was pretty excited to have won. Haha. About a month later the brand new console arrived in the post. It was the original Super Mario World version of the console, so that’s the only game I had for a while. But that was enough, really! Super Mario World kept me and my roommates occupied for quite some time. This all happened in my final year at university, so it wasn’t the best time to be playing SNES games, but I managed not to fail my course! LOL. The funny thing is: in 1993, after I finished university I then got a job working on a Super Nintendo magazine, and went on to have a successful ten-year career as a writer and editor of games magazines, culminating in three years at PC Zone magazine. I got to know (and be friends with) all the CVG guys and gals – including Christina Erskine – and later spoke with them about winning that competition. I have to say that winning that SNES was one of the highlights of my life! 😀
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