From: Street Fighter
Genre: Video Games
Who said it?: Various characters
The story behind the quote: We’ve already discussed a bunch of Street Fighter II quotes, such as Ryu’s victory quote regarding the “mysterious” Sheng Long and even M. Bison’s quote regarding Tuesday. However, these quotes came from the extremely popular 2nd entry in the series. Most people haven’t even played the original Street Fighter game. Now seems like the perfect time to take a gander at it.
The original Street Fighter game was actually a pretty amazing fighting game… for its time. While there were some games that used different characters like Yie Ar Kung Fu, you normally played as an ordinary guy with no real special skills while your opponents can do amazing things. In Street Fighter, Ryu (or Ken if you’re playing as the 2nd player), you can throw fireballs, perform spinning kicks or a devastating jumping uppercut. While the controls weren’t responsive (you’d be lucky to actually get the fireball motion to register), that was pretty different for its time and did gain a significant following.
Another big innovation would be digitized voices. Ryu and Ken would yell out “Flash Fire” or “Dragon Punch” when they did the fireball and Dragon Punch, respectively. The most memorable use of digitized speech used would have to be the entire quote spouted out by the computer opponent when you beat them. Even though the sound quality was terrible (it was pretty hard to understand it without the subtitles), it was still amazing to actually hear it.
Geek wisdom: You may think that you are the best at a certain thing but you cannot rest on your laurels. You have to constantly practice your craft in order to actually be the best. For example, you may think that you’re the best Street Fighter at your arcade, however, unless you actually go to different arcades and test your skills against new players, you’ll never improve.
Sure there’s a fear of losing, but that fear is also important since the only way you can get better is to try testing yourself against others. If you want to be the best at anything, you have to prove yourself as the best.
