From: Street Fighter II
Genre: Video Games
Who said it?: Ryu
The story behind the quote: This is actually the victory quote from Ryu, one of the characters from Street Fighter II. However, it created a lot of questions and confusion, which sadly could have been avoided if Capcom was more serious with their documentation.
The quote will appear when Ryu beats his opponent. However, people who were playing the game started wondering who the heck Sheng Long is and why we won’t be able to beat Ryu unless we go through this Sheng Long guy? A lot of people (myself included) that Sheng Long was Ryu and Ken’s master. We all thought that he was some tough Karate master who trained Ryu in his fighting style and must be one tough sonoabitch.
It was a great mystery and EGM, a popular video game magazine at the time, fueled the rumor that Sheng Long was actually in the game by publishing a method to actually fight him!
The method EGM published turned out to be an April’s Fools joke.
The real story behind the quote actually comes from sloppy translation of the victory quotes. The original Japanese quote reads “You must overcome the Rising Dragon,” which is Ryu’s jumping uppercut move, AKA the Dragon Punch. The Japanese text was translated into Chinese, where “Rising Dragon” can be translated into… yep, “Sheng Long.” When it came time to translate the quote to English, the localization staff misunderstood that it was a special attack and not a person, so he (or she) transliterated the text to read the quote we all know and love.
Still, we can sort of thank this mistranslated text. Because of this error, Capcom actually created Akuma (Gouki in Japan… don’t ask why they keep on screwing up the names), who had the moves of “Sheng Long” as described from EGM’s April’s Fools joke, and Gouken, the “official” master of Ryu and Ken who look strangely like the character art from EGM’s joke.
(Whew! That was another long one!)
Geek wisdom: We have to know our limits. A lot of people try to overcome great obstacles and that’s still admirable. However, we sometimes have to realize there has to come a time to step back and actually assess if we have the ability to perform the task. I mean, an ordinary guy just can’t come up to Kobe Bryant right now and challenge him to a one-on-one basketball game and hope to dominate! There’s a certain skill level involved to even stand a slight chance of beating him!
Now, I’m not saying it can be done. It can… but there’s a lot of practice and training involved. But, until you become skilled enough, just stay back and admire the man’s skill on the court.
My Geek Wisdom 