The story behind the quote: This week’s quote comes from Street Fighter: The Movie, the 1994 live-action film based on the hit Capcom fighting game. While not really taking the source material to heart, the film is still remembered as Raul Julia’s final film as M. Bison as well as another famous quote involving Tuesdays. But it still has another memorable quote besides that iconic saying.
The quote comes from the middle of the film. As Chun-Li (played by Ming Na Wen) and her crew send a truck filled with explosives towards the tent where M. Bison and he cohorts are celebrating. As the group watches the truck barrel towards them on a monitor, Zangief (played by Andrew Bryniarski), in fear of his life, yells out the quote.
Geek Wisdom: There are going to be some problems you cannot simply shut your eyes and hope it will pass. Sometimes, taking fast action is needed.
Who said it?: Ricki Ortiz and various announcers/commentators
The story behind the quote: While this quote doesn’t come directly from a video game per se, it is video game adjacent and actually is very important.
The quote actually has two origins in a sense. The first time the quote was uttered was during a Street Fighter IV match between Ricki Ortiz and Wolfkrone. Wolfkrone’s C. Viper managed to perform a clutch Ultra combo on Ricki Ortiz’s Rufus. Wolfkrone thought he won and stood up to raise his hands in victory. However, he was wrong and Ricki managed to come back to steal the victory. In a fit of hype, Ricki exclaimed the quote and UltraDavid, one of the commentators for the match mirrored Ricki’s statement. This was the actual birth of the quote.
However, the quote only really gained notoriety during EVO 2015’s winners semi-finals for Guilty Gear Xrd. In a do-or-die situation, Woshige managed to win the second round against Ogawa to stay alive in the tournament. However, he apparently forgot he needed to win two rounds because Woshige prematurely left his controller to celebrate. This didn’t matter to Ogawa as he immediately pummeled his opponent’s helpless character to move on in the tournament, all the while the commentators echoed Ricki and UltraDavid’s words…
Geek wisdom: Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Sometimes you can prematurely celebrate “a sure thing” but there are going to be times when these “sure things” actually don’t push through. It’s better to actually celebrate after achieving your goals rather than do it before it actually happens.
The story behind the quote: This week’s quote comes from Street Fighter II. While the series has always revolved around karate practitioners Ryu and Ken, Street Fighter has amassed a huge cast of characters. One of the more popular characters is Guile. The quote doesn’t actually come from the arcade/original version of the game. Rather, the only time Guile gives this particular victory quote is in the console versions (SNES and Genesis).
Here’s a little piece of trivia: The win quote is actually a mistranslation of a much longer quote. In the original Japanese, Guile advises his defeated opponent to “Go back home. You need to take care of your family.” However, the translation became the quote as we know it today.
Geek wisdom: Being a father and/or a mother is more than just siring a child. You also have to take care of your offspring. But a lot of people think this is just providing for them. If you give them money or support them, that should be enough. But it’s not.
You have to be there to nurture your children. Be there to take care of them and make sure they grow up the right way.
The story behind the quote: Wreck-It Ralph is a CGI Disney movie released in 2012. The titular character is a “bad guy” in a fictional video game called Fix-It Felix, Jr. Ralph’s job in the game is to wreck an apartment building while the “good guy,” Fix-It Felix, Jr., fixes whatever he destroys. Being the villain of the game (and since his job is to wreck the building), no one in the apartment complex really likes Ralph. Wanting acceptance, he believes that, if he gets a medal just like the one Felix gets when be beats the game, he will finally earn some respect.
The quote comes early in the movie where Ralph attends a Bad Guy support group which other video game villains like Zangief (?) and M. Bison from the Street Fighter series and Clyde from Pac-Man meet. At the end of the meeting, after Ralph expresses his want to stop being the bad guy, they stand up and give the Bad Guy Affirmation.
Geek wisdom: A lot of people miss the point of the quote. It’s actually okay to try to better yourself. The message here is more of accepting oneself for who we are and not how others think of you. In fact, the last line of the Bad Guy Affirmation says this pretty clearly: There’s no one I’d rather be than me.
There are a lot of people that are not satisfied with their race, color, gender or whatever. And they hate themselves for it.
You are who you are. Trying to pretend that you’re something else is not the answer. The best thing to do is to accept who you are and love yourself because you are unique and special because of what you are.
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.
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.
The story behind the quote: This quote comes from the “so bad its good” movie adaption of the Street Fighter video game. But first, let’s go through a little history behind the film. With the success of Street Fighter II, it was highly inevitable that someone in Hollywood would get the idea to cash in on its popularity and develop of movie about it. However, like most of the early video games turned movies (Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon), this really didn’t turn out very well. The story doesn’t follow much of the plot of the game. Well, to be honest, the game doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with, but there were too many liberties taken regarding all of the characters’ backstory, such as Ryu and Ken being smugglers and Chun-Li being a reporter. This movie also has the “privilege” of getting an even more horrible video game based on it (Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game)!
Now that’s out of the way, the quote comes when Chun-Li (played by Ming-Na) gets captured by M. Bison (portrayed by the late Raul Julia) and retells the story of how Bison murdered her father a long time ago when the warlord tried to take over her village. Bison simply tells the reporter (not an Interpol officer like in the games) that he has no recollection of the matter since it was just an ordinary day for him.
Geek wisdom: We normally think of how people would react to things based on how we would react to them. This is, of course, flawed. The way a person reacts or remembers something will be different for each and every one of us. They were raised differently so their manner of thinking is different. Even identical twins will have some very notable differences on how they would handle certain issues.
We cannot just substitute their mindset with ours. Simply put, we put other people in our shoes when we should be thinking of putting ourselves in theirs. For Chun-Li, the death of her father was the memory that molded her into what she is today. For Bison, it was just another day in the office.
The story behind the quote: Street Fighter II has a varied cast of fighters you can select. One of these characters is Ryu, a no-nonsense karate expert who travels the world testing his fighting ability. While the other people in the game have different motives for joining the tournament (Guile and Chun-Li wants revenge on M. Bison, the final boss in the game, E. Honda wants to prove the superiority of Sumo to the world), Ryu’s only motive is to test himself against the best fighters in the world.
In Ryu’s ending, a ceremony is being held to congratulate the winners of the tournament. However, Ryu, who has bested all of them, is nowhere to be seen. As the audience wonders where he is, the scene switches over to Ryu walking into the sunset. The narration states that he doesn’t care about the adulation of the crown, the glory of winning, or the prize money. All he was there to do was fight, improve his skills, and “the fight is all.”
Geek wisdom: People nowadays are focused on either the material gain for accomplishing a task or the accolades they’ll get for doing something. A lot of them don’t really enjoy what they’re doing. These are usually the same people that complain about their jobs and they just can’t wait to get paid since that’s the only thing that’ s keeping them there. However, there is a small percentage of people that actually enjoy what they do.
Finding a job that you actually enjoy doing can be difficult. But for those that do, they never really cared for the amount of their salary or the glory of success. Those things are just bonuses to them. Sometimes, its just the act of doing a good job that makes it worthwhile.
My Geek Wisdom 