This info was taken from:
http://www.videogames.com/features/universal/sfhistory/history.html
I am letting you know this, just incase anything happens with them.
This section is copyright 2000 ZDnet

There was a point not too long ago when it seemed as if the American video arcade was only days away from utter collapse. Flash back to 1991, a year when Capcom's visually stunning walk-and-punch title Final Fight was waning in popularity, and similar games such as Sengoku and TMNT 2: Turtles in Time were titles that people wanted for their Super NES and Sega Genesis systems, as well as shooters such as Smash T.V., Mercs, and R-Type 2. Some of those games bring back great memories, and if they were without competition in arcades, they might have been strong enough to stand out in a person's memories as classic. They were not alone. Dozens of lesser walk-and-punch fighting games - including Combatribes, D.J. Boy, Crime Fighters, Violence Fight and Alien Storm - and shooting games - including Aliens, Thunder Jaws, U.N. Squadron and Vapor Trail - were flooding arcades, and almost no one seemed to care. This was the close of an era when many people liked games that had two buttons and a joystick, and hitting the two buttons quickly while wiggling the joystick meant that you stayed alive.

The seeds of change had been planted six or seven years earlier, but the arcade industry had hardly noticed. Sega had been working on 3-D simulation games since Hang On debuted in 1985, and by 1991 the company had released the cutting edge jet combat simulator G-LOC and was readying the genre-defining race game Virtua Racing for a 1992 release. Capcom, for its part, had studied both Data East's 1984 one-on-one fighting game Karate Champ and Konami's 1985 title Yie Ar Kung Fu before releasing its own game, Street Fighter, in 1987. Like Hang On, Out Run, After Burner and other 3-D simulation titles, Capcom's lonely Street Fighter had found a niche - it was different from everything else, and so people wanted to play it. It even inspired a clone that appeared a year or so later, SNK's Street Smart, which let characters move not only left and right but in and out of the screen as in most popular beat-'em-ups of the time, and players could fight against two enemy characters at once, so the game felt more like boss stages from a walk-and-punch than anything else.

In the mid-1980's, however, one-on-one fighting games were in their infancy, and the limitations of technology prevented them from catching on. It was hard enough back then to program a game to recognize the fast motions of a joystick, let alone have eight or ten megabytes worth of game graphics or enough RAM to display one tenth of them at once. So programmers did what they could, and the results were mediocre. Lacking animation to walk fluidly, characters staggered on the screen, and in the absence of a fluid control scheme, some moves took five or ten tries to execute while others shot out so quickly that opponents never had a chance to defend against them.

By March of 1991, when Capcom debuted Street Fighter II, the technical problems had been solved by the company's R&D staff . At the time, it was arguably the finest action game programmers had ever assembled under one roof. Utilizing Capcom's proven CPS arcade chipset, which had powered the revolutionary large characters and colorful backgrounds of Final Fight, Yoshiki Okamoto's team developed a joystick and button scanning routine that would revolutionize the industry. Unlike the programming in the company's earlier Street Fighter, the new control mechanism could quickly sense certain types of motions - like holding the joystick back for two seconds and then pressing it forward with a punch button, or rolling the joystick from down to back with a kick button - and accurately spit out special moves in response. The technique had been tried in Street Fighter, but the technology wasn't accurate enough. Now it worked. And wherever the earlier game's animation had been choppy, it was now silky smooth - smoother than anything in arcades at the time. Armed with some of the best artists in the business, Capcom's Street Fighter II team sifted through pages of character and background designs before settling upon 12 incredible stages and fighters to populate them. Most crucially, the decision was made to allow players to choose from eight characters - each with different looks and moves - and face off against either the computer or human opponents.

Given the state of the arcade industry at that point, there was little expectation that Capcom was about to experience the classic Field of Dreams scenario where it builds the game and people flock to play it. Yet it happened. Street Fighter II arrived and just exploded in popularity, as prolonged positive word of mouth from established arcade fanatics caused other game players to leave their homes and check out the revolutionary new thing in arcades. Some people wanted to master Ryu and Ken's Shotokan karate, others wanted to learn Zangief's wrestling moves, and still others were obsessed with Guile's flash kick and E. Honda's sumo 100-hand slap attack. SF2 machines were hardly vacant for long, and most of the time had people lining up to insert quarters for 15-297 seconds worth of play. So arcade owners bought more machines and even clones when they emerged - late '91's Fatal Fury, and mid-'92's Mortal Kombat, World Heroes and Art of Fighting were just a few, with SNK ironically falling back upon 3-D movement simplified from Street Smart to power Fatal Fury, and Midway resorting to digitized artwork (used in Terminator 2) and secrets (a la Smash TV) to lure crowds.

Capcom was overwhelmed, as were arcade owners. SF2 became popular enough that gamers and magazines worldwide were describing it as the greatest game ever made, despite its decidedly skewed appeal towards males and teenagers, with a secondary audience of males older and younger than the 13-19 age bracket. It was not a Space Invaders nor a Pac-Man that anyone could or would play; SF2 was a game that people learned only with practice, and once mastered they continually tested their mastery against others. It captured imaginations and spawned thousands of pages of magazine coverage, as well as home game cartridges, comic books, movies, CDs, action figures and many pseudo-sequels. All told, the game brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for Capcom, and the sort of publicity, historical revisionism, imitators and detractors that only success can bring.

So before we explore the Street Fighter games in specifics, let it be said that Street Fighter II did not create a genre. It defined and popularized one that had its origins in Karate Champ, Yie Ar Kung Fu, and Street Fighter itself, and it brought new life and energy to arcades and home consoles. Having said that, Street Fighter II's importance can hardly be overstated. When several years had passed and arcades had again filled with clones - this time of Street Fighter II - everyone prayed that Capcom would appear once more as the industry's white knight, Ryu vs. M. Bison in Street Fighter II Turbo
emerging with a Street Fighter III that was as profound in its impact and unique in design as had been its predecessor. Three-dimensional graphics had emerged in arcades, and they seemed a no-brainer for use in a Street Fighter sequel; perhaps Capcom would be ready to do for action games what Sega and Namco had done for racing and flying games in recent years.

Frankly, though, with one exception, each Street Fighter II-related product that came out diminished Capcom's credibility. After the successful SF2: Champion Edition, a re-balanced SF2 with new color schemes and 12 selectable player characters, Capcom released three more SF2 games based much too heavily on the preceding two - SF2: Turbo Hyper Fighting was a response to ROM counterfeiters who had hacked faster versions of SF2 with mid-air special moves and Chun Li fireballs, amongst other "features," and Dee Jay vs. Fei Long in Super Street Fighter II Turbo
then the re-designed CPS2 game Super Street Fighter II was rushed to market before completion, adding four new characters, re-drawn artwork and enhanced Q-Sound audio to the original game. Capcom's team then released Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which had features that had been "left out" in the rush, including selectable speeds and a hidden character. Mainstream audiences were tired of the new-upgrade-every-six-months phenomenon after the third title. People wanted Street Fighter 3.

Capcom stalled. It released Street Fighter Zero (aka Alpha), originally billed as a game taking place in between Street Fighter 1 and 2, and then released a semi-sequel, Street Fighter Zero 2, and finally released a slightly enhanced Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha in Japan only. By now, Capcom's audience was drifting away, and Japanese game masters were turning to the 3-D Virtua Fighter and especially Virtua Fighter 2 in droves. Many American players were playing Mortal Kombat 2 or were getting bored of fighting games. Akuma vs. Dhalsim in Street Fighter Alpha 2
A truly awful Street Fighter movie, a horrid Street Fighter: The Movie home and arcade game, cheesy action figures, endless SF3 stalls and other generally foolhardy licensing moves had eroded the natural optimism people had once felt for Capcom products. And the company had to deal with monumental overstock problems when hundreds of thousands of copies of its fourth SF2 home game, Super SF2 (following SNES SF2, Genesis SF2: Turbo, SNES SF2: Turbo), failed to sell.

Street Fighter III was finally announced, and it was initially described as a 2-D sequel using brand new Capcom CPS3 hardware, whereas another title, Street Fighter EX, would be a 3-D Street Fighter game running on PlayStation-compatible arcade hardware. Street Fighter EX arrived in arcades first and bombed; it was less a 3-D fighting game than a 2-D fighting game with 3-D character artwork, Guile vs. Doctrine Dark in Street Fighter EX
and its new characters paled in comparison to the classic fighters readied for Street Fighter II's debut. This was Capcom's second Street Fighter arcade game bomb, following the disastrous release of Street Fighter: The Movie, and the company hurried to assure arcade owners and players that a more complete version - Street Fighter EX Plus - would be released in arcades soon.

Then Street Fighter III arrived, following Capcom's first CPS3 release, Red Earth (aka Warzard). Two established characters (Ryu and Ken) square off against nine new ones in SF3, presumptuously retitled simply "Three: A New Generation of Street Fighters," and the main differences between the SF2 games and SF3 are improved visuals and slightly enhanced character depth.

An excellent conversion of Street Fighter EX for the Sony PlayStation was released, and players took a second look at the game, finding it to be better suited for the home than the arcade. Also, Street Fighter Collection has been released for both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, collecting Super SF2, Super SF2 Turbo, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold (a version of Alpha 2 released in arcades only in Asia) as Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha. An update to Street Fighter III (dubbed Street Fighter III: Second Impact) has been released, and although it improved on the first attempt at redefining Street Fighter and made a few new III fans, it failed to succeed on a large scale. Meanwhile a superdeformed-style 2D fighter with simplified gameplay, called Pocket Fighter, was released both in arcades and on the Sony PlayStation. Fans either loved or hated the game, in which serious gameplay took a backseat to lighthearted silliness and cameos.

On the arcade front true Street Fighter titles continued to be upstaged by the untraditional Marvel vs. Capcom, and 3D fighters have moved to the forefront of the genre. The graphically 3D, 2D-in-gameplay Street Fighter EX2 benefited from significantly improved visuals, and while EX fans were happy with the eye candy, it's essentially more of the same and hasn't attracted legions of new players. The addition of Street Fighter II veterans Vega and Blanka fit with the recent Capcom trend of bringing forgotten classic characters into new series. Perhaps a home version with additional features will be a greater success. The latest incarnation of Street Fighter III, subtitled Third Strike, remains relatively untested. While Third Strike does bring the playable character lineup up to 18 and marks the return of "the strongest woman in the world," Chun Li, SFIII3 is nothing revolutionary and will still likely face the prospect of being overshadowed by future incarnations of popular 3D fighters.

Probably Capcom's biggest success with the Street Fighter name as of late is the strong performance of Street Fighter Alpha 3. While the game runs on Capcom's slightly aging CPS2 hardware with only marginally improved visuals, the large character lineup and ability to select different gameplay styles made a good impression in arcades. The PlayStation release of the title heaped on extra upon extra and crammed every character from SFII, Super SFII, and the Alpha series into the conversion, which has proven to be a hit in Japan. Backed by a healthy dose of good press, the title should also make a strong showing in the US, and conversions for the Saturn and Dreamcast are scheduled to follow shortly.

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