Watch the 30-Year Evolution of Street Fighter Characters

Long Story Short

A bunch of geniuses have charted the 30-year evolution of major Street Fighter characters.

Long Story

Who's your favourite Street Fighter character? Ryu? Ken? Chun-Li? If you’ve stuck with the game over the 30 years since it first appeared in Japanese arcade parlours, then you can likely play them all. Still, there’s probably one with whom you take all comers (and all quarters).

That’s across 20 versions of the game. You read that correctly — there have been 20 different Street Fighter games. Who knew? Along with that, there have been 20 different iterations of some of the central characters. And while you may remember them all looking more or less the same (particularly if you’ve skipped a few sequels here and there), the differences are in some cases striking.

How different? Muchgames is here to show you. The online gaming portal has put together a series of GIFs showing the 30-year evolution of some of the game’s major characters: Ryu, Chun-Li, Sagat, M. Bison, Ken, Sakura and Akuma. Taking screenshots of live gameplay across the Street Fighter series, Muchgames then created morphs from one image to the next to show the transition and changes.

It’s simple, fun stuff. Highlights? There’s Ryu, who actually started out with red hair in the original Street Fighter, and has become impossibly beefy in more recent versions of the game; Sagat, whose muscle mass and scarring changes markedly from title to title; and Ken, who after remaining relatively consistent for the first 20 years as Ryu’s sparring partner, went completely man bun and gym gear in Street Fighter V.

Really, though, this is for the diehard fans. There is actually a lot of consistency of the years, illustrating how terrifically realised these characters were in the first place.

Take a look at the entire project here.