Recently, I was looking up old video games, and I came across a game whose title caught my eye – Street Fighter 2010. It was a side-scrolling beat ‘em up game released by Capcom for the NES back in 1990. America got the version where the storyline was altered so that the main character of the game is in fact futuristic, year-2010 version of Ken Masters. The basic story is that Ken became a scientist after winning the Street Fighter tournament, and is going around through transdimensional portals, partially a cyborg or something along those convoluted lines, and beating up a variety of cyborgs and aliens, searching for clues for his dead science partner.
Honestly none of that is really at all important, humorously absurd as it all may be. My biggest point of criticism is simply the fact that the game is titled “Street Fighter 2010,” and it’s currently the year 2012, and not a single fucking thing about the game is the least bit realistic to the times. Interplanetary warp gates? We’re still struggling with daily commuting, as they did back in 1979. The cybergoo that the story revolves around that turns people into superhumans, I guess could be a comparable analogy to steroids and human growth hormones or something like, but that shit has been around for decades, so it’s nothing new.
Imagine if it were possible to project hands and feet, let alone punches and kicks. I bet Capcom’s writers didn’t imagine how passive-aggressive and troll-y society would turn into by 2010. There would be no need for projectile punches and kicks, when all people would be content to do is project their hands to do illicit things like assault or groping from a distance, tripping people, or dragging their projectile shoes on the ground to make annoying squeaking sounds.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with all of this is the fact that when the game was launched in 1990, they only gave themselves a 20-year cushion before it was actually 2010. If they just called the game Street Fighter 2050 or any single number fairly substantially larger than 2010, they wouldn’t be in this position of ridicule. Never mind the fact that Ken Masters decided to make a drastic career change from a street fighter to a scientist. Never mind the fact that maybe two people knew who Ken Masters was in 1990, considering Street Fighter was released in 1987 for a different system, and Street Fighter II was still a year away. As of 2010 to today, Ken Masters is not a scientist, but instead arguably the most overly-used, overpowered character in the Street Fighter fighting games, but he is not traveling through interplanetary warp gates.
Considering we were supposed to have flying cars and robot servants by the year 2000, Capcom isn’t the only entity to biff on this romanticism of what the future held. But I have to imagine that aside from the technological disappointment that 2012 is, let alone 2010 was, they’re probably wishing they named it something like “Street Fighter 3010,” just to have been doubly safe. I bet Marvel Comics is really banking on the world ending by 2099, because otherwise, there are a lot of people and probably aliens going to be laughing at the 2099 series in the year 2099 for reasons aside from the absolute shitty quality of the series.
