When I turned twelve years old. I owned the first Super Nintendo from months of effort and dedication. The brother I had Matt was 22 , and was temporarily staying at home. We didn’t have much in the way of common interests. He was into sports, and I was more than a comic book lover. The only place we could be together was on the SNES with the controllers held in the palms of our hands. The game we chose to play included Street Fighter 2 Turbo.
It was the ideal combination of our preferences in entertainment. It was competitive enough for sports fans but also stylized enough for comic book fans. Our talents were roughly identical, and they grew by the day as we fought everyday in the evenings after school.
The other day, Matt suggested that we keep records of all our struggles in a journal. I’ve always enjoyed making lists and I was for it. We utilized the financial ledger which was originally designed to be used in Matt’s accounting class. We recorded which characters were involved in each fight and also who was victorious and losers (or tied or tied, which is extremely uncommon). We played at least one game every day for three years. Our rules were very simple: The person who won the previous match was required to pick their first character during the subsequent match. There was no way to pick an identical character within a row.
Three years after our first match, my brother left which ended our daily ritual. We’d play a few games occasionally however, the pace was waning. The last time we played was shortly before Matt quit Minnesota in order to enter the Navy. He has been in Virginia since.
Analysis of the data
We initially focused only on the overall record of win/loss. As time passed, we realized that we could utilize the information we had gathered as a base for optimal character selection. For instance, as per our data, Sagat beat Zangief 92 percent of the time and Guile beat Zangief just 71 percent of the times. It is clear that Sagat was the right option in this scenario.
We played 5,157 matches. The final results were extremely close. I was the leader with 2,608 wins while Matt has recorded 2,546 wins. We tied 3 times. Our most intense match was between two of our best players: M.Bison (me) versus Ken (Matt). The legendary battle was fought 311 times and ended up with M.Bison cleaning the floor alongside Ken the number 182.
I employed the OCR software to translate the sheets of data into the Excel spreadsheet (thank that I have decent handwriting) And some fascinating results were uncovered when I analyzed the data. We did not pit characters against each other for 4% at a time. We chose Chun Li more in the summer, and E. Honda more in the winter. I have never played Vega with Zangief.
The log book that was originally created was lost during the process of three trips. This Excel spreadsheet was destroyed when a hard drive failed before I realized the importance of backups. I only had the numbers that were mentioned above in a notebook from the past.
Street Fighter 2 Turbo brought Matt and me together in an era that we had nothing in the same. The log book served as the motivation and opportunity to play. This was by far the longest and greatest battle in video games in our history. And I took the victory. 😉
Luke Porter is the owner of Cyborg Arm Games, an independent game studio located within Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cyborg Arm Games believes in providing unique first-person shooter experiences to the avid gamer for a reasonable price.
