Street Fighter (ストリートファイター)

Street Fighter II, released in arcades in 1991, did not merely do well: it created a genre and rescued an arcade industry that home gaming was suffocating. Eight playable characters, secret inputs discovered by word of mouth, and above all a player-versus-player mode that turned the cabinet into a public ring.

The series gave fighting games their vocabulary — hadoken, combo, frame — and founded their competitive culture. The Evolution Championship Series, the world's largest fighting tournament, grew up around it. Capcom has sold over fifty million copies, and the sixth instalment, released in 2023, was designed explicitly for esports.