High on the success of Final Fight, the team ran full speed into Street Fighter 2 with Okamoto, Yasuda, Funamizu and others throwing out ideas and Nishitani bringing them together. This time the game used six buttons from the start, offered eight playable characters and focused on creating a sense of competition, which was, in part, inspired by trying to crack the arcade business model.

Yoshiki Okamoto:

Back in the day, people at arcades weren't happy. Space Invaders was popular and cost 100 yen ($1) to play. And we were thinking, if you're playing a shooter and there's a lot of bullets coming at you, that's a lot of fun. But if it doesn't last very long, then developers are happy and arcade operators are happy, but players aren't happy. So we were thinking really hard about what would make everybody happy.

We thought about putting big machines in arcades, so you would need to spend 500 yen per game — developers would be happy because they would make more money, players would be happy because they would get a better experience, but arcade operators wouldn't be happy because it would cost a lot to swap these big machines in and out.

So we thought about it more and came to the conclusion that if two people played at once ... operators would get twice the money. Players would essentially split the cost so they could both play for longer. We kind of did that with Final Fight since players help each other out, but we realized some players still felt cheated because the game was too difficult ... If we dictated the difficulty, players could always get frustrated. But if players were competing against each other, whether they won or lost would be up to them. So we were thinking that could take out the frustration.

John Gillin (Director of marketing, Capcom USA):

I think the great thing was it really stoked players' competitiveness ... It was a deep game; it still is a deep game, and it was one that required a lot of time with it, a lot of quarters in the arcades.

Yoshiki Okamoto:

I had the team put together a concept and the art, and I would look through the design documents and tell them what I liked — what to keep and what to throw out. I'd say this is approved or not approved. There were lots of times people would ignore what I said too. Nishitani would sometimes say no and reject my ideas. ...

You know how each character has a life bar? At one point, I wanted to make the power gauge for Chun-Li shorter than for the other characters because women are not as strong. But Nishitani didn't want to do that. We both had legitimate reasons, but then we came to an agreement to not make it shorter.