By any standard metric, Street Fighter 2 was a success in arcades. And success also meant issues with players discovering glitches — the more people playing, the more glitches they found. The most infamous of these centered on the character Guile. While using him, players could freeze the machine, stun their opponent (in a move nicknamed "Handcuffs"), grab their opponent from across the screen (nicknamed the "Air Throw" or "Magic Throw") and break the game.

Yoshiki Okamoto:

To a developer, a bug is shameful. Total shame. And if the game sells a lot, that makes it even worse. Street Fighter 2 happened to be a game that went out with a lot of bugs. ...

One is that, most people didn't realize it, but Ken was stronger than Ryu. They were the exact same program, but because of one factor, Ken was stronger. We had this idea that after a player does a Shoryuken, we were thinking of adding a weak point so their guard would be down and the other player could inflict a lot of damage with a single hit. We were going back and forth on whether we should include that in the game, and we decided not to do it, but we forgot to take that out of Ryu's code. So in the end, Ryu and Ken had exactly the same code, except for that one point.

The same thing happened with Blanka as well. When he does his rolling attack, there's one weak point we forgot to take out so he took huge damage from a Hadouken.

Joe Ganis (Software tester, Capcom USA):

Guile had a particular move where he would start a throw animation, and then you would be stuck — your sprites would be basically conjoined for the rest of the match . ... And likewise, he had something called the Air Throw where he would make a throwing motion, and it didn't matter where you were on the particular playfield — you would just immediately take throw damage and fall directly to the ground. And that was kind of disconcerting. ...

And then there was an even better one where a Guile player, if they knew what they were doing, was able to reset the machine right there on the spot with a particular command setup there between the joysticks and a couple of buttons.

Akira Nishitani:

I was extremely disappointed. There was an arcade game magazine called Gamest in Japan, and it seemed like somebody from Korea sent in a video called "The Horror of Guile," and it showed the glitches. When I first saw it, I thought, "No, this can't be true." And then I found out it was true. That was a very shocking moment.

Motohide Eshiro (Programmer, Guile):

That was actually my first programming job at Capcom when I joined the company. So the hardest thing was basically everything — getting used to the difference between what I learned in school as a programmer and the way you really do things on the ground. ...

I'll tell you the story of when I heard about [Guile's glitches]. We were having an event where we had invited players and journalists to come play Street Fighter 2. It was one of the first times it was even out there — it was just starting to get big — and the higher-ups picked me to play an exhibition match against some users. We were having the staff play against other people. And a journalist — a game journalist, a Japanese guy — approached me and said, "Hey, check this out. I found this crazy Magic Throw with Guile." And he showed it to me. When I first saw that, the first thing I thought was, "I have to quit. I can't do this anymore. I think I'm gonna quit my job." And luckily, Mr. Nishitani said, "Hey, if you're gonna let something like that bother you then you can't make games anymore period. You can't go to another company and do it either. This is part of the business." So he stopped me from making any drastic moves. But yeah, I felt terrible.

Akira Nishitani:

I remember Mr. Eshiro coming to me, yeah. He was new to the company at that time and there were processes he was supposed to take, but I don't think he went through all those, which led to the bugs. So because of that, he felt really responsible and came to me, but I didn't take it that seriously. I was like, "Oh, what are you talking about?" I never seriously considered letting him quit.

Scott Smith:

You know, in a game of this complexity, things were bound to crop up. ... Obviously you want a product to be perfect, but in the coin-op world there was no way to really do ROM upgrades. ... It's not like you could have a Wi-Fi enabled arcade cabinet that you could dump a new ROM to very easily. It was just a product of the time. There's bugs everywhere. It's just damn hard to fix them when you've got a static board.

James Goddard:

It's more disappointment than anything else. I mean, glitches are gonna happen, but the fact that it was something so nasty that — depending on the rev of the board — that basically that'd be it, quarter over. I mean, the fact that it was ruining players' experiences and creating drama, that wasn't necessarily good for Capcom's reputation with the operators, because that was starting to impact money.

Yoshiki Okamoto:

A lot of players would ban those moves and play a clean game, so I really appreciate how kind they were to support the game in that way.