The History of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, subtitled Fight for the Future, is a 1999 fighting game developed and published by Capcom for its CPS-3 arcade hardware. It is the third and final edition of Street Fighter III, after New Generation (1997) and 2nd Impact (1997), and it is the version history kept: five added fighters including the returning Chun-Li, a grading system that scores your play after every round, reworked stages and voices, and the parry system refined into the game's defining skill.
A note on this shelf's frame, stated plainly: 3rd Strike is an arcade game of 1999 with a Dreamcast port in 2000. Its PlayStation 2 history is the subject here. Japan received it as a standalone PlayStation 2 release in July 2004, in standard and limited editions. North America never got that standalone disc; there, 3rd Strike reached PlayStation 2 inside the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection of 31 August 2004, bundled with Hyper Street Fighter II and the 1994 animated film. The Xbox version of that collection followed with online play.
THE TWO COVERS
Japan and America
HOW IT WAS MADE
CPS-3 and the third revisionStreet Fighter III was Capcom's insistence on 2D at the height of the 3D boom, built for the CPS-3 board to push sprite color and animation beyond anything the genre had shown. Producer Tomoshi Sadamoto's team began it as a new game entirely; designer Akira Yasuda pushed for personality in the cast and predicted, correctly, that it would become a Street Fighter title with Ryu added. 3rd Strike, arriving in arcades in May 1999, was the refinement pass: Makoto, Q, Remy, and Twelve joined, Chun-Li returned by popular demand, and the presentation, soundtrack, and grading of players were all reworked.
The parry was the system everything hung on, inherited from New Generation and tuned here: tap toward the attack, or down for low attacks, at the exact moment of impact, and the blow is deflected for no damage, not even the chip damage blocking concedes. It is covered on its own page in this wing, because in August 2004 it produced the most replayed sequence in fighting game history.
THE PLAYSTATION 2 RELEASE
Standalone in Japan, collected in AmericaCapcom announced the Japanese standalone port in spring 2004, and it launched that July, the game's first home release since the Dreamcast version of 2000. In North America the strategy differed: 3rd Strike headlined the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for the series' fifteenth anniversary, sharing a disc with Hyper Street Fighter II, an edition that lets any version of a Street Fighter II character fight any other. The PlayStation 2 collection was a North America only release; in Japan the two games were sold separately.
The timing deserves its own sentence. The collection reached American shelves on 31 August 2004, thirty days after a semifinal in Pomona, California turned this five year old arcade game into front page news for the entire hobby.
HOW IT WAS RECEIVED
Then and laterWHAT IT LEFT BEHIND
The long arcade3rd Strike never really left. It received an Online Edition in 2011 with GGPO netcode, joined the 30th Anniversary Collection in 2018, and remains a tournament staple a quarter century after its arcade release. The PlayStation 2 versions in this gallery are where most of the West first owned it, which is why this shelf files the arcade immortal under its 2004 homecoming.