Who is Sheng Long in Street Fighter?

Sheng Long was born from one of Ryu's win quotes. In the Japanese arcade game, Ryu tells the loser: if you cannot overcome the Shoryuken, the Rising Dragon Punch, you cannot win. The English localization rendered the shoryu, rising dragon, characters through Chinese, and the taunt came out as: "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance." Sheng Long is the Chinese reading of the words rising dragon. There was no character, only a move wearing a person's name, but thousands of players went looking for the person.

Electronic Gaming Monthly finished the job. Its April 1992 issue, on sale in February, published a method for fighting Sheng Long, Ryu and Ken's supposed master: clear the game as Ryu untouched, then stall the final boss for ten rounds without dealing or taking damage, whereupon Sheng Long would throw M. Bison aside and fight you himself. It was an April Fools' prank, conceived by editor Ken Williams, and it escaped the magazine: other publications reprinted the method as fact, players burned tokens on it worldwide, and the SNES port's own instruction manual named Master Sheng Long as Ryu and Ken's teacher before later manuals scrubbed him.

The legend then shaped the real series. Discussion of Sheng Long shadowed Street Fighter III's development, EGM revived the joke with original artwork in 1997, and Capcom eventually answered the myth in kind: the master became real, years later, as Gouken, Ryu and Ken's actual teacher, and Capcom's own character database gave Sheng Long a joke profile in 2017, a quarter century after the prank. The most famous Street Fighter who never existed is a translation error that outworked most real characters.