The tangled and bizarre lore of ‘Street Fighter’, explained

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The hotly anticipated Street Fighter 6 hits shelves next week, promising the biggest and best incarnation of the classic fighting game franchise to date. Each new Street Fighter game is met with an enormous amount of hype from players, continuing a strong pedigree that stretches back all the way to 1988.

The new entry will continue Street Fighter‘s reputation as an eSport (it’s arguably the original eSport), will be a mainstay of fighting game tournaments for years to come, offers a suite of online options to battle players around the world, and, for the first time, a full single-player ‘World Tour’ RPG mode letting you design a fighter and take them from a lowly scrub to an international champion.

All that’s set against the backdrop of iconic characters like Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken, Guile, and the rest, with a bunch of new challengers joining the party for the first time. There’s a hell of a lot of lore behind these games, so here’s what you should know about the Street Fighter story before you throw your first Hadoken.

Round One! Fight!

The story begins with 1988’s Street Fighter. This relatively bare-bones experience sees the player take control of Ryu or Ken as they battle their way through the first World Warrior tournament. Here, the martial arts pair are talented newbies, though only Ryu manages to make his way to the final and square off with the towering Muay Thai master Sagat. Sagat systematically dismantles Ryu in the climactic match, leaving the young fighter battered and broken on the arena floor.

Sagat is an honorable fighter and offers a hand to help Ryu up. But this condescending move awakens a burning fury in Ryu and he breaks out a powerful Shoryuken dragon punch, catching Sagat completely off guard. The blow