8 Gaming Features That Started Life As Fan Hacks

8. Street Fighter II Rainbow Edition

The Street Fighter series is one of the most revered franchises in the history of gaming.

Bursting onto the scene in 1987, the original was a revolution in the genre but failed to truly captivate the commercial masses. However, its sequel Street Fighter II in 1991 would catapult the series into an unprecedented level of popularity, with SF2 cabinets populating arcades the world over.

As an ever-growing fandom developed around the series, modders began creating bootleg versions of the game in order to push Street Fighter II to its absolute limits, with one of the most famous adaptations being known as Street Fighter II Rainbow Edition. Rainbow Edition took the already high-paced action and cranked it up to eleven, giving all playable characters expansive movesets and making Hadoukens more prevalent.

Though Capcom were reportedly unimpressed with the Rainbow Edition believing that it detracted from the skill of their original work, some of the improvements introduced in the game clearly left their mark on the developers.

A number of features included on the bootleg would eventually be canonised in the series such as Chun-Li getting her own fireball, with the release of Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting believed to be a direct response to the changes made in Rainbow Edition.