10 Crazy Unlicensed Video Games You’ve Never Heard Of

4. Street Fighter II: Black Belt Edition (Arcade)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6U47-qSXAc As alluded to earlier, Street Fighter II was a gigantic hit when it came out as an arcade game in 1991. The first console port, for the SNES, was also a gigantic hit, but with such a huge following, tons of requests came in for new features. More than anything else, they wanted to do mirror matches and be able to play as the boss characters. Capcom obliged, releasing Street Fighter II': Champion Edition in arcades in 1992. It wasn't long before bootleg arcade boards of Champion Edition started surfacing. While bootleg boards were not uncommon, and they exist for a number of classic games, usually they're not much different from the official versions. With Champion Edition, the game ROMs were hacked in a number of ways, most notably speeding the game up and adding crazy modified special movies, like aerial versions of everything and the ability to shoot multiple fireballs at once. Being cheaper and appealing to players, they became incredibly popular, with Black Belt Edition being the best-known. Capcom's solution was to quickly develop a new follow-up, Street Fighter II€ Turbo: Hyper Fighting. It increased the game speed, added new special moves by adapting existing animations, and even adapted one of the aerial special moves, the Air Hurricane Kick. This put an end to the popularity of the bootlegs, which quickly became curiosities more than compelling games.