If you're reading this, you probably remember that
Street Fighter II on the SNES didn't, by default, allow for "mirror matches" in two-player fights. You couldn't have Ryu vs. Ryu, basically.
Until the code came out, of course. You had to punch it in quick—while the Capcom logo faded on and off the screen before the game booted up—and for some reason I wasn't terribly good at this, meaning that I came to associate the well-crafted, pleasant Capcom logotone with
stress:
I suppose I eventually got good at it. I'd use the code even when I wasn't playing with friends, just because I liked using characters' alternate colors. I was, and am, pretty fucking girly about costumes in video games. Ask me how much time I've spent earning money for alternate Rock Band avatars just so I could dress them up
just right! (Please do not actually do this.)
And you're saying to yourself,
you like alternate costumes in video games; that is not a terrible confession, that is the reason people grind away for hours towards contextually meaningless in-game achievements: they want to see Raidou Kuzunoha wearing the cowboy hat and assless chaps. And oh! I know! It is not in itself terrible, and in fact it's just an ancillary detail I thought I'd mention because, well, I just wanted an excuse to talk about it. (Now, if I confessed that I was really,
really into KiSS dolls for a brief period in the late 90s, I could end this entry right here, because good
lord, those fucking things. Whoops!)
Something
else you couldn't do in
Street Fighter II was play as the bosses. This was, for a while, the
Holy Fucking Grail of cheat codes. We talked about it at school, we mashed fruitlessly around on our joypads during that goddamned Capcom logotone, we sure as hell daydreamed about it, and then we ended up blowing an unreasonable amount of cash on the "Special Champion Edition" when it dropped onto the Genesis a year later.
But in the meantime, we wanted to play as the bosses so badly we could just fucking taste it—and what a letdown they finally were, eh?—and the fact that a code existed to unlock one missing piece of
Street Fighter functionality existed suggested that
another code was waiting in there...
And so it came to pass (and this, my precious, lovely friends,
this is the confession) that I posted a message to the Prodigy online service sometime between 1992 and 1993 with the title "BOSS CODE MUST EXIST - PROOF". What followed was a post I thought to be
very clever indeed, in which I did a bunch of dot-connecting between what we knew to be true about the SNES port of
Street Fighter II and a bunch of posts about it I'd read. It never occurred to me, of course, that the posts I'd read—the posts that were pretty much the prime source of this PROOF—could either be (a) merely reporting interesting glitches or (b) just fucking
lying. Honestly, it would be years before I hit upon the idea that some people might lie on the Internet just for fun—what would be the point of that?
With the publication of this opus, "BOSS CODE MUST EXIST - PROOF", I fully expected to shake things up. I thought I'd nailed it, and all that was left was for Capcom to come clean and release the code. "Yeah, you got us, man. Here's the code to activate a feature that we were planning on shaking you down for next year, to the tune of seventy bucks. Honey, it's me; yeah, call the swimming pool people and see if you can get our deposit back. We're totally rethinking Q4 because of some genius on the Prodigy service." Alas, I didn't get a single response, although someone else's post called "SF2 BEER DRINKERS", in which people theorized what beers and spirits their favorite characters liked, was humming along nicely. No, I wasn't jealous.
There was, in fact, no boss code for the SNES port of
Street Fighter II. I was a dumb kid on the Internet
before there was a World Wide Web, you guys.
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