Sheng Long, Street Fighter and the Legacy of W.A. Stokins
In the previous post, I explained how Impa was unique in the way that she’d technically debuted in the first Legend of Zelda game but only in the accompanying instruction booklet. A character who had a similarly roundabout entrance to an official game canon would be Sheng Long, the “unseen” Street Fighter who didn’t exist until recently, even if his ghost has hovered around the series since Street Fighter II. Really, this is a story of a video game ouroboros where one side is canon and the other side is fandom, and they’re pursuing each other in an endless circle that actually isn’t a bad metaphor for how pop culture works these days.
Perhaps one of the more infamous mistranslations in video games is Ryu’s win quote in the English localization of Street Fighter II. In the first versions of the game, Ryu seemed to telling his vanquished opponents of a secret character: Sheng Long.
It’s fairly well known today that Ryu should have been saying his opponent needs to overcome his signature uppercut move, the Shōryūken or Dragon Punch. (Ryu’s win quote in Japanese is “Shōryūken o yaburanu kagiri, omae ni kachime wa nai,” or translated directly, “Unless you can defeat the Shōryūken, you have no chance of winning.”) However, when translating the kanji for Shōryūken (昇龍拳), the first two characters, 昇 (shō) and 龍 (ryū) were translated according to their meaning in pinyin Chinese, sheng and long, instead of an English equivalent. Literally meaning “spelled sounds,” pinyin is the most common way for rendering Mandarin Chinese using the Roman alphabet. In doing research for this post, I didn’t find anything to indicate why the person translating Ryu’s quote would have treated 昇 and 龍 as pinyin instead of as kanji, but that’s what happened. Whatever the reason, Street Fighter would be forever changed by this, and in more than one way.
Because none of this was at all obvious to most people playing Street Fighter II in North America, it was assumed that Sheng Long had to be a person. I couldn’t tell you why that’s what we defaulted to, but as early as my tenth birthday party — at the Straw Hat Pizza in my hometown, which had the best arcade in Hollister, California — that was the shared assumption. Regardless of the motivations, the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly famously capitalized on the rumors in its April 1992 issue, devoting a whole page to how players could meet and fight Sheng Long in the game: Play as Ryu all the way to M. Bison, and once there avoid either Ryu or M. Bison hitting each other for ten rounds, at which point the legendary Sheng Long — another Shotokan fighter, but in a black gi and with a long silver ponytail — would defeat M. Bison and then challenge you.
I have some suggestions for the layout editor.
Examining this page today, it should be very obvious that all this was an April Fool’s joke, even if the screenshot mockups look pretty decent. The text credits Mr. W.A. Stokins from Fuldigen, HA, as being the reader who came the closest to uncovering the secret of Sheng Long — and if that weren’t enough, the bottom of the page is a banner advertisement for a contest asking readers to spot this year’s April Fool’s joke. But people did fall for it, and that is what makes it even funnier that EGM did it *again* six years later, this time claiming that Sheng Long would be an unlockable sub-boss in Street Fighter III, which had debuted in arcades the previous February.
For the record, the layout on this page is much better.
You would expect that the story ends there, but more than three decades after the first EGM prank article, Capcom made Sheng Long an official part of the game canon in Street Fighter VI. He appears as an optional opponent in the game’s story mode — and one of the more difficult fights in the game.
Curiously, he looks like a cross between the EGM conception of Sheng Long and Heihachi from Tekken, though this version of him technically debuted a few years previous, as part of the Shadaloo Combat Research Institute, an online database of Street Fighter universe characters that included a lot of faces you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
But while there is a direct line from mistranslation to April Fool’s joke to actual, canonical Street Fighter character, there are actually a few pit stops on this journey that are even more interesting, I’d wager. First of all, there’s the very real possibility that the original EGM prank might have prompted Capcom to invent Akuma, an actual hidden character and a sort of anti-Ryu who debuted two years after the prank was published. If you go to the Wikipedia page for Akuma, it states that the EGM April Fool’s article directly inspired Akuma’s creation, the source for this information being Steve Hendershot’s 2017 book Undisputed Street Fighter. I’m not sure this is entirely correct, however; the text of the book stops short of claiming there’s a cause-and-effect relationship here, though it does allow the reader to infer that.
It took a translation mistake by Capcom, followed by a prank from a gaming magazine to produce Street Fighter’s best villain. … Players were tantalized by [the Sheng Long translation error], and as an April Fool’s joke in the 1992, the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly concocted an elaborate ruse, telling players that if they completed an impossibly difficult path through the game, a new villain would emerge who would toss aside M. Bison and face Ryu. The whole thing was clearly meant in jest… but apparently it wasn’t clear enough — Street Fighter players went nuts trying to face (and defeat) Sheng Long. Not long afterward, Street Fighter II co-creator Akira Yasuda got a call from Noritaka Funamizu, the operations specialist who helmed the final Street Fighter II interactions in the wake of Akira Nishitani’s departure to work on X-Men: Children of the Atom. Funamizu had a small request: create an all-new character by modifying Ryu’s head — just his head. Yasuda had one hour to comply.
The text goes on to describe different facets of Akuma as a character, but it never says outright that Capcom used the prank as an inspiration. It does seem fairly plausible that the prank did help shape Akuma, however, if not give Capcom staffers the motivation to create a real hidden character. For example, the way you meet him in Super Street Fighter II Turbo is very similar to how EGM describes meeting Sheng Long: He jumps into the final match against M. Bison, obliterating the end boss and making you fight him instead. And the method of finding him is difficult, though not impossible in the way EGM describes: Merely beat all fighters leading up to M. Bison in under twenty minutes and don’t use a continue. And thirdly, Sheng Long and Akuma both look like Ryu’s body in a black gi with a new head pasted on. Whatever the effect that the Sheng Long prank had on Akuma’s creation, this hidden fighter went on to become a Capcom favorite, and he even appeared in X-Men: Children of the Atom, more or less setting up the Marvel vs. Capcom spinoff franchise.
Weirdly, it’s the other original Street Fighter character, Ken, who takes on certain aspects of Sheng Long as the series progresses. It’s in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, for example, that Ken gets further differentiated from Ryu in that his Shoryuken can explode into flame. That wasn’t seen in the game before; only EGM’s mock-up of Sheng Long had a flaming rising uppercut. And then in the prequel Street Fighter Alpha series, which followed Street Fighter II starting in 1995, Ken sported a long ponytail, meaning he looked even more like Sheng Long.
Left: Sheng Long's flaming Shōryūken in Thailand, per the EGM prank. Right: Ken's flaming Shōryūken in Thailand, per Street Fighter Alpha.
There’s yet another way in which Sheng Long seems to have shaped the Street Fighter series long before his canonical debut in Street Fighter VI, and that’s the debut of Gouken as a playable character in Super Street Fighter IV. Gouken is canonically the sensei who trained both Ryu and Ken, and he existed in series lore since the earliest days of Street Fighter. Unless I’m mistaken, however, he was not named and did not make an actual appearance until the Street Fighter II manga by Masaomi Kanzaki, which ran from 1993 to 1994. I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but in the west, it was eventually decided that Gouken and Sheng Long were one in the same — that Ryu and Ken’s master simply went by a different name in English-speaking territories than he did in Japan, the same way Guile's ill-fated army buddy is Charlie here and Nash over there. (He’s apparently now Charlie Nash (チャーリー・ナッシュ or Chārī Nasshu) in both territories now.) The original EGM prank does not mention that Sheng Long is the one who taught Ryu and Ken how to fight, but the second one says this explicitly: “Players from Japan know him as Gouken, but here in the States, we call him Sheng Long!”
As the story of the Street Fighter series was fleshed out, it was decided that Gouken and Akuma would be brothers. Like Ryu and Ken, they both trained under the same master — called Goutetsu in the game canon, that name coming from yet another alternate version of Ryu and Ken’s sensei appearing in the 1994 Street Fighter II anime. The brothers embraced different sides of their discipline, Gouken favoring a non-lethal version and Akuma deciding instead to master the Satsui no Hado (“Surge of Murderous Intent”) to the point that he eventually uses it on Goutetsu, killing him. For a long time, the series lore stated that Akuma killed Gouken as well, and Gouken’s first appearance in the game series itself is in Akuma’s Street Fighter Alpha ending, where it’s implied that he has already murdered Gouken and Goutetsu.
For Gouken’s in-series debut in Street Fighter IV, however, Capcom rewrote these events in classic soap opera style to say that Gouken did not die but instead just went into a very long coma, emerging years later, much to Ryu and Ken’s surprise.
While this character’s appearance shifted leading up to his canonical debut, I at least like that the Street Fighter IV version of Gouken was drawn specifically to match his appearance in Akuma’s Street Fighter Alpha ending: an old man with a beard, white hair and big, bushy eyebrows. But it’s also worth saying that this version of him also looks a great deal like the EGM version of Sheng Long, just with a different-colored gi.
Again, no one at Capcom has pointed to the Electronic Gaming Monthly prank and said, yes, this is the origin of all these elements that ended up in the series proper. Given Street Fighter’s tendency to absorb bits of pop culture here and there and throw them all together, it seems very plausible that the prank truly did influence the games, however. And for the purposes of this post, let’s just suppose that it did just that. If that’s true, the legacy of this fun little joke thought up in the EGM offices is rather astounding. Not only did the editors manage to fool more than a few readers, but they also actually changed the series. And it didn’t just impact Street Fighter once, but repeatedly as the series goes on and on. That’s wild.
W.A. Stokins, you are not a joke. You are part of video game history.
Miscellaneous Notes
Akuma also happens to be one of the Street Fighter characters whose name was changed for localizations outside Japan. In Japan, he’s Gouki (豪鬼), which can mean “great demon” or “great devil.” The fact that they changed his name ruins a neat little similarity among him, Gouken and Goutetsu in that all three have names beginning with the same syllable. Their names don’t share a meaning, necessarily, as Gouken’s (剛拳) means “constitutionality” or “great fist,” while Goutetsu’s (轟鉄) means “roaring iron.”
I’m not clear why Capcom USA changed Gouki’s name to Akuma. My guess back in the day was that it could stem from the similarity of the Japanese name to a certain slur, but the fact that Capcom stuck with Gouken makes me think this probably not the case. (And in case you’re curious, I will be doing a post about a certain oddly named Street Fighter character soon.) According to the Street Fighter wiki, Capcom USA initially decided that this particular character would be a possessed by a demon and that the name Akuma (悪魔, “devil”) made more sense for this backstory, but I’m not sure that one Japanese name meaning “devil” makes more or less sense to an English-speaker than another. If anyone knows why the name was changed, I’m all ears.
Speaking of video game names of uncertain origin, I can’t find an etymology for Shadaloo, the international criminal syndicate that’s at the heart of so many Street Fighter games. What does this name mean? A lot of English-speaking players have just sort of shrugged and decided that it’s a mangling of “Shadowlaw,” which is actually how the group name was rendered in some materials back in the day, but I’m not convinced. The Japanese name, シャドルー or Shadorū, is very close to the katakana rendering of the word shadow, シャドー, however. I really need to post that “wanted list” of names and terms that we have no history for or explanation about.
I mentioned the Shadaloo Combat Research Institute having entries for a lot of characters you wouldn't necessarily expect. Here are some of them:
Captain Sawada from the live action Street Fighter movie
a newly hunky version of Momotaru, originally from the arcade game Pirate Ship Higemaru
not Ruby Heart from Marvel vs. Capcom 2 but a version of her, who is now Momotaru’s sister
Kevin Striker from Street Fighter 2010
the mysterious Ingrid, who was never supposed to be a Street Fighter character but who I guess is by virtue of appearing in Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX, along with Rook, D.D. and Death, who like Ingrid were designed as original characters for Capcom Fighting All-Stars, which was canceled
the guys fighting in the opening to Street Fighter II (who are apparently named Scott and Max)
a host of female wrestlers from R. Mika’s world (but curiously not Black Widow or any of the male characters from Saturday Night Slam Masters, who I demand we see in a Street Fighter game at some point)
the lovely Pullum Purna (plus other weirdos from the Street Fighter EX games)
a fantastically effeminate fighter named Cuticle Toru who was created as part of a fan submission contest and who may or may not be canon
and, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Can anyone find examples in official, English-language, Capcom-sanctioned material where the name of Ryu and Ken’s sensei was given as Sheng Long? Because I’m curious if that ever happened. For what it’s worth, when the character appeared in the American-made Street Fighter cartoon series in a 1996 episode, his name was Gouken.
I suppose there is a sort of parallel story to Sheng Long in the Mortal Kombat games: Ermac. Going back to the original Mortal Kombat cabinet, the audit screen kept track of total battles with Reptile, the game’s actual secret character, as well as ERMACS. Having no reason to suspect otherwise, players guessed that Ermac might be another hidden secret character. He wasn’t; ermac was an abbreviation for “error macro,” but in October 1993, EGM once again fueled the rumor that there was something more here by publishing a bogus reader letter from someone claiming he’d fought a red ninja by that name. Two years later, a red palette swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero appeared in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, so if anything the Mortal Kombat team gout around to making the mistranslation to urban legend to canonical character thing happen a lot faster than Street Fighter did.
Finally, anyone who is familiar with my non-video game-related obsessions should not be surprised to learn that it was really hard to type out Sheng Long repeatedly and not accidentally write it as Shelley Long.