Anyway, what I'd like to talk about is the metastory of the Street Fighter franchise. It's a little hard to figure out, because the game treats everyone's endings as if they were canon; you have to sift through them, see how they connect, look for patterns, and even then, go find statements, interviews and whatnot from Capcom that helps clear it up. But let me do my best to lay out the chronology of the Street Fighter story, which I think takes place over the course of about a dozen years. We're told in biographical stuff what Ryu's birthday is, but I don't think we're meant to "believe" that exactly; rather, I think that like Marvel superheroes, there's a sliding scale. I.e., time doesn't move as quickly in game as it does in real life. If Ryu was meant to be 23 when Street Fighter was first released back in 1987, which was 34 years ago now, he's not meant to be pushing 60 years old now. Plus, the games have not been released chronologically; the game that's the "most recent" in terms of in-game chronology is Street Fighter III: Third Strike. It was released in 1999, and given that that's about 12 years after the original Street Fighter, that was probably more or less OK when it was released. But now even that was over twenty years ago, and we're still getting new Street Fighter content. In none of it does Ryu look over mid-30s in age.
Anyway, like I said, we know for sure that Ryu was supposed to be 23 when Street Fighter came out in 1987. Let's divorce that age from the year, and just talk about the chronology of the series from that anchor point of Ryu's age in the first game. We'll call that Year 23 since that was Ryu's age. It's the first thing that happened in the Street Fighter chronology. My advancement is somewhat arbitrary; there's only a handful of anchor points that are official, like Capcom stating outright that two years takes place betwen Street Fighter Alpha 1/2 and Alpha 3, the general order of the subseries, and dead reckoning by estimating how old characters like, say, Mel are based on their size (I've had four kids, and my wife has babysitted a great deal more than that. I'm pretty good at estimating kids' ages.)
- Year 23: Street Fighter. There's no mention of Shadaloo or any of the supervillainous organizations; there's just Sagat who's a martial arts champion and all-around mean guy. Ryu and Ken, feeling that their training has advanced to the point where they can consider themselves "graduates" want to go out and test their skills in the world, so they enter the tournament. Ryu wins, Sagat is defeated, etc.
- Year 24: Street Fighter Alpha and Alpha 2. Although not released until 1995; eight years after Street Fighter and four years after Street Fighter II basically invented the fighting game genre as we know it, this is the next one from an in-game chronology, and takes place not too long after Street Fighter. I'm rounding it up to a year, but it's feasible that it takes place even considerably sooner than that; maybe even only a few months at most after the first game. 1996's Street Fighter Alpha 2 isn't actually a sequel to this game, rather it's a rewrite; Alpha can be considered almost a first draft that was perfected in Alpha 2. Ryu comes home from the tournament he won to find that his master's brother, Akuma, has murdered his master. There's other stuff going on too; Shadaloo and Bison are introduced. Of course, they were actually introduced in 1991's Street Fighter, but this is their first appearance in the in-game chronology. Curiously, while Shadaloo was played up as a kind of gangster enterprise in Street Fighter II, here they're shown more like a rogue state almost; a kind of supervillainic organization that is directly analogous and in fact almost identical in scope and scale to HYDRA as shown in the Captain America movies, or Cobra Command from the old GI Joe stuff. The Alpha series has a lot of Final Fight characters in it, although they make their biggest bunch of appearances in the next game. I'm not exactly sure when the Final Fight's are supposed to take place, but I think it's pretty clear that they take place before Street Fighter Alpha 3. I tend to think it likely that they are in this range between Year 23 and Year 25 or so.
- Year 26: Street Fighter Alpha 3. One of the few anchor points we have in the chronology is that Capcom have told us that two years takes place between Alpha 1 and 2 (which, again, was the same storypoint, just perfected in a better version of the game) and Alpha 3. Alpha 3 was not another rewrite of Alpha 1, but a genuine sequel. Capcom have retconned a few things; Ryu now didn't actually beat Sagat, he actually lost to him, but then he drew on the Dark Side of the Force to sucker punch Sagat after already losing and scar Sagat, for instance. Ryu now seems more concerned with figuring out his fatalistic relationship with the Dark Side of the Force than anything else. Ken meets Eliza in this game. Or maybe that's Eliza in his ending in Street Fighter Alpha 2, although if so, they never mention it. Bison is HUGE in this game, and plays a major role in everybody's story, just about. But Bison is pretty much meant to have been killed and his psycho drive destroyed. Which is odd, because this is a prequel game to Street Fighter II where, of course, Bison is the boss character and he mentions the psycho drive. Based on the appearances of some of the Final Fight characters, especially Cody, we know that the Final Fight games have already taken place by now, too. Mad Gear is broken up, and some of the Mad Gear bosses like Rolento, Sodom (or Katana), etc., are out trying to figure out what to do with their lives, while Cody is in prison for his vigilante fighting, which supposedly went out of control at some point after Final Fight. Although he's arrested by Edi E. who was a corrupt cop on the payroll of the Mad Gear Gang, so it's entirely possible that the whole arrest and felony conviction are not justified. That might explain how he's in prison in Alpha 3 and even Street Fighter IV, but he's the new mayor of Metro City already by Street Fighter V.
- Year 27: Street Fighter II (all versions.) We don't know how much time passed between Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 2, but there are reasons to assume that it isn't too long. I'm going to round to a year. Those reasons include a lot of the information in the stories of characters like Chun-Li, Guile, T. Hawk, etc. who are clearly continuing efforts that were detailed in Alpha (again; they were detailed in SF2 first.) Given the general lack of progress that Guile has had in finding Charlie, Chun-Li in finding her father, or T. Hawk in finding Julia. This one is a bit speculative, but it works out well, and there's not much reason to assume more than a year's passage here. (on the other hand, Cammy developing from being a brainwashed teenaged girl Killer Bee in Alpha 3 and having already had a history as a Delta Red agent at the end of II seems awfully compressed.) However, we do have some more relative anchors put into place here. For one, it does seem likely that if Street Fighter, which was released in 1987 was supposed to have taken place in 1987, then Street Fighter II, which was released in 1991, was also supposed to have taken place in 1991. This was before prequels and timeline bending became normal, as well as before the plot got complicated, so this assumption seems likely to have been true at the time, and it also seems like Capcom have kind of worked around it. In fact, there's a vague timeline Capcom once published in Japan, and although I don't read Japanese, it's clear that only two dates are clearly given, 1987 and 1991. Ken and Eliza get married at the end (in Ken's ending) which also provides a useful anchor of sorts. Although Udon Comics had Eliza get married partly because she was already pregnant, that actually seems unlikely to have been Capcom's intention. This means that we can peg the timing between Street Fighter II's ending and Street Fighter IV's ending, when Mel is born, to have been unlikely to have been much shorter than a year. It could have been a little longer, but there's not much reason to assume that it should have been. Also; all of the versions of Street Fighter II are just iterations on the same story. None of them is a sequel to any other version of Street Fighter II.
- Year 28: Street Fighter IV (all versions). There's some vaguish comments from Capcom that Street Fighter II was supposed to take place in 1991; the year that the first version of it came out, and that Street Fighter IV, the next once chronologically, takes place in 1994. I don't know if this is really meant to be true or not in a literal sense, or even that it's accurate. I've only heard it second hand. Or more likely third or more hand. Street Fighter IV takes place at least a year after Street Fighter II, as mentioned above, but it could be three years. That gives Shadaloo, which was more thoroughly destroyed this time than it was after Alpha 3, time to regroup into SIN under new leadership, and it means that Mel isn't quite the honeymoon baby that he otherwise would have been. Keep in mind that this timeline originally had the final Street Fighter III game taking place in 1999, or "year 35." I'm trying to make the timeline fit that paradigm still. I should point out that the manual for Street Fighter IV suggests that it takes place "a short time" after Street Fighter II. I like rounding to one year instead of three years as "a short time", so I'm tentatively putting this at Year 28 rather than Year 30. Realistically, though, there's not a lot of reason to favor one over the other; you've simply got two potentially conflicting offhand comments from someone allegedly at Capcom, subject to translation, second and third hand distortion, and interpretation of what exactly "a short time" means, though.
- Year 32-33: Street Fighter V (all versions). Based mostly on Mel's appearance (although all characters are notably aged at least a little bit; Mel's is the best for dead reckoning, because going from newborn to a kid of 4-5 is a much easier thing to dead-reckon on physical appearance than going from late twenties to early thirties, this is about where I think the Street Fighter V games take place. This game also has the most clearly defined story, as well as finally tying the Shadaloo focused games to the Illuminati focused SF3 titles. There are decent reasons to assume that this doesn't take place too long prior to the first SF3 game. Most of the characters have about the same appearance, for instance. Mel seems to be a little bigger, but no more than a year or so.
- Year 34: Street Fighter III: New Generation and 2nd Impact. As with the Alpha series, III originally game out in it's first version, but was then "rewritten" and replaced with the second iteration of the series. Although, like with Alpha, the third game in the sub-series is a sequel to the first/second. For whatever reason, the storytelling really fell apart in this game, too. While there's lots of vague hints of stuff, it's almost impossible to actually determine what is supposed to have happened. And because Street Fighter III had very little to no mainstream appeal, only being popular with the competitive technical set, I suppose Capcom just decided that they didn't really care about clarifying anything going on in the story anyway.
- Year 35: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Ryu actually looks older (especially in his bearded "hot Ryu" alternate) in SFV than he does in SF3, which is probably a good clue that they can't really be posited to take place too far apart from each other. We know that 3rd Strike takes place after 2nd Impact. When there's a "short time" between iterations, I'm rounding that up to a year, because there's never any reason to assume that it has to be less. There are good reasons to stretch the game out some too; Cammy for instance has a pretty intricate story and backstory that needs some time to develop. She can't go from being a brainwashed teenager Killer Bee assassin to a valued member of Delta Red who has a history and personal ties with her team in just a couple of months, after all. There needs to be some time for that type of story to develop. Of course, that is in contrast to what I said above that there are good reasons to presume that Alpha 3 and SF2 aren't that far apart. If there needs to be some stretch in the timeline, I'd put another year or two between those titles
