But when translating this into English, the developers decided to first translate it into Chinese, because that's evidently closer, and by the time the quote reached Western arcades, it read: "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance."
Poor Guile. First the haircut, then the ass-kicking, and now the lecture. He's having a serious case of the Mondays.
"Well then who the fuck is Sheng Long?" a chorus of 11-year-old voices shrieked, only to be answered when the SNES version of the game came out. Its instruction manual claimed that Sheng Long -- which, I cannot stress enough, at that point was a mistranslated gibberish name that came out of fucking nowhere -- was Ryu's former martial arts master.
Into this clusterfuck of miscommunication stepped Electronic Gaming Monthly, a video games magazine best known for its mastery of clusterfucked miscommunication. In their April 1992 issue, EGM printed a claim that the player could fight Sheng Long by undertaking a ridiculously difficult sequence of events, essentially using Ryu for half a day without taking any damage. It was later revealed that this was an April Fool's joke (which EGM cleverly disguised by publishing in mid-February), but that didn't stop other magazines from reprinting the trick. Without checking it, because obviously this is just video games journalism we're talking about. Before long, there wasn't a Street Fighter player in the world who wasn't convinced that you could fight Sheng Long if you only tried hard enough.
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