Street Fighter

In my teenage years there was still a cool thing that kids and teenagers went to called an Arcade. This is like a foreign concept now as you can have a gameplay experience thousands of times better from the comfort of your couch at home with millions of people online. But for those of you who remember the arcade experience, there was never anything quite like the challenge of a good Street Fighter match.
The great characters of the original series: Ryu, Ken, Guile, Chun-Li, Zangief, Dhalsim, Blanka, and E.Honda (E is for Edmund) were the original eight playable characters. And the four final bosses were Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M.Bison. This was a great game to challenge your strategic ability against the AI opponents, figuring out the characters moves, tactics, and defenses. A good player could get through the game with a single quarter and enjoy about 30 minutes of gaming time. The real fun came in versus battles though. The true pleasure of this game is playing amongst a crowd of people, the screen topped up with quarters lined up by players waiting to be the next challenger. All kinds of players trying all kinds of strategies and characters. There were times when I could be playing for over an hour on a single quarter against dozens of opponents, and I was not even close to being an expert player.
This game, and its many sequels, changed the face of arcade gaming for a long time to come. It inspired games like Mortal Combat, Virtua Fighter, Killer Instinct, Tekken, and many others. Street Fighter continues on today on consoles, some games developing old characters and others pitting the key characters against Marvel Superheroes or Capcom video game hero's.