March 11, 2021
Arcades were huge back in the 90's in the city of Los Angeles. I remember when all the kids would go to the local arcades, and I too put my fair share of quarters into those machines.
At my elementary school, there was a liquor store down the street and it was known throughout the school to have arcade machines (they even closed off a section of the store just for the cabinets). When Marvel vs Capcom was installed, it was HUGE. After the school day ended, all the kids would race down there to get there first. EVERYBODY played. However, nobody did fancy combos or strategized. We were kids: we all picked Ryu as the first character and used the cheapest moves over and over again to do damage and go to the next round. That meant fireball after fireball, uppercuts after uppercuts.
Pic credit: arcadecontrols.com - tealsnk
All the kids would talk about MvC, and none of us knew how to pronouce Ryu's moves. "Hadouken" was just simply fireball, "Tatsumaki Senpukyaku" was air kick or spinning kick. But, for Ryu's "Shoryuken", we didn't call it uppercut and instead gave it something that sounded phonetically close to the fuzzy 90's arcade box sound bit. "Shoryuken" was called by us Los Angeles 90's kids: All you can.
Kids would be sitting at recess discussing their favorite moves or how to beat Onslaught, and you would hear "Yea, just do all you can!", "Use the fireball and all you can!" Boys would run around doing uppercuts shouting "ALL YOU CAN! ALL YOU CAN!"
It was never changed or corrected, even with the super ending that boldly displayed "SHIN SHOURYUU-KEN" on the screen for a few seconds (I don't even think we could have spelled "hurricane"). I think I finally found began to pronounce the real name sometime in high school when I had more access to nerdy stuff (i.e. internet).
I still think back fondly of our exploits of cheese moves just to beat the final boss: putting quarter after quarter into the machine and quarter circle forward A over and over, leading to loud bursts of jubilant cheering by a bunch of kids when the final boss was defeated. I guess we did try to do all we can. :cue cheesy 90's music:
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