The fourth version of Street Fighter II was released in 1993. Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers was a much bigger update than the previous game. All of the original 12 characters returned with new special moves and animations, but they were joined by four new characters: T. Hawk, Fei Long, Dee Jay and Cammy. New stages were added for these characters, whilst all the old stages were changed and given new colors. The music was re-done, there were new sound effects, each character had more colors to choose from, the endings were changed and more. The game runs on Capcom's CPS 2 board, the first game in the series to do so.


Despite all of these additions, Super Street Fighter II was not the game Capcom had originally intended to make. Rumors indicate that Capcom had originally intended to end the SFII series with Hyper Fighting, and make a truly new sequel for the next game. However, multiple other companies also had fighting games in development. SNK had Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury Special, whilst SEGA was developing Virtua Fighter -the first 3D fighting game. Midway had Mortal Kombat II in the works. Capcom needed a new game out to compete with them all, and Super Street Fighter II was the end result.


When the game was released, is was mostly positively received. Some weren't happy with the slower game speed, as it played much slower than Hyper Fighting. However, some were fine with this, as they didn't like the Hyper Fighting speed anyway. The next game in the series would appease players by letting them select the game speed they'd like. Super Street Fighter II enjoyed being one of the most popular arcade games of the year, just like the previous versions.