The Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) was the first console to see a version of Street Fighter II, which was released in 1992. It became one of the highest selling games for the system, with over 6 million copes sold, and as of 2011 is Capcom's best selling console game of all time. It isn't hard to see why -people were desperate to play Street Fighter II in the comfort of their own homes, and this version was the only worthy port available at the time. Far better than the abysmal versions by U.S. Gold, SNES Street Fighter II has got all the characters and moves, and plays just like the arcade game.

To get the game onto a 16 meg cartridge, a number of changes had to be made. In the arcade version, most characters had unique upper body sprites for moving backwards as well as forward. In the SNES version, these backwards sprites are gone, as is some other frames of animation. There are only 2 bonus games in the SNES version, the car smash remains but there is also a brand new game which involves destroying wall. The "danger" music of each character's theme is also missing from the SNES version, instead, character themes simply speed up when a round is about to end. The intro sequence is missing in the SNES version, replaced with a simple spinning logo. I also dislike the music in this version, as I don't think it compares well at all to the arcade version's tunes.

But despite these cut backs, this was still leagues above any other version available at the time, and it also had many other little quirks and bonuses. Many of the endings featured new art or new scenes, such as Ryu training by a waterfall, or Ken carrying Eliza off to the church. The pitch of each fighter's speech would vary for special moves, such as Ryu's hadouken getting higher and higher pitched depending on which punch button was used to do the move. A cheat code let 2 players both use the same character -one of the the only versions of the game to let you do this. Most of these things are exclusive to this version of the game, and would not be seen in the SNES version of Street Fighter II Turbo.

Although the later Street Fighter games on the SNES are better than this, this is still a great port and helped sell a lot of Super Nintendo consoles, and is certainly a game any SNES owner must have. This version was also available on the Wii's virtual console, but it can no longer be downloaded. As of 2021 it is still available on the Wii U and New 3DS virtual consoles.