Street Fighter

***Street Fighter***, commonly abbreviated as ***SF*** or *スト* (*Suto*) is a Japanese media franchise developed and published by Capcom. It is one of the highest-grossing video game franchises, and began as an arcade game in 1987.

Being an avid video gamer, Lupe Fiasco participated in a 2016 exhibition match against Daigo Umehara, which was part of the launch party for *Street Fighter V* and in promotion of his album, *Drogas Light*. His win, three-two, was named as a "dream come true" for him. Along with this, he appeared on two *ELeague* shows, the first one in 2017 where he played for charity along with Shaquille O'Neal, Natalie Eva Marie, and Reggie Bush. In 2018, he was featured in the third episode of *ELeague The Challenger: Street Fighter V*, where he played team captain in a three-on-three game.

## Background

> My relationship to gaming is real. I think because people don't know about it, they just look at it as just being a celebrity. It's like, "Bro, I had an arcade, literally, when I was a little kid. [...] But it is weird when you show it to the world after you're a celebrity, and you think that you're just kind of like gaining off of it. It's like, "Nah, I really got it. Do I have to put my whole story as to why I should be here? And like why I'm authentic to this space? I actually vibe with you guys more than I vibe with the rap world. I can hang out with you dudes more than I can hang out with the next rapper."
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> Fiasco to *Billboard*

Fiasco told *Billboard* how he first got into *SF*:

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> I think it was either kindergarten or first grade. I went to a school called Crown Academy on the West Side of Chicago. There was a corner store up the street from the school that people used to go to before you had to go to class. Before the bell rung and school started, you would get cookies or candy or whatever. They had a few arcade machines in there, and one of the machines was *Street Fighter II*, the original. I remember just throwing a few quarters in or if you just let the game play, you'd see the different scenes and the different characters kind of come up. Kind of like the demo thing.
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> Those were my very first experiences with *Street Fighter*. Then it just kind of fast forwarded through random arcades and seeing it around. And my father, we had martial arts school. He always had some type of video game at the school. At one of the schools, he had *Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition*, which was this super glitchy Champion Edition—like glitched out version that we used to play. It was like super crazy.
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He disliked the *Street Fighter IV* edition, which he referred to as "3D, clunky animation." With *Street Fighter V*, he would sometimes play *Arcade Edition* online. He recalled, "I was begging them to do a standard arcade mode, right? Like what we used to play when we played Super Nintendo or whatever. Just basic arcade mode. So when they put that in, I was just like, "I'm just playing arcade mode from here on out. I don't even want to play online. I just want to play this arcade mode." Arcade mode is too easy for me. I walk through it."

He used to play with the character E. Honda when he first delved into the franchise, though switched over to Ken or Ryu, liking the "karate aesthetics and the hadoken and the dragon punch and all that stuff." In high school, he "really started to play Ken in Street Fighter vs. X-Men" at the arcade, and continued, "I actually picked Ryu, Ken, and Sagat. It was all those Shodo, down-forward fireball dudes. I just got an affinity for Ken. Then it became Ryu, and they started to balance him out. They made Ryu slower, but stronger. I still liked the speed of Ken, so I kind of just stuck with Ken. Fast forward to this Diago [Umehara] match, that's who I was naturally able to practice with and play with."

On February 15, 2016, he played a match against Umehara. He said:

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> I really trained. People put an asterisk next to that match because they think it was fixed, but it wasn't. Like, it really, really wasn't. It was just a matter of what state or condition Daigo was in and how comfortable he was with playing the game. That was my first time ever playing *Street Fighter V* because it wasn't out and I didn't have access to any of the betas. I was playing *Street Fighter IV* to practice because I thought we were going to play *Street Fighter IV*. I was expecting to lose. I was just like, 'Let me just go in here and not look crazy. If I can get in a super, then I'm good.' But we were playing *IV*."
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> So then fast forward to the match, they were like, 'No, no, no, we're going to play *V*.' And *V* came out the next day for console. So we did our match on the 15th and *V* came out on the 16th. So we're like, 'Yo, we are just going to play *V*.' So that was my first time ever playing *V*. I got to practice a little bit before that match and one of the *Street Fighter* techs were there from Capcom, and he was like showing me the updates and some of the moves on Ken… And giving me ideas on target combos and stuff like that.
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> It was just one of those things, and Daigo—whatever his condition was or whatever his comfort level with the game—people were like, "Oh, he was sandbagging." I was like, "So? [Laughs] I still won. It was a real match." So that was cool. I was the No. 1 Street Fighter player in the world. Until the first tournament came around, I was No. 1.
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## References

1. ↑ "Game Series Sales". *Capcom*. June 30, 2022.
2. ↑ Clark, Trent (February 17, 2016). "Lupe Fiasco Beats Gaming Legend Daigo Umehara in "Street Fighter V"". *HipHopDX*.
3. ↑ Diep, Eric (April 18, 2018). "Lupe Fiasco Talks Guest-Starring on 'ELEAGUE The Challenger: Street Fighter V,' Nicki Minaj's 'Chun-Li' & His Upcoming Music". *Billboard*.