http://shoryuken.com/content/happy-20th-birthday-street-fighter-ii-world-warrior-3767/
For the new members of the league that don't know the history of the SFCCL, the original league was created with the release of this game to console for the first time on the Super Nintendo. The home version was released 17 months after the arcade release as a direct result of the great popularity of the game in arcades. The SNES version was released in North America is July 1992. I didn't buy the game until the week of Thanksgiving that year based on two fo my classmates asking me if I was going to buy it. At the time, I had never played the game. I just bought it based on their word of mouth. The rest, as they say, is history.
My cousin and I played SF2:TWW on the SNES all day on Thanksgiving day. We played with every character. We played in various mock tournaments. We played with various rules. On that day, we basically came up with the idea of a league. With online play being a futuristic idea at that time, the league would consist of local family and friends. We simply wanted to beat each other up in matches that meant something more than just bragging rights. We wanted to see who was the best among us. At the time, SF2:TWW only had 8 playable characters. We each own the "rights" to a character thru a draft. From there, we setup matches each week to play, and created the ranking system that we still use today in the SFCCL. Win your matches, and your fighter would climb the rankings until the got a shot at the Champion.
Over the years, I began playing in local arcade tournament, buying & playing the mutiple sequels that would come to the SNES, Sega Saturn, and Sony PlayStation. In fact, the release of Street Fighter Alpha on the Sega Saturn in January 1996 was the sole reason I bought a next-gen system after the SNES. I bought the Saturn version at the time because of their standard 6-button controller compared to the PlayStation controller. A good console, but ended up being the final Sega console. Actually, I bought the system off a friend. I think I still owe him $200 all these years later...whoops.
For those younglings in the league today, all this stuff is probably too old for you to remember. But for us elderly gamers, eeeerrrrrrrrrr, veteran gamers, it brings back old memories. The hours (or days) spent at the arcades plunking down quarter after quarter (or token after token) on the SFII. Always be sure to place your coin on the screen to indicate you have 'next game', even if your coin was the 10th in line. The picture I use for the Waiting Lists on the Members Database page comes directly from the arcade intro of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. Just a small homage to the original game that was released 20 year ago this month.
Video below of the intro and gameplay of SFII:TWW. Note the 2-hit dizzy combos! If only that would be put back into place...I'd dominate the world again! Eh...maybe not.