For a lot of us, the Legend of Sheng Long is like the Contra code–part of the very fabric of our gaming history. It’s not as well-known in Japan, however, so project manager Natsuki Shiozawa breaks it down on Capcom Japan’s SFIV blog:

“So who’s Sheng Long?” Let me explain.

It all goes back to when Street Fighter II was released in 1991. You all remember Ryu’s line, right? “You must defeat my dragon punch to stand a chance!” (It seems like a lot of you do.)

His line, however, on the original American arcade version was as follows:

“You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.” Who is this Sheng Long guy?!

Sheng Long is a Chinese pronunciation for the same characters used for “Shoryu”. This was obviously a case of mistranslation, but it was this line that the rumor of Sheng Long took off in America. But of course, the character never existed to begin with.

When the game was ported to the home version, Capcom corrected the mistake and replaced the Japanese “Shoryuken” with “Dragon Punch”.

But even with this, the legend of Sheng Long wouldn’t go away. Apparently, when Street Fighter III was released, it became a heated topic amongst the game’s fans.

Though not familiar to many Japanese (I didn’t know very much about it myself); and this certainly isn’t something in the works, this was an interesting bit of history and I thought it would be a waste to not share it with you all. So, I decided to make a joke of it and post it here.

With that, Sheng-Long is still now and always will be, truly a character of legend.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t lying when I said that that we are almost done finishing the game and that I will be doing my best to bring you the most up-to-date information. I want to, and will be, giving you guys a lot more information. You’ll just have to wait a little bit more.

But, oh oh! We’re looking to start our location tests and I hope to tell you more soon!

There you have it. This has been the “Special Update: April Fool’s Joke Exposed”.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Capcom®. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.