Where were you when Street Fighter IV was announced? Make a note of it now, because it’s information that you’ll one day treasure, the way you remember where you were when the Spice Girls were assassinated or when the first McDonald’s opened in Scotland.

It’s information a lot of people thought they would never actually need, the view of many that fighting games, like scrolling shooters were a genre consigned to the dustbins of history; fun once upon a time, but like a faithful, senile old dog, long overdue for a humane double-barreled disposal behind the cowshed.

This was always rubbish, as anyone who has devoted any serious time to the best of the genre can attest. But even we stalwarts of the fandom, the hardest of the hardcore, la cremé de l’apologists secretly craved something new. I’ve been playing Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo for 13 years now. I fully expect to be playing it for the next 13 years, but there was never a single second where, deep in my heart I didn’t hope for that news, those rumours, those early screenshots and teasing reports, drawn out simultaneously agonising and ecstatically. And now it’s happened.

SFIV was always going to happen. Nothing as incredibly popular as SF once was will lie dormant forever, nothing in the entertainment industry works that way. Hopefully though this announcement means more than just the result of a few focus group meetings or anything as dull as a transfer of intellectual properties. Hopefully this has been done because the time is right, because the staff are in place, because the technology is ready to use and because the ideas, the core concepts - the impossibly intricate spiderwebs of precise, technical information are all the best they could ever be.

It’s hard not to build hopes up after so long. True Capcom have dropped a few crumbs in the past eight years with varying degrees of success but the gap between 1999’s Third Strike and the ETA of this title, supposedly a year hence is vast, and deep, and much has changed during that time.

The status of Street Fighter itself remains largely a mystery. Informed reports tell us that few, if any of the Capcom staff that worked on the series are still there, the majority of them scattered, Jon Romero-style to form or be part of smaller, more independent companies.

The rights to the IP itself are currently owned by Capcom’s USA division, although Capcom Japan still evidently hold the reigns and make the decisions, as evidenced by their firm bootprint on the high-definition, US-produced remake of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. So who’s going to be doing the programming? Who’s designing the characters? Who’s in charge of tweaking and balancing the game engine? At this point, nobody knows. Anybody who does is lying.

While it’s too soon to be predicting greatness, it’s also too soon to be doomsaying. The only previous American Capcom fighter, the laughable Final Fight Revenge, often cited as an example of what happens when Westerners get their hands on holy JP properties remains an anomaly, a cast-off, clearly of no interest to Capcom Japan and a game whose production studio no longer even exists.

I also refuse to believe that the only people who could ever make a truly brilliant Street Fighter were those who worked for Capcom between 1990 and 1999. Why can’t a new team come along and blow us away the way Yoshiki Okamoto and friends did in the early 1990s? Capcom has churned out some exceptional games since they locked SF away in a vault. The talent, both conceptual and technical is clearly still there, the question remains, will they use it?

As well as the possibility of getting a spiffy new 1-on-1 fighting game, there are broader issues to consider. What does it mean for the people who play fighting games? Well for the next year it probably means lots of arguing and name-calling. Like any deeply-entrenched online community, we fighting game fans are a boisterous, argumentative lot, grown cynical through years of abandonment by the company that once loved us so much. It’s only been four, five hours and I’m sure that the arguments over whether it’ll be good or bad, 2D or 3D, who’s in it and who isn’t are already raging. I’m certainly looking forward to doing my part, hopefully with a combination of veterans and new people who were too young, or too busy to ever get into the series in its previous incarnations.

Even further afield, and admittedly more fancifully at this early stage, perhaps this could even lead to a resurgence of interest in the community, eventually even in the genre itself? SF2’s influence on the gaming landscape is the stuff of legends, and while no fighter since has ever managed to make such an impact, today’s gaming climate demonstrates over and over that one good idea is enough for numerous companies, franchises and titles to feed on for ages.

Fighting games are still made of course, the big franchises still represented on the newest consoles and services, but this announcement makes every Tekken 6 rumour or Soul Calibur 3 concept artwork seem like the tiniest, most insignificant thing in the universe. Capcom made this genre, they sustained it for seven, eight glorious years and then, perhaps sensing the winds of change or compelled by market forces beyond their powers, left it to slumber. Some might even say to rot. SFIV has more riding on it than perhaps any videogame since Street Fighter III disappointed the world, a decade ago, and the pressure on everyone that orbits it, be they industry or consumer will be huge, for the next twelve months.

For me the 17th October 2007 was an average day in most respects. Hopefully the 17th October 2008 will see me with a six-button arcade stick grafted into my arm, playing the most brilliant title the industry has ever seen. Regardless of its final quality the ride to getting there is assuredly going to be a wild one, and I look forward to sharing it with you all.

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