Street Fighter II SNES Myth Confirmed As E.Honda Will Always Lose Against Zangief


Did you ever hear the urban legend about Street Fighter II that said E. Honda would get his behind kicked every time by Zangief without being able to lay a finger on him?

Well, it turns out that it's true.

Street Fighter II SNES Myth Confirmed As E.Honda Will Always Lose Against Zangief

Zangief's infamous Spinning Piledriver can catch E.Honda at the start of the match, driving him into the ground before following up with the same move again... and again.

The Spinning Piledriver is one of, if not the most powerful moves in the game, and E.Honda's hitbox is the largest. And because it can't be blocked while Honda is down, Zangief can just keep pulling off the move (this was fixed in later versions of the game).

Fighting game expert TheoryFighter issued a challenge to prove the issue, and it was claimed by Twitter user ElenoreHU3BR almost two weeks later.

Speaking to Eurogamer, TheoryFighter puts the 'unwinnable match' down to the differences between home and arcade versions of the game.

At this point in time, home versions of fighters were incredibly inaccurate when compared to their arcade counterparts but these inaccuracies weren't documented online like they are now. So it's possible that word of mouth just spread from a handful of people playing the SNES version as genuine matchup advice without the understanding of how bad these ports are.
My other theory is, it did actually exist on the arcade version. People have continued to talk about it and if the beta of the arcade version is even half as broken as the SNES port, anything is possible because that game is a complete mess. The problem is we don't have a ROM dump of the arcade beta, and until someone finds one we'll never find out.

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