Street Fighter II:
The definitive Soundtrack
The soundtrack of a generation
Street Fighter II The Definitive Soundtrack is a restored and remastered, complete and definitive edition of a soundtrack that defined a generation. It has been prepared with great attention to detail, under supervision and with final approval from original composer Yoko Shimomura. It’s the best the Street Fighter II arcade soundtrack has ever sounded.
There are almost three hours of music and more than 100 tracks total, including character themes, ending themes, alternate ending themes, sound effects, and even secondary critical themes.
The vinyl box set houses four 180-gram vinyl discs, containing a thorough 140-minute edition of the soundtrack. The oversized booklet includes an exclusive interview with Yoko Shimomura, a foreword by Executive Producer of the Street Fighter series Yoshinori Ono, and an essay by video game journalist Matt Leone (Polygon, 1UP).
Responsibilities
I was responsible for the restoration and remastering of the full soundtrack. This involved a complex process of mixing separate audio streams, cleaning up the audio content (noise and click removal etc.), restoring high frequency content, reverse engineering an undesirable pseudo surround effect and undoing the damage of the signal's inherent audio distortion, as well as subtly enhancing the audio.
All of this was a uniquely developed process for this specific release. This was all done manually on around 100 tracks and nearly 3 hours of music.
The soundtrack entered the American Billboard charts.
Press
Brave Wave has received a lot of media attention over this release. Here are some articles (including an interview in which I participated and explained some of the process behind the restoration):
How Brave Wave went above and beyond to release the definitive Street Fighter II soundtrack (FACT Magazine)
Street Fighter II is finally getting the remastered soundtrack that it deserves (The Verge)
Street Fighter II: The Definitive Soundtrack - Brave Wave's long-awaited vinyl box set lives up to its billing (US Gamer)
