Street Fighter 4 Rollback Mod Goes Out Into the Wild

Street Fighter 4 is often seen as a game that revived the 2D fighting games, a game that brought the genre back in a big way and caused other publishers to follow suit. It's hard to deny its iconic status, but despite much respect and praise, you won't see too many people trying to play it these days.

The netcode is one of the biggest reasons behind it. Sure, age is a factor, but anyone who wants to run some sets in SF4 will have a terrible experience unless playing with people close to them, which might be either a small or non-existent amount of people.

Now, over 15 years later, it seems like the effort to make SF4 more playable online are underway.

It all blew up when Senor Power shared a Google doc on Twitter with instructions on how to get it installed and start playing. A very convoluted and scuffed process that involved either installing 3rd party apps or doing a decent amount of port forwarding. However, according to few people who got it running, it actually works, even if it's not even remotely close to a final and polished state.

The person who shared the doc is not the one who actually made it, and when the author caught on that someone else is spreading the build and installation info, they scrubbed the doc, instead referring people to check out the fgc.network portal on fediverse.

If you go there, the author of the mod points out some of the frustration with what has happened, and it becomes evident that had no intention of having to mod go around in such an unstable and early version. If you love SF4 and look forward to playing it online, you know where to find more updates about it, but remember to respect other people. Development of something like this requires a lot of time and effort, and might not even pan out in the end, but the fact that it exists at all is amazing.