Street Fighter III: Third Strike Mod Restores the Stages Capcom Left Behind

Modder Andy R restores missing New Generation and 2nd Impact stages to Street Fighter III: Third Strike, fitting over ten classic backgrounds onto Capcom CPS-3 hardware.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike has spent twenty-seven years being praised as one of the finest fighting games ever made while quietly hiding an awkward little secret: when Capcom created the final version of Street Fighter III, a sizeable collection of backgrounds from New Generation and 2nd Impact disappeared. Modder Andy R has now essentially told the CPS-3 hardware to stop making excuses. His latest project restores the missing stages from Street Fighter III: New Generation and 2nd Impact inside Third Strike, including more than ten backgrounds and their variants. Even better, the restored material reportedly fits on the same ROM configuration when using the seventh SIMM. That matters because this isn't merely somebody replacing screenshots in a PC emulator; the goal is to make the expanded version operate within the architecture of Capcom's original CPS-3 game.

Third Strike originally sacrificed several older stages while introducing its own new characters, balance changes and environments, presumably because arcade memory was not an infinite magical cupboard in 1999. Later versions such as Third Strike Online Edition and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection never restored them either. The mod therefore creates something Capcom itself never officially offered: effectively a greatest-hits environmental edition of Street Fighter III's three arcade iterations while retaining Third Strike's mechanics. Apparently the final boss of retro preservation is occasionally just finding enough room on the SIMMs.