The Mystery Of Sheng Long

Time to reintroduce some levity and fun back into this blog, hot off the heels of an article about a Sri Lankan man exposing himself to a female British tourist on a glamcation.

Sheng Long, I would like to speak about Sheng Long. He of Street Fight 2 fame. But wait, he wasn’t in Street Fighter 2. Or any of the Street Fighters! Or was he?

We have an orientalist flavour here. Orientalism is always a mystery to us European-descended folk. And here it presents a grander mystery than normal.

Sheng Long was basically a rumoured hidden character in Street Fighter 2. He didn’t actually exist, but his existence was rumoured across multiple editions of the game spanning across years.

Eventually the fans amassed such outrage at being the repeated victims of the hoax that the developers finally relented and DID put in an actual character called Sheng Long in a recent edition of the game from a couple of years ago. By that point a defined appearance, temperament and fighting style seems to have been fleshed out across the years. As though the hoax had been a slow-motion collaborative character-development exercise with the fans. Or that’s what the gist of the linked video below seems to suggest.

What a time to be alive.

We salute Sheng Long here.

If you’d like to learn more about Sheng Long then this 15 minute documentary video should get you up to speed.