Electronic Gaming Monthly · April 1992 · Street Fighter II
EGM's April Fools feature invented a hidden Street Fighter II boss named Sheng Long, seeded it with joke clues nobody noticed, and watched the fiction spread worldwide — eventually influencing Capcom's own canon.
The Sheng Long hoax began with a mistranslation. In Street Fighter II, one of Ryu's victory quotes was rendered in English as "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance" — a garbling of a line that should have read approximately "If you cannot overcome the Rising Dragon Punch, you cannot win!" The Japanese term for the Shoryuken had been mistaken for a proper name, and players across the world were left wondering who this mysterious Sheng Long might be. Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Ken Williams saw an opportunity. For the magazine's April Fools feature in 1992, EGM published an article claiming that Sheng Long was a real hidden character: if a player completed the game's arcade mode as Ryu without taking any damage across several consecutive matches, Sheng Long would appear, hurl M. Bison bodily off the stage, and challenge the player to a final untimed bout. The piece was written straight, complete with instructions and photographs. EGM seeded the article with clues intended to give the joke away. Among them was an "Honorable Mention" credited to one "W.A. Stokins" of "Fuldigen, HA" — read aloud, "waste tokens" of "fooled again, ha." The editors assumed these tells made the prank unmistakable. They were wrong. Players around the world took the article entirely seriously and poured countless hours and quarters into damage-free runs, and — more damagingly — other publications reprinted the claims as fact without checking, propelling the fiction across the globe and far beyond EGM's control. The hoax's strangest consequence is that it partly came true. The name Sheng Long lodged so deeply in the Street Fighter mythos that Capcom eventually engaged with it: a character named Gouken, introduced in Masaomi Kanzaki's 1993 Street Fighter II manga as the master of both Ryu and Ken, was woven into the series' official backstory, and Capcom later made him a playable fighter. A magazine's April Fools joke, born from a translation error, thus fed back into the canon of one of gaming's biggest franchises — making the Sheng Long hoax the most consequential prank in the history of games journalism.
Being the most consequential prank in games journalism — a joke that spread worldwide as fact and ultimately fed back into Street Fighter's official canon.
EGM believed it had made the gag obvious. The article was studded with tells, most notoriously an "Honorable Mention" to "W.A. Stokins" of "Fuldigen, HA" — a groan-worthy pun that reads aloud as "waste tokens" of "fooled again, ha." But readers, primed by a genuinely baffling in-game line about a mysterious Sheng Long, took the piece completely at face value and set about attempting damage-free arcade runs in pursuit of a character who did not exist. Worse, rival publications reprinted the claims as fact without verification, and the hoax escaped its author entirely, spreading across the world as accepted knowledge.
What makes Sheng Long extraordinary is that the fiction refused to die and eventually shaped reality. The name embedded itself so thoroughly in Street Fighter lore that Capcom engaged with the mythology it had accidentally spawned: Gouken, the master of Ryu and Ken, first appeared in Masaomi Kanzaki's 1993 Street Fighter II manga and was subsequently absorbed into the series' official backstory and made playable. A translation error produced a phantom, a magazine turned the phantom into a hoax, players turned the hoax into folklore, and the publisher ultimately turned the folklore into canon — a chain of events unique in gaming history.