I (very vaguely) remember the first time I played SF2. It was at a laundromat back in 1992, so I was about 3 or 4 at the time. I was too short to reach the joystick and buttons normally, so my mom brought a milk crate for me to stand on to play the game. My first character was Guile, and I promptly got whooped by Blanka (damn you and your balls, Blanka! ).
My parents apparently saw how much I liked the game over the next few visits to the laundromat, so a few months later they bought the game for me on SNES after seeing it on sale. I played that bad boy for days, then weeks, then eventually months. At 6 years old I pulled off my very first special move on my own without mashing, the Sonic Boom. I couldn't explain what drew me to the game. Maybe it was the, well....opinion that it was the first good fighting game to ever come out (the funny part is, my second ever game was the very first Street Fighter game, at about 2 years old. This is what my dad told me, at least). The characters were certainly cool too. Where else would you find a green beast guy who can fry people like an egg, or a stretchy yoga master?
Later, I ended up getting Special Champion Edition for Genesis, which basically combined aspects from Hyper Fighting and Champion Edition into one game. This is when I learned how much of a cheap prick Vega could be.
The real fun came from trying to master the characters themselves. When I was about 10 years old, my friend's dad gave me a big stack of magazines, about half of which talked about SF2 and its enhancements in great detail. Characters, special moves, frame data, all in crazy detail. By this point I'd played SF2 for a few years and had also been playing the Alpha games, as well as pretty much any Capcom or SNK fighter I could find. But I'd only been scratching the surface.
A year later, my parents and I went to a different laundromat, clear on the other side of town. They had a regular SF2 machine there, just like the one at the other laundromat. There were two guys playing it, both were pulling off touch of death combos left and right. I was mad that I couldn't at least have the honor of being whooped by them, because my right arm and left wrist were broken at the time. Before that I hadn't been playing any video games at all for about 4 months. They went at it for a couple hours, with a sizable crowd of about 15 people watching. I don't know what the hell it is with this game and laundromats where I live, but watching this exchange made me want to get better at these games.
So I practiced long and hard for months on every SF game I could find, and eventually got pretty good at them. I can safely say that playing those games in and out gave me the benefit of having really good hand-eye coordination now (I had some motor skill impairments as a kid due to being born prematurely) and it even helped my arm and wrist get (mostly) back to normal, even though now I can't play fighters on a stick to save my life.
I guess basically what I'm trying to say is, SF2 had some cool design choices that stood the test of time. It had to if people are still willing to play games like Super SF2 Turbo after 19 years. Even now, 21 years later, I still play most fighters religiously (especially SF, Virtua Fighter, and Fatal Fury). It makes me sad to see anyone dump on the SF series, because without it, who knows where fighting games would be now? Even the character designs inspired other fighters.
I was kind of a weird kid. Most grew up on Mario and Sonic, but I grew up on Mega Man and Street Fighter. Go figure.