Tons of exciting news flooded the fighting game community Tuesday as SNK and Capcom have partnered up to get Terry Bogard in Street Fighter 6, and the character’s new gameplay trailer unveiled a ton about his coming appearance.
Fans immediately started wading through all this exciting information to mine out intriguing new details such as Terry’s unique Super combo abilities, but we’d like to turn attention right now to the new Pão Pão Café 6 stage. Street Fighter 6 will mark the fourth different fighting game franchise that Pão Pão Café has been playable in, making it the most ubiquitous in the genre.
There are certainly more well-known stages in fighting games (Street Fighter’s Suzaku Castle and Mortal Kombat’s Living Forest are easy ones) SNK’s Pão Pão Café has arguably the most impressive resume.
A quick look over the history of the prominent bar, nightclub, and (apparently) fighting joint begins with the very first Fatal Fury that dropped in 1991. You could throw down at the Café in 1995’s Fatal Fury 3, The King of Fighters 94′, 2005’s King of Fighters 11, 2010’s King of Fighters 13, 2022’s King of Fighters 15, 2000’s Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000, and now 2024’s Street Fighter 6.
Even beyond the times where Pão Pão Café was a playable stage, it’s been directly referenced in a handful of additional titles. There’s a reason for its prominence in SNK’s fighting world as the Café has a full backstory with various character threads which weave right through it.
As the lore goes, Brazilian fighter Richard Meyer opened the club in a neutral area of South Town not affected by the various gangs that otherwise controlled the city. It quickly became a popular spot for food, entertainment, and controlled fights as Meyer taught Capoeira there after hours.
Eventually one of Meyer’s students, Bob Wilson, opened up a second location (Fatal Fury 3) which proved just as popular as the first. Terry Bogard would become a regular patron, popping in so often that he accrued his own running tab that he sometimes had to pay off by doing janitorial work.
Another Pão Pão was erected in Mexico in the King of Fighters story line, and it seems yet another has gone up in Metro City for Street Fighter 6. While the look and feel of these stages have certainly evolved over time (you actually fight outside the club in KoF11) the spirit has been consistent throughout its many appearances over the last 30 years.
Check out this gallery we put together of the Café’s eight playable appearances thus far so you can see how the stage has evolved over the years:
Click images for larger versions
With so much history you know that Capcom is going to pack the stage with Easter eggs and references. We have a hunch we’ll be revisiting Pão Pão Café soon here on EventHubs to point out all of said Easter egg references, but please feel free if you’d like to start us off in the comments with anything you’ve spotted already.