There is a Street Fighter II poster on a wall in the Japan stage.

Rose and Birdie's stage in Italy is based on Bruce Lee's "Way of the Dragon" film, where Bruce Lee as "Tang Lung" fights Chuck Norris as "Colt" in the Colosseum in Rome. The background is identical to the movie, and even includes the stray cats who are passing by the stage.

In Ryu & Guy's stage in Japan, the store in the background references SonSon, the name of Capcom's second arcade game, as well as being a play on a Japanese store called "Lawson".

The Great Wall of china in the background of Chun-Li's stage also bares a strong resemblance to the cover art for SonSon.

The Japanese version of the Arcade release includes a hidden Dramatic Battle mode with Ryu and Ken fighting against M.Bison, with a remix of the main theme from the Street Fighter 2 Animated movie playing in the background. This is a reference to a similar fight scene from the animated movie.

The game was going to be developed for the Super Famicon system and would have been called Street Fighter Classic.

Sodom's ending consists of him rebuilding the Mad Gear gang and unfolding a scroll that features the name of the gang.

However, Sodom has failed to write the scroll in katakana (マッドギア), and instead used the kanji '魔'-(ma), '奴'-(do), '義'-(gi, miswritten) and '亜'-(a) to phonetically spell out Mado Gia (Mad Gear). Because each kanji has meaning, this appears to the Japanese reader to be a nonsensical coupling of characters: "devil", "guy", "honor", and "to come after" as in a rank or position. '亜' can also mean "Asia".