Dainashi shows the stamina of a warrior as he drums the extremely high tempo theme songs to every stage.

Because I’m an old fart now, I can fondly remember playing the original Street Fighter II in the arcades. However, in that environment I could only really make out the sound effects and announcer. The background music always tended to get lost in the cacophony of dozens of other game machines running at once.

By the time it reached the SNES, I suppose I was already conditioned to blocking out Street Fighter II‘s music and never really noticed it. That is until the undisputed drumming champion of video game music Dainashi (who we’ve seen before in one of his previous opuses covering several games like Dragon Quest, Kirby and Star Fox) took up the challenge of drumming the entire game start to finish.

Here’s a video showing off the man in his natural state. In the tweet he claims this is him after a show, but we’d like to imagine this is how he hypes himself up before one too:

Not only does Dainashi provide the beat to the background music of each character’s stage, he also provides the percussion to the intro, character select screen, bonus round, post round comment screen, ending sequence, and credits.

Let’s watch, but be warned this is a bit of a long one so you might want to get a snack!

You might be thinking in the spirit of Street Fighter he’s dressed as El Fuerte, but that’s how Dainashi always looks when he drums. A rather prominent YouTuber, Dainashi has a sizeable following, but considering the raw talent he posses, he’s still criminally underappreciated.

The first thing I realized was how unrelentingly fast the beat was in most of Street Fighter‘s music, and Dainashi could rarely let up on his double bass pedal for the entire 15-minute medley. Actually a second camera shows you just how freakishly fast his feet legs are working the whole time. And yet, despite this, Dainashi seemed to be comfortably managing it, even taking moments to do some character poses…

▼ …mimic their special moves…

▼ …and even take the occasional shoryuken to the chin.

▼ He could even play while fighting M. Bison at the same time.

And after taking his only rest to a well-earned ending sequence, Dainashi closes with a rousing rendition of the ending theme which I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard until now having skipped through it every other time.

I was a little disappointed he didn’t get a “Thank you for playing” message from Capcom, but a least you can show Dainashi some appreciation by sending kind comments on his YouTube video.

Or even better you could always purchase a ticket when the Dainashi Band comes to your town to see him fire a giant hadouken into the sky… I’m assuming he can really do that.

Source, images: YouTube/dainashi / ドラム / ゲーム音楽