Ryu Number

Synonyms:
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Ryu Number is a concept in video game fandom. Inspired by concepts like Wikipedia:Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and Wikipedia:Erdős number, the Ryu Number answers how many degrees of separation between a given video game character and Ryu from Street Fighter measured by appearances in the same video game.

Ryu from the Street Fighter series has notably participated in many video game crossovers, such as the Marvel vs. Capcom series, so a Ryu Number can be thought of as a number tracking degrees of separation through character appearances in video games. While the concept of a Ryu Number for game crossovers has been floating around for a while, it appears to have really kicked off with Ryu’s inclusion in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U as downloadable content in 2015; for example, this 2016 Source Gaming post provides an extensive list of characters Ryu has directly crossed over with, this 2018 Medium article by Jason Zhen Li directly mentions a Ryu Number, and this 2019 Fanbyte article by Topher Florence calculates Ryu Numbers of some real celebrities, including Kevin Bacon.

Links

• Into the Heart of Battle with the Ryu Number, ^{Archived version}, article by Jason Li
• Six Degrees of Ryu, a twitter account that calculates Ryu Numbers for video game characters
• Six Degrees of Ryu, a Tumblr blog that also calculates Ryu Numbers and takes requests. (Seems to be run by a different person than the twitter account)
• /r/ryunumber, a subreddit for discussing Ryu Numbers.