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Zangief is a video game character created by Capcom. He is part of the Street Fighter series of video games.
According to his official biography, Zangief was born in the Soviet Union on June 1, 1956. He stands 214 cm tall and weighs 121 kg. His blood type is A. He is fond of vodka and can resist extreme cold. He likes wrestling and dancing the Cossack dance. He does not like projectiles or young, beautiful women. His fighting style is an effective form of sambo.
Zangief is one of the hardest characters to master, as his moves require incredible timing and coordination to pull off, mostly consisting of full 360-degree rotations of the control stick. He is entirely a close-combat character. Because of his move repertoire and the way his special moves are executed, he and other characters with similar movesets are known as 360 grapplers. Due to the difficulty of these moves, characters such as these are rare outside of Street Fighter (indeed, in many other fighting games, 360 moves are often commands for super combos).
As Russia's greatest professional wrestler, Zangief was contacted by Mikhail Gorbachev to demonstrate Russia's strength to the rest of the world. Zangief patriotically agrees, and receives disappointingly low-budget training.
With this government sponsorship, Zangief becomes "the Red Cyclone." He opposes the activities of Shadowlaw, and meets one of his fans, the Japanese pro wrestler "Rainbow" Mika Nanakawa.
Zangief wrestles polar bears in SiberiaSiberia ( Russian: , common English transliterations: Sibir Sibir' is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia, and extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and southward from the Arctic Oc, on which he practiced his trademark spinning piledriver. His chief rival in the wrestling world is American Mike Haggar , who stole the Spinning Piledriver . In return, Zangief stole Haggar's Spinning Clothesline . Zangief probably trained with Aleksay Zalazoff (Biff Slamkovich from Saturday Night Slam Masters).
In Street Fighter Zero 3 (removed from the American "Alpha" version), Zangief's win quote to Ryu is "I don't like projectiles, but I like you personally..." In Lilith's Marvel vs. Capcom, Zangief interrupts their soul transfer, ends up in Morrigan's body, and has no problem with it. The Official Street Fighter 2 Fanbook (an old Japanese companion, written by Capcom) outright states that Zangief is gay.
Street Fighter characters