Where do people get the plot points to various fighting games?

I was playing Tekken Tag Tournament 2 with my brother this past weekend, which was the first Tekken game I've played since Tekken 3, and got into a discussion about the plot of fighting games. I have played a good amount of fighters and with the exception of the most recent Mortal Kombat have found pretty much all of them to be lacking story details. My brother and I were both surprised though that while searching for Tekken combos how much back story the series had. We then realized that Street Fighter had a ton of plot points as well that, from what I could tell, definitely do not come from the game itself.

Of the Street Fighter games I have played, which is a lot of them, it always consisted of picking a fighter and beating other people up and getting about 10 seconds of some kind of story at the very end. Nothing close to being able to provide paragraphs of story information like found here on Giant Bomb, Wikipedia and other various wiki sites.

Where does all this fighting game story come from?

Depends on the game. Often times back in the day most of the story info would be given in the manual. You get some of it with the arcade ending and various incidental dialogue.

I might be misremembering this, but at least in the older arcade fighters there used to be character profiles that popped up during the attract mode. That's where most of the basic character stuff came from.

I believe the games also had movies that may or may not have been released outside Japan. Depending on the movie, it could expanded on the story line and that is where some of the info is coming from. For instance Jeff played a Street Fighter game on the Saturn in Japanese during a live stream that was basically just an interactive movie.

By watching the Saturday morning cartoon.

For the most part they would add them in the manuals back in the day, others with a short profile under the characters. The original Soul Blade & Calibur was among the first fighting games to actively incorporate a story into the game; as such they were largely regarded as single player friendly fighters before the trend set off.

The lack of manuals might explain my not knowing any aspects of story for Tekken 1-3 since I got them from a friend who would put all his PS games in a CD book and throw the cases away.

The amount of story content for Street Fighter though seems vastly greater than what was in the manuals. Though if Jeff played some weird Japan only game that was nothing but story that might explain some of it.

P4A had a pretty detailed story mode.

I'm also to understand that blazblue has one too.

For Tekken specifically a lot of it actually came from the manuals in the early ps1 games. There was set up for the tournament in the beginning of them, and all the characters had little biographies that showed things like blood type, birthday, list of likes and dislikes, stats, and backstory. They've actually remained totally faithful to them too, I remember because I practically had them memorized. Then when a sequel came out one of the endings from the game before it was usually established as canonical. This tradition continued until Tekken Tag Tournament (original), and then in Tekken 4 they started including that stuff in the actual game in the forms of prologues before the character's specific arcade playthrough.