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In the early days of the arcade,
the idea of action and competition were fairly separate.
So you had sports games like football, soccer.
One on one things, like YieAr Kung-Fu and IK Plus
I think because of that they were like karate and martial arts.
Simple appeal of like one against one.
Like you obviously want to win.
The fight against the preceded Street fighter one where similar in a lot of ways.
You take a game like Karate Champ which is probably the most successful title in that vein beforehand
and it did accommodate two players playing at once, but nobody really used it that way.
People were still used to score chasing and that's what they thought an arcade game should do.
Karate Champ in particular was very interesting because all through sticks it's awkward.
It's like, How do I do this move every time?
And it was one of the first games that did a winner stays, loser pays.
And then after that there was Yie Ar Kung-Fu, which was a multi character fighting game
where you actually got to play different characters.
So it was fun, but very, very simple.
When you look at something like Tenkaichi Bushi on Famicom.
Hokuto No Ken on the home consoles.
It's all based on extended boss battles when it comes to the versus mode.
And then you had like the Brawlers, like Double Dragon just come out.
And then when Street Fighter one comes out.
Elaborating on the boss battle aspect
rather than focusing on the competitive nature of what fighting games would come to be.
The original Street Fighter one was a kind of luxury version of a lot of ideas gone before it.
They tried to make it a reason to visit and play in the arcade, something that you couldn't do at home.
Street Fighter one starts the concept of having iconic characters on screen.
Ryu and Ken get introduced in Street Fighter one.
They are literal mirrors of each other, except one is wearing a white guy and one is wearing a red one.
And then with Sagat, you've got a guy with a very similar move set, except he's enormous.
What I think it does right, is that it creates
the allure of playing as the hero and the competitive nature.
It creates that martial artist that goes through all these masters and you tackling them.
You're becoming the world champion like a sport.
It did get some things right and it got some things wrong.
Fundamentally, I think it did sort of tap into this idea of a one on one versus fighter.
The exciting idea of just walking up to somebody, a stranger in the arcade,
popping that quarter in and squaring off in a battle that was engaging.
The difference between Street Fighter and Double Dragon was that if you were playing Double Dragon first player
and another kid came up and put in a quarter, you were still playing the game with that person.
That person's objective was your objective.
If you're playing Street Fighter and you're doing well and another kid comes up and puts in a quarter,
suddenly you're fighting that kid.
In America especially, that's how the game was used.
And that really changed the dynamic of the game because it became this two kids in the arcades
squaring off versus one another as opposed to one kid fighting for the high score on the machine.
Back in that time, it wasn't known how you play fighting games
and there was no like official command this that taught you.
You just have to sort of figure it all out.
Some of the special moves, the Hadoken, the Shoryuken,
were introduced that gave a little bit of differentiation and fun factor to the game.
And then lo and behold, you know, there's always the first time you ever did a fireball.
Theres the first time you ever did a Tatsumaki. The first time you ever did a Dragon Punch.
So there's all these things that you're getting used to feeling in the game and understanding,
you know, how the different mechanics work.
Street Fighter one, we know that the way that the inputs were done back in those days, it's not the same.
They were like really rigid, right?
The input method, it started with those pneumatic buttons that you sort of slam with your hand.
And the idea was that the harder you press it, the harder you punch in the game.
The players loved the game play.
However, that big punch pad was not holding up.
You sometimes miss the button and would skin your knuckles.
People would break their hands on those things.
People were breaking their thumbs on them. They were cutting their hands.
Apunch pads were breaking up.
People were obviously playing these games to destruction
and with an arcade game, you the machine's got to stay relevant for a long period of time.
You want to make money off it.
The game was being held back by its controls.
Then comes the introduction of the six buttons.
And now you get six buttons. I mean, it's I think it's going to be too complicated.
I'll never forget what it said to me.
Jeff-san, you're an amazing marketing guy, but you're not a game player.
There's going to be more flexibility.
There's going to be more combination of moves when you've got six different buttons.
Well, of course he was right, I was wrong.
And I stated my my lane after that.
It still had this feeling of sort of almost like a side scrolling platformer style feel to it.
And rather than a proper fighting game as we know it today.
We only have singular elements that kind of work on their own, but they haven't come together yet.
But you could feel the origins of something. Capcom was finding their feet, so to speak.
Lots of stuff happens behind the scenes between the release of Street Fighter 1 and 2.
First of all, the team that creates Street Fighter one leaves Capcom,
moves across town to SNK and essentially immediately installs themselves as
Street Fighter's earliest game studio rival.
Then, in the meantime,
Capcom makes the bold choice of tapping these two extremely young developers
Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda to lead the Street Fighter 2 project.
And just as they're getting underway, there's a global shortage of silicon,
which means that the extra memory that they knew that they would need to make this game is impossible.
And Street Fighter 2 goes on the shelf.
The Capcom Play System One. The CPS hardware.
This was Capcom's big move to create sort of a centralized arcade platform.
Essentially, so they could develop games targeting the specific piece of kit.
It was able to produce large colorful graphics with independent background
scrolling layers, and it was used in games like Strider, Mercs, Ghouls'n Ghosts.
In the meantime, they worked on another project, a side scroller in the style of Double Dragon
that ultimately is called Final Fight.
Or Street Fighter '89, which was its informal internal title.
And I even remember seeing Street Fighter '89 in like EGM where one the American magazines
have a coverage of Japan where they show that Street Fighter '89 is coming out.
And when they were developing Final Fight they always have monitors looking at American films,
American television and then primarily American wrestling as well as Japanese.
A Walter Hill movie comes out in the early eighties called Streets of Fire.
And see if this plot sounds familiar.
You've got a fighter named Cody whose girlfriend is stolen away from him by an angry mob
that takes her across town and he has to fight his way across the wild urban streets to rescue her.
That is exactly the plot of Final Fight.
I'm surprised there was no licensing deal required to make that happen.
So I definitely think that Final Fight has some cues from Street Fighter one and is sort of this middle
ground towards the progression to Street Fighter two and I think if you put the three games
side by side by side, you can see that's very logical progression.
Final Fight was one of the first arcade games I can remember being absolutely obsessed with.
The massive sprites, the animation, the fact that you could do stuff like throw enemies into other enemies.
You could see that a lot of time have been spent on the character design.
Even the enemies were completely unique to one another.
So as you progressed through Final Fight,
you're playing against very different, low key kind of enemies until you get to a boss character.
And that whole concept really carries across to Street Fighter as well.
When I did eventually get Final Fight in the snares, it was obviously single player,
had less characters and less levels, but I still absolutely loved it.
And I think with Final Fight they try to improve some things from Street Fighter one
where maybe the moves weren't as flashy, but they're much easier to do.
So anyone could jump into a final fight, feel powerful, feel special.
And the controls were great, very responsive.
The culmination of the music,
the backgrounds and the action with an underlying story that pushed people forward.
I think those are all elements that helped to inspire Street Fighter 2.
Walter Hill's first feature in the mid seventies was called Hard Times and it was released in the US.
But in Japan and elsewhere it was called The Street Fighter.
And here's the plot.
Charles Bronson plays this drifter who arrives in New Orleans by train
and proceeds to fight for money in front of docks,
a crawfish boil, a dance hall, all these picturesque scenes against a series of colorful characters.
And it's not a stretch to say we really see the plot of Street Fighter in this movie.
Building that character roster really was all about contrast.
So for instance, now we see Ryu and Ken starting to take on distinctive personalities
beyond the fact that they're wearing different colors.
Ryu is the strong and silent Japanese version of this fighter,
whereas Ken is the headstrong, Corvette driving blond American.
To be the best example of this contrast is Guile and Blanka.
Nishitani and Yasuda used to play a lot of Nintendo pro-wrestling after hours
as they were making Street Fighter 2
Yasuda especially got into the dynamic between two of these characters,
one called the Amazon, this feral monster, and another called Star Man, who was very slick and cool
and it wasn't that either of those characters grabbed them so much as the dynamic between them
really captured Yasuda.
And that literally gets ported over into Blanka and Guile.
Guile is supposed to be the unflappable, cool soldier, and Blanka is the one who can roll in
and ruffle his feathers.
And so those characters exist in contrast to one another.
There are a lot of stereo types in the street fighter world, and it's not by accident.
It's not something that Akira Yasuda apologizes for.
Street Fighter is very much based on archetypes from each country.
You know, your Russian is a big, strong man from the USSR.
We've got very traditional Chinese dress for Chun-Li.
Dhalsim, the yoga who for some reason is wearing a necklace of skulls.
Who knows where he's pulling some of these influences from.
But certainly honoring cultures wasn't the foremost intent.
I think back then, this was all about trying to pull up recognizable stereotypes and helping
you sort of understand where these characters are supposed to fit in his universe of contrast.
Any player anywhere in the world could get a sense of World Warriors.
E. Honda was kind of fun just because he was odd.
He wasn't real athletic.
My favorite character was always Blanka.
I don't know. I'd try and use him in everything I did just because he was green and ugly
and he rolled up in a ball.
Blanka really felt different. How he animated his background.
His story were very interesting to me, and even though he's never been a top tier
character in any sort of version of Street Fighter, he's always my go to fallback, fun character.
I'm going to be boring and I'm going to say Ryu.
Obviously he's the character from Street Fighter one. Him and Ken.
It feels like the series is built around those two characters.
They've got the right balance between speed and power.
If I'm going to pick up a controller, it's that's the character I'm going to go for
because I know I can deal with any situation that's thrown at me.
Zangief is my absolute favorite character.
He's my he's my spirit animal.
Basically.
I won't do cosplay as saying it because no one is that scared.
My favorite character out of that set is Chun-Li.
I think most of the fighting game depictions of Chinese characters
when the games come from Japan can be negative or stereotyped.
And in Chun-Li we just see this awesome admired hero.
Guile just looked cool. The flat top, the army fatigues, the camo.
The sonic boom and the flash kick looked really cool. And his stage with the jet was very iconic.
I do think the global nature of the characters and the setting for the game helped
make it a worldwide phenomenon, not necessarily in a localization kind of way where people were playing
because they felt represented, but it did give it A, a grandness of scope
and B, just allowed them to touch on every possible martial arts style
or trope that they could think of.
The happy accident in there is the fact that there was combos.
Those kind of natural combos were in there,
but the actual cancels or two in ones, that's a happy accident.
That where suddenly the competitive play exploded.
A game is neat, but if you can imagine playing the game without those
without two in ones or cancels...
It had legs, but it wouldn't have the kind of legs that ended up having.
The special move was a special move.
The fact that in Street Fighter you had light, medium and hard versions of all the moves
that had their own uses for combos or depending on the height and trajectory of someone's flying attack,
little baby Dragon Punches that level of multi dimensionality
tactics, strategy... like chess, isn't it?
So I think the music was definitely
a crucial part of the Streetfighter experience.
They're memorable from the standpoint that they're always playing in the background and as we played Street Fighter
so frequently, the song started just getting in our brains and loops and stuff like that.
The quality of the songs
and their catchiness as far as in relation to matching the levels that they were part of were really crucial
because it just felt like a cohesive experience between the character, the background and the music.
There are moments that resonate with me, and if I were to have to choose one song,
it have to be Vegas stage because it's very fast paced, it's very energetic.
It matches sort of his background, his level very well, but it makes the battle feel very intense,
almost like the timer is going faster and faster and faster.
So in Coin-op, the way that they would test the game is
they'd sent a printed circuit board over to us basically stick it in a cab and off we go.
So in February of 1991, I got the board.
I'd already have a meeting set up with the distributors to launch it.
They were testing not two blocks from where I lived.
It just completely captured my imagination.
Oh, there's a guy throwing sonic booms and there's a stretchy guy.
At that time, if you had a game that was doing
five or $600 a week to start off, you were doing pretty well.
And of course I'm monitoring the sales, booking my flights because I got to go down
and report some earnings and you need a seven day earnings to report.
So it's like $523 for the earnings for the five days.
So I said, well, I'm going around it out and just say, we headed there for seven days
and it did 750 bucks for a week, which was very impressive.
So everybody was very excited about it.
Those units went out and I sold 900 way too fast
because of my $750 earnings were really $900
and that they were asking for a second game and a third game.
And every time I got in another game, their overall gross went up to the point
where I think at one point they were probably operating 12 or 13 of them in one location.
So that this kid is like, ouch, I've just played Street Fighter 2.
Said, "Oh, what's it like?"
He was like, was almost shaking, right.
They said, it is amazing, man. You've got to play it.
Everybody seem massively excited about it.
And it was almost like, say, Nirvana or Terminator 2 or anything else
around those time in the 90's that was like a must see movie or a must have album.
And Street Fighter 2 was a must play and must own game.
When Street Fighter 2 dropped, arcades were really in decline.
That notion of heading to the arcades, so you could chase the high score.
It was really not much reason to do that when you could do the same thing on your home console.
But then Street Fighter 2 arrives and there is a reason to go to the arcade
because you've got to prove that you're the king of the mall.
I saw the game in the arcades a few times.
It wasn't that well known and says something very special about it.
It was just very, very playable and I really wanted to talk about it.
I wrote about it for the first time in an editorial in Mean Machines magazine.
Mean Machines was the magazine that I read about Street Fighter 2 in first,
and they'd say, oh, you know, this new arcade machines out. It's amazing.
It's going to take the world by storm.
This one Arcade and Water Street in London had an entire wall of Street Fighter 2
all occupied with people waiting to get on it.
That's when you knew that it was serious.
It was intimidating.
So it was such a popular arcade that there was a queue of people with their 20p, 10p laid down
and you would get on there for maybe one game, get absolutely thrashed, and then you're just watching.
It took like 20 minutes to get my turn and I got killed right away.
Street Fighter 2 was, you know, center stage, everyone crowding around it,
people leaving their credits for my other games to come over and watch the crowd of Street Fighter players.
This is like the ultimate Karate Champ.
This is so awesome.
I played it.
I put all my quarters into it and I got fairly good.
I kind of grew naturally to it.
That's the first time I'd ever seen a game literally take over an entire arcade.
You go in there, you get your butt handed to you by the AI.
But then when you're squaring off against one another,
you're kind of learning the game and just figuring things out together.
They're just like, yeah, you know, do this, do fireball.
I don't know. You go like this to do the sonic boom thing.
A lot of times when you have new arcade games come out that people are interested in, there's a lot of like
rumor and hearsay about what's in it, and that sparks a lot of imagination about what's real or not.
So everything was spread word of mouth.
I still remember to this day it was this guy.
He was older than me. I was probably eight.
He had a girl, his arms.
He came over and he's like, oh, I'm going to beat that punk.
And I was like, Oh, sure. Like, I'll play you.
And definitely he was trying to get my quarter because if he wins, he continues, I remember I beat him.
I beat him really bad.
And by the time the match was over, his girl had left and he was just like, well, where is she?
And I learned a very valuable lesson.
Women don't care about Street Fighter.
Here we are, the source of all Street Fighter strategy. Capcom headquarters in Northern California.
Another job I had Capcom... I was a man of many jobs.
James here is a resident Street Fighter 2 expert.
Rumor has it you got a new Guile killer combo.
You got it, man.
Because I also was basically, I guess, their first community manager.
Oh, yeah. Hey, you're the guy who knows Tomo, right?
Hey Tomo, you know this guy, right?
No, I've never seen him before.
But when people would call in about Street Fighter with rumors and that's
how we started hearing about handcuffs.
And we start hearing about Dhalsim disappearing.
What is this now? Right.
Can we just go back to Sheng Long? What is happening?
Yes. Guile had handcuffs and the body would get locked on.
And this caused a lot of fights.
What would happen is, you know, little cheeky guys would learn it against the CPU
and then they would do it against the human opponent and then leave the arcade.
Now, it's a very specific command to escape the handcuffs,
but if you don't escape the handcuffs before the time runs out,
the game infinitely freezes on that single frame of no time
with Guile, with the opponent in handcuffs not moving, neither player can move nor start a new credit
because the game thinks that the game is still running because the timer is on, but there's no time left.
And this one time a guy did handcuffs and left and I didn't know how to escape it then.
And on like 10 seconds left because these guys were freaking
Oh my god. Gonna lose the credits, man.
Quick, don't you know how to do it?
Get on it, man.
And then this guy just casually walks over and goes...
They're going "continue now" and just walks off.
Yeah, that was a very powerful tool.
If you knew it.
Seeing moves and learning
that they had a complicated input to achieve them,
that it required a kind of elevated level of skill to pull off.
Suddenly there's an eliteism now.
There's people that have put in the training that can do moves that you can't.
It's never been seen before.
Re-dizzy combo by Guile, double sonic boom re-dizzy.
Pull up that game screen over there, and I'll talk you through it right.
All right!
The feedback was pretty universal.
Everybody want to play the same character. Everybody wanted to play the same bosses.
The more we did tournaments, the more that was obvious, especially when you're having to make rules like,
All right, ready?
We're going to toss a coin that's two out of three coin tosses gets to pick side
or character, because even which side you played on was a thing back then.
It's like, oh damn, I really want to play Guile, but I really want that right side.
So I'll take the right side. I'm taking Guile. Dammit!
So Street Fighter 2's popularity in the west
is really rooted around this head to head shoulder to shoulder arcade dynamic that super competitive.
That wasn't the way it was in Japan.
The notion of person versus person game play was slower to develop.
And even today you go to an arcade in Japan that has Street Fighter machines, they're positioned
opposite one another.
So even if you're playing someone else, you can't see that person.
Because the Japanese were playing differently than us and because socially walking up
and just being like sitting down next to a stranger and being like, I'm just going to play, you know?
It's was like, that's not that's rude. That's not how it works.
I ended up at an arcade show playing
one of the best street fighter players from Japan at the time from Gamest magazine.
So I go playing all eight characters, I go 50/50 with them.
And he was like, wow, you're one of the best players in the U.S.?
I go, I don't even make top 16 in my local tournament.
And it shocked him.
You know, I said, that's because we play Wild West cry school style.
It's just whose the best.
And so until Japan starts playing that way, they're never going to be as good as us, right?
It's kind of a little taunt.
And he's like, oh, so he went and wrote an article about it.
And then I worked out with him.
We'll make it on the Japanese version that if you hit the second player button, it flashes.
I welcome any player in Japanese and we changed it to winner stays, loser pays.
That changed everything. So now all of a sudden they're playing head to head too.
Now a lot more money is pouring in, so more units are being sold.
It was a worldwide hit.
We just kept trying to stop Street Fighter 2,
and guys just kept saying, well, can you just...
and then next think you know... No, I'll, I'll do a thousand more and that's it.
Well then Sugimoto had the problem of keeping a young development team in Japan,
keep them hungry and they want another game to come out.
They just did not want to be known as a one trick pony and Street Fighter.
So there was a game called Captain Commando, which was a tremendous turd.
Japanese felt and wasn't, you know, done.
They were going to work on Captain Commando. That was their big next game was Captain Commando.
And yeah, there was a lot of energy into that.
It wasn't earning well at all
and it was a four player game and there was all kinds of problems with it.
And James Goddard said to me,
Jeff, you got to come down to Sunnyvale Golf Land.
The kids are all dressed up as the characters and they're in huge arguments
because they can't play the same character.
So I went down there, I saw this.
I saw these two young girls dress up like Chun-Li, and she goes, It's my turn next.
I'm playing that game.
Or they're trying to coordinate playing each other.
But the game wasn't facilitating their form.
So I had to ask Jeff Walker how to make it happen because I saw an opportunity
and he saw that opportunity.
He saw people waiting, wanting to play the same characters.
He looked at me, I looked at him.
I go, looks like a pretty easy fix to me.
He helped me pitch it the right way, which is business first.
I said, James, are you telling me that if we just had a couple more characters
and we allow them to be the same character and play the same game, we can run this thing again.
He said, not only can we run again, I think it would be bigger.
I'm positive.
So what should we call it?
I said we have to set this thing up so we can facilitate tournaments with them.
So let's call it Championship Edition.
I get on a phone in Japan, got an idea.
So Sugimoto says to me, so let me tell you something right now if you can guarantee me
we can do a thousand uprights on that thing, I'll roll into it.
So okay, we can do a thousand.
Do you mind if I fly
and I hear that from your distributors mouths?
No problem.
So I brought in eight of my biggest distributors from around the country.
They flew in, sat there, Sugimoto sat there, and he says, I need to see a commitment of a thousand games.
Let's start with you, Peter Betti from Betson Pacific, who represented 33%.
And he said, OK, I'll take a thousand.
Next.
So within just in that meeting
we'd already sold about 8000 units.
But you in concept learned a lot about what's involved in all the changes
to make a game like that land.
And we really did a great job on that thing.
We're going to maximize the sales. One is I got to keep the earnings up in the street.
These operators are too quickly to discount the pricing.
Right now, the game went out to 50 cent start 25 cent to continue play.
I'm so confident in the game, I'm locking them out.
They're going to go 50/50 and also another thing a dirty little part of the business is
you got to collect your money because they're only paying you while you're red hot.
So I starved the market and I set and I kept building them.
I took the three different factors, build them at the time I set and I waited and I waited.
I said, everybody pay their bills.
Everyone get their operators collect it up. Everyone paid me.
Here they come.
Champion Edition would go on to actually sell more than the original.
We sold tons of dedicated cabinets, tons of kits, and it wasn't even just in America.
It was a worldwide hit.
And part of the reason that that was well received in Japan is that meanwhile, Akira Nishitani
had been continuing to tinker with the game and realized that he wasn't satisfied with
where he had left the balance, wanted to do some tweaks, but knew he needed to package it with something
bigger and more ambitious.
And this feedback from America gave him carte blanche to do that.
So there's Champion Edition.
But everything about Champion was just amazing.
It had more characters.
You could pick the bosses, which was really anticipated.
They were cool.
There was a new color palette.
Everyone looked really fresh, you know,
the game was faster, which I
personally really liked because it was more of like, Who can beat who to the punch now?
Rather than just building a strategy that you make them follow.
So this was really cool.
I mean, they really did a good job with the champion.
And I put a lot of time into that.
So I have particularly fond memories of playing that particular version.
I think it's well balanced, just a lot of memories tied up.
Playing all the mean machines team.
With how many tournaments at lunch times and sneak off work for a few games.
And just brilliant to have that in the office.
Very lucky.
My favorite is Champion Edition just because that is the, you know, the first tweak
where you can play the bosses, but it really still points to that original character roster.
And I appreciate that so much.
The sort of contrasting set of characters that Akira Yasuda developed.
And I just that to me is the sort of purist execution of the original version for Street Fighter 2.
These are things you put, you just can't plan them.
You just kind of look at what the market is doing, what the players want and go with it and you try things and
We're damn, damn lucky.
But we were listening.
Stay calm.
Concentrate on the screen.
Street Fighter 2 is on Super Nintendo.
From the arcades, the ultimate combat game.
Once the console version was being discussed, the fact that was even possible.
It just seemed crazy.
It would even fit on the Super Nintendo, right?
Everyone knew that Street Fighter 2 coming home was going to be a big deal.
Nintendo was the first one to strike with this.
They obviously had a deal with Capcom, Street Fighter 2 was announced for Super NES.
Everyone was psyched for it.
Crazy what they were able to do to shrink the sprites down just a bit
and still retain the integrity of the way that the game played.
I remembered thinking to myself, my God it looks just like the arcade.
Like it's really, really close.
It felt like it was the full experience.
You'd got all the characters, you'd got the two player modes, you've got the battle mode.
And I thought, this is really exciting because there was the possibility that I could now
play a game without losing my quarter, get familiar with it without the threat of getting
kicked off the cabinet.
You could play Street two on the SNES and go down the arcade
and what you learned at home, you would be able to repeat it in the arcade and become a bit of a legend.
You know.
I remember getting the game into in the office.
Work stopped.
Everybody piled into the office to look at this game and to see whether it lived up to all the hype.
It was an amazing conversion.
It was actually spot on.
It was kind of nervous about what this sport could be.
But then when we got it was the complete package and I couldn't believe it.
I was blessed by my darling mother with the Super Nintendo Streetfighter two package for Christmas.
Yes, I still remember it like it was yesterday.
I can smell the fibers of that cardboard.
I played it all day, all night.
Don't I think I slept for a month.
You can have a tournament, whatever. You've got two or three friends around.
And I remember just spending hours with my mates, you know, we'd have sleepovers and it would just be
the SNES hooked up to a telly and it would be winner stays on
and that would be all you played for hours and hours at a time.
The Super NES pad was made before six button fighters would become a big deal.
So while it did have six buttons with the shoulder buttons, you didn't
have the six face buttons that you would expect from the arcade original.
It's really hard.
D-pad on the Super Nintendo we had played that way was like, oh God, I can't do anything.
I sure as hell to do a walking spinning pile driver.
This is the specific moment, in fact, that I believe caused the rise of six button pads.
Without street Street Fighter 2, we would not have had that.
You win.
So when I got my Mega Drive, that kind of opened my eyes to the fact that,
you know, you could actually get arcade perfect games like Golden Axe and Ghouls'n Ghosts.
Prior to that, I'd been an Atari ST owner.
There'd been a lot of arcade conversions, which would that got the flavor and the essence of the game.
But there was something missing. You know, you've got less fire buttons.
The hardware wasn't really designed for games at that point.
So when US gold got its hands on Street Fighter two and started
releasing ports, of course people were excited, right?
You want this game on your home computer.
That was an exciting thing.
The problem is, is most of the platforms they were targeting
were not up to the task of running a game like this, right?
Yes, the arcade conversions back then were absolutely hit and miss and the basic Amiga version was not good.
It really wasn't much fun playing against the computer at all.
We always played as Dhalsim because it's slightly broken and you can just punch from a distance
and getting the special moves wasn't fun.
It's not good.
Let's be honest, the scrolling is choppy, the sprites look a little bit often awkward.
Everything feels wrong and that's exactly
the same issue with every other home computer version.
They don't feel right.
One of my friends was a big Amiga owner and I can remember the look
of crushing disappointment on his face when he realized that it A, came on about 20 disks
and B, it looked terrible and you'd only got one button to do all those special moves with.
But we played it loads in two player, don't get me wrong, it wasn't great, but it was all we had
and it was clearly still Street Fighter 2 and they're still shouting Shoryuken
and flying across screen. So we were quite happy with that.
I remember my mate, you made a big song oh, I've got the Amiga version of Street Fighter 2.
It's going to be amazing, it's going to blow this SNES version away.
And he's like, oh you know... a click, click.
Okay, well, forget let's play Sensible Soccer again.
So I got to review the Spectrum version of Street Fighter 2.
I don't even remember being able to sort of really even play it.
Actually, I think that's a kind of controller with a with a Kensington joystick with like one button.
The graphics are impressive and the kinds of the games there, but the multi load is an absolute killer.
You have to rewinding and loading from a tape which takes several minutes and you're never quite
sure which position you are on the tape unless you happen to have one on the tape counter.
And it should not have been a thing.
You'd have the amazing artwork on the box and you'd think, okay, so I'm getting in the same game.
Oh, that actually looks like Street Fighter.
I'll pick this up, then you take it home and you're swapping disks and it runs at like 15 frames per second.
And it's, it's terrible.
I mean, that just goes to show you how kind of ruthless and a little bit cruel
some of the publishers were in those days.
Not a great time for conversions.
If you wanted the game at home, you had to play it on Super NES.
At the time.
So Capcom had this team of American operatives, not just the arcade guys, also some creatives
who were looking into how the games might be updated and how they're being received in arcades.
James Goddard was one of those guys and one of the things he noticed was that a wave
of fake hacked editions of Street Fighter were making their way into American arcades.
They're like, Hey, there's another kid on the phone for you
talking about Street Fighter.
Can you just take this call? Sure. Pick it up.
Like, Hey, tell me about like how to do the fireballs in the air.
And I'm like, Oh, man, there's no fireballs in the air.
And he goes, No, I'm seeing it.
It's crazy. And like, there's hurricane kicks in the air.
And then I got another call and then they're talking about it at the arcade.
Sure enough, walk in...
Yeah, there's fireballs in the air and there's just crazy stuff happening.
Sonic booms like
going on a sine wave like this.
And I'm like, Oh, wow.
And it was super fast.
It was probably like 25, 30% faster.
These hacked games arrive Street Fighter Rainbow Edition, which is not a real game,
but it was a hacked game that showed up in arcades everywhere.
Characters had new moves.
The speed of the game was dramatically faster and ultimately this forces
Capcom to realize after initially resisting, especially on the Japanese side,
to kind of come around to yeah this faster game it it's hard to go back to the slow game
once you played the fast game.
Get back to Capcom write a report basically in summary says yes this is real.
It's apparently some kind of a bootleg chip that's been added.
You know, this this game is completely unbalanced and it's fun, but it ruins the game.
So I wrote this report.
I put aside sit down and play Champion Edition and it felt terrible.
I'm just like, I'm completely thrown off.
I go back, scrap my report, and instead I write.
Rainbow Edition represents the greatest threat to our business around Street Fighter
because after just a short time in playing, when it's so much faster,
it changes your perception of the game so the game never feels right again.
Part of the Manufacturers Association.
Distributors Association was a FBI force, if you will, or a committee
that was looking at copy games and where they were coming from.
And most of them are coming from Taiwan.
When we tracked him down, we cut a deal with them
because it was easier to cut a deal with them and take a percentage of what they were selling.
They were servicing all of the third world markets that we really couldn't service anyway.
So Mexico, South America, stuff where we didn't have inventory anyways,
To my knowledge, a deal was cut in Japan and they were making a piece of they get a licensing deal with that.
And in the meantime we were satisfying everybody else and, and keeping the copies out of the US
telling these other companies we don't want to see any in Europe or Asia or Japan or the US.
And it pretty much worked out. So yeah.
After Champion Edition, we have a new system, the new super system coming out, it's more powerful
and we could add more characters and cue sound and there's a lot more we're going to do with it.
So we're going to make Super Street Fighter.
I was like, awesome, this is exciting. We're gonna add four characters.
Wow, that's great. And then Hyper Fighting happened.
We need to make our own ROM.
We've got to make it super exciting and way more balanced and tournament worthy.
And so that's how Hyper Fighting came to be, is we pitched it and it was like,
Oh, here we go, like more ideas from the US and we don't...
We're in the middle of Super Street Fighter. We don't really want to do this.
And none of us, none of us wanted to touch Champion Edition, but Rainbow Edition was out there
and the operators were buying it like crazy and it was going to wreck everything.
So I foolishly and epically
in front of a roomful of designers where I should have had my mouth shut, apparently.
Go, give me five changes we've tested here in Japan.
And if it doesn't work, then we can write, "It's a failure" and then we'll just stop.
We go through the five changes, Hurricane Kicks in the air, Chun-Li Bird Kick in the air
Chun-Li Fireball. Blanka ball in the air.
And Dhalsim disappearing. Its 15% faster.
They tested literally two and a half hours away by train to make sure it's been nowhere near the office
to embarrass themselves. It's over there on site testing.
It was phenomenal. They're just like freaking out.
There was a line, what, an hour long line to play without that many people around cheering.
And it's coming fresh off the uncertainty of like, hey, did I just risk my entire career
on five changes based on channeling what the players want back home?
I saw them freaking out about and so it was really awesome.
It sold tons of kits, sold actual uprights also worldwide.
So, Hyper Fighting has been the best thing for my career overall
and the worst thing that could have happened to me at Capcom
because after that my career was pretty much done because I caused somebody big
to lose face a couple times, even though I actually didn't intend it,
it absolutely did what we wanted to do, which is destroy Rainbow Edition, want to make it obsolete.
And so high performing was so successful in the middle wasn't planned that,
you know, Super Street Fighter would have had of course correct to address all those things and it didn't.
So did the Street Fighter 2 Turbo characters turn up for the interview, then?
So you're going to show off the new moves then? Great.
Well, that works then.
Well if I'd known you were having this much fun.
I'd never hidden in the lab as I'd pretended to be late.
Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Intimidating. Invincible. Nintendo.
And so a really unique thing about Street Fighter
is that in some ways this was the forerunner to the modern console title.
You know, the Internet supported console title
that gets season one, season two, season three, balance updates, new characters, things like that.
In an age when that wasn't possible, popularity of Street Fighter willed it to be possible.
As the years went on I would get the successive updates of the game.
I think the speed increase I remember with Hyper Fighting,
I remember there was a star system of how fast you wanted it to be.
So experimenting with what's the sweet spot for speed, because I felt like max speed, it was too fast.
You know, It's no different really from upgrading FIFA every year.
You know, it felt like it was a natural progression to do because me and my mates, we were all still playing it.
We're all still obsessed with Street Fighter and the idea that if you didn't buy
this version, you wouldn't be able to play as the bosses and you wouldn't be able to play at the right speed.
You know, no one wanted to miss out.
On the very first one.
Street Fighter two was was fun because we were talking earlier about the different formats
and each of them had a different packaging shape.
I remember having E. Honda just do one hand forward and I sent that off to the art director.
I do remember them asking for this change.
They wanted to really make sure that I tried to accentuate the fact that he could do it like that.
When I got it back, I had the paint out the hand that was just kind of
just thrusting straight out, you know, look like he just did one of these thrusts.
He's flying backwards.
And and it turned out that became the focal
point of the whole box, in my opinion.
It was hugely successful. I can't remember the numbers.
It's four plus million Super Nintendo carts alone.
You know, whatever the Genesis did, it's a it's another worldwide phenomenon.
The thing is, is this was still early days for the console war, if you will, at the time.
But Sega Genesis was big in America.
It was known for its big arcade style games.
So the fact that the still new Super NES was getting Street Fighter 2 it felt kind of like
a blow for Sega fans to be honest I was more I love them both, but I was more of a Sega guy.
I mean, I think Street Fighter was one of those series that the battle lines were drawn between Sega and Nintendo
because obviously Nintendo scored a massive coup by having the first game ported to the Super Famicom
and I remember the hype around that being absolutely massive, purely just because they'd secured the license.
Well, I mean, Nintendo sort of famously had
an advertisement that said you're not going to get this on Sega Mega Drive.
Of course they were wrong. And they eventually did come out.
It was obviously a big deal, right? But the thing is that the road to this conversion was a difficult one.
Traditionally Capcom games they appeared on Sega's 16-bit system had actually been developed by Sega itself,
but at some point Capcom took over the project and they delivered the final version, if you will.
It comes remarkably close to matching the Super NES version.
In fact, it looks like it was directly based upon it and that was also
one of those games that pushed the arrival of the six button controller.
That six button pad really felt like a big difference to me because you had
instead of having two of the buttons on the shoulders, which was sometimes hard to get for combos
and stuff, you had all six buttons on the front of the pad, which made things a lot easier.
That new six button pad ended up being vastly superior Street Fighter over the Super NES
which is a roundabout way of saying I did ultimately prefer the game on Sega Genesis
because of this pad you could do those quarter circle moves perfectly.
Whether you were on Sega or Nintendo,
you were treated to an exceptionally high quality conversion of what was a fairly demanding arcade game at the time.
The guy that brought me Street Fighter, his name was Denny Moore,
he worked for Moore & Price Design, up near Palo Alto in California.
He was a real go getter, entrepreneur guy, really fun guy to work with.
You never met him for the first ten years of working with him.
He had a relationship with Capcom already.
He sent me three screenshots of the video game and they said, we want to feature Blanka
I guess it was Ryu and Chun-Li, so give us some sketches.
And anyway, so I went to work and did two or three sketches and had a lot of fun.
They were really happy with it.
It is probably the most iconic piece that I think I did of all of them.
The artwork's not terrible, I regret one of my interviews that I actually said that because it's like,
No, the artworks awesome.
You know how things were back then, like on TV and all the box covers.
It was all real, like fantasy and epic.
But the guy is super talented. The artwork is not his fault, it's his style.
He's been asked, do his style, Western style and not Japanese style.
Just as a way of promoting the next Street Fighter.
I think I did maybe eight or ten characters,
just small, small little pieces,
kind of in an action posed in my style instead of what was available
for them at the time was just the Japanese versions.
Well, I always thought that I was realistic, but I really wasn't.
I mean, I was I was actually a step or two behind
the people that were doing all those illustrations for the Japanese covers.
I mean, it wasn't anything I admired all that much, but now it's like one of my favorite art forms.
I mean, there are just beautiful.
Looking at the original artwork, I felt like all I could do
was just be myself and based on my influences,
I was going to redraw and repaint these characters, doing their fighting moves.
But try not to compete against the Japanese style.
We would write about it almost every month.
Because readers wanted to read everything they could about the game.
It was, you know, it was always a joke. ls Street Fighter 2
mentioned on the cover of the magazine, because if it's not, it's not going to sell as well.
So you've got interesting things like this Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition Mean Machine Sega poster book.
But it's not bad, actually. The art works pretty nice all the way through,
so there's a poster of each of your favorite characters and yeah, it's nicely drawn, it's nicely put together.
That's quite a nice, nice little thing, that.
Announcing the all new official strategy guide.
For Street Fighter 2.
From the Masters of Menace, Game Pro magazine.
On the original Game Pro Guide, I got invited to consult and so it was done in a way that was good.
Like, here's the moves and here's stuff about the character.
And it was it was a really good book, you know, It was like a fighting game guide was kind of new.
There's a lot of Japanese magazines covering Street Fighter like crazy, especially by Champ Edition.
And so, you know, there's a lot more stuff being written about techniques and all that.
And now because of that, Capcom, they're giving me all kinds of books and I'm looking through them.
I'm going not even been able to read.
I'm seeing collision boxes. I'm seeing notes about timing.
I'm seeing notes about how much damage.
So when hyper fighting comes around, especially being the co-lead hyper fighting designer,
I definitely had some say in how that book was going to go,
and I got a chance to be like a co-lead author on it.
The difference in how we approached it was we want to model off of what the Japanese were doing,
but why don't we go Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.
Street Fighter 2 Expert Player's Handbook.
Not only is it got incredible artwork
from throughout the eras of Street Fighter, but it's obviously got tutorials on the basic moves.
And as you progress into progressive combos
looking at this stuff because you know when you've been playing a game for a while,
you almost forget training certain combos, doing a crossover combo,
which is almost like a broken buggy thing in Street Fighter that you can fly
and kick over the player's head, but you're hitting them behind you.
Even though the striking limbs are facing that way.
It's like the hit boxes were a bit dodgy, but people liked it, so they kept these things in.
We had tons and tons of footage we had to edit. We had to do all the combos.
You asked how it was done.
Dave Winstead, Matt Taylor and I did everything.
We actually discovered combos we didn't even know were there.
Maybe doing a light punch, a medium
low punch into a standing fierce uppercut into their shoulder.
You can getting that because the uppercut to shoulder you can was a great knockdown combo
and then with a charge characters that was almost more difficult with Guile
jumping in with that flying kind of slap chop thing that he does that's a certain skill
charging, particularly sonic booms and flash kicks.
I'm really proud of the work that Game Pro did on that because they were they were the first, you know,
later on Matt Taylor would form Versus Books and do just amazing guides with all the top pros
and you know it kept going from there.
We did lots of different promotions for our magazines.
We gave away stickers and badges.
And all sorts of things and we thought, why not try and put a video cassette
on the front of a magazine to promote it, you know, as a cool freebie?
I mean, kind of sums it up, you know, like a nineties
games coverage, like a VHS tape with commentary from a couple of the guys that works on the magazine.
And we're here to teach you how to play Street Fighter 2 like a master.
Unlikely, but it's possible.
So we basically put together what was a very early let's play player guide.
So we went to a recording studio and pretty much did it
all in one take, played the game and just narrated how we were playing.
And now he's on the fence.
Now this is where you want to do the Dragon. And make sure you're well positioned.
He's up... and a miss.
Deary, deary me.
But to give them credit, they knew what they were talking about.
Gary constantly practicing and he would actually go down the arcades and pick up
tips from the kids that are playing in Soho, like religiously for hours and hours and hours.
At various comments over the years, people saying how much they enjoy,
enjoyed watching it, and nearly wore the tape out when they first got it.
It's a fun trip down memory lane watching this old video that's now 30 years old.
With the editorials that they had very good at registering, kind of like what is it
that grabs the attention of people is a kind of created this atmosphere of worldwide competition.
So basically the arena of Street Fighter as a video game became an arena for coverage
in the video game magazines.
It's funny how Street Fighter just kind of rolls out and becomes
every medium that it touches.
The Street Fighter brand just started to be everywhere.
Obviously, there's a Hollywood movie, but also lunchboxes and t-shirts.
And this was just, y'know, maybe alongside Pacman, one of the very first franchises
to sort of get the full run market saturation treatment in terms of merchandise.
Starting to get pulled into discussions about toys and pinball machines and never cereal.
But that's unfortunate.
Because I used to read magazines like Super Play CVG
Mean Machines, and they would occasionally report on what was happening in Japan.
One of the things they did say is that this game's a phenomenon because in Japan
they've got music, CDs and toys and t-shirts and stuff like that.
And that's when I kind of realized, well, this is obviously quite a big thing.
Man, there's all these almost encyclopedic books and stuff coming out in Japan.
I remember to show that off in Super Play.
I think it was like a page was like, Hey, there's an art book just specifically by Street Fighter.
I imported a very expensive book.
The Street Fighter 2, was like a hardback, came with a CD with all the sound effects on it, right.
Amazing artwork. It was so beautiful.
And I just started working at this publisher and I was taking it and say, I've got this, you know?
And the guy there was like, Huh,
we should probably produce something like that here, you know?
So basically what they did, we got permission to sort of use the artwork,
but they just had to scan it all in, and completely wrecked my book.
So I managed to get another one.
The first Game Pro book was Western Art with maybe a couple of pieces of Japanese art.
And so when we went to the Hyper Fighting guide, sorry, I was persuasive enough
and to be able to say, Hey, here are the guidelines for the way we're going to the Hyper Fighting guide.
No American art.
I really like the Super Street Fighter 2 artwork.
I love this artwork as well. That's a great image. That's tattoo worthy.
So here we have everybody's favorite Street Fighter 2 item
Look And Find Street Fighter 2. It's like where's Wally for Street Fighter 2, but is where's Blanka instead?
Here is the USSR factory full of random people
and also Zangieffor I don't know, Blanka wearing a hat on that even on the back it says
"search each of the nine wildly confusing fighting arenas." Is that good?
The gloves are off as far as merchandizing was concerned you know anything they could slap a name on.
So Street Fighter 2 at the apex of its popularity was still early days
for the notion that a video game property could be turned into three dimensional
touch them and hold them toys that could dominate at a retailer like Toys R US.
But everybody wanted a piece of the action.
And early on, Capcom strikes an ill fated deal with Hasbro
to make basically G.I. Joes that are slightly repurposed to look vaguely like street fighter figures.
That was a landmark licensing deal, right?
Not a super success for one.
Its the most lethal G.I. Joe team yet.
Capcom's Street Fighter 2. No way.
Way.
The commercials that were released were really just not great.
And unless you were a kid of like eight years old, I don't think you'd get any enjoyment of them.
And I think even young kids who saw those commercials really felt
like they didn't want to play with those characters.
I understand the opportunity they felt they had with Street Fighter 2.
This was a group of characters that were in interesting and distinct costumes, just like G.I. Joe was based around.
This was a group of action heroes, just like G.I. Joe
And they were the perfect vehicle as a toy company to create Street Fighter 2 action figures.
So from the Official Street Fighter 2 chapter of G.I. Joe
it's Chun-Li with you will notice a hand grenade around her neck because that's her classic look apparently.
So all of these figures had to have some sort of crappy spring loaded action in order to ruin them.
How is this particularly egregious...
So, just noticed she's got a flintlock pistol on her thigh.
Why does Chun-Li have a flintlock pistol?
They are a group of very colorful action figures that are based around the Ninja Force format.
They come with sprues of neon colored weapons.
All the kids knew who all these characters were.
Yeah, so you notice she's got this sort of odd thing with the sort of design of the waist and legs.
It looks like she's wearing a nappy.
And that is because there has to be the spinning bird kick action.
Yeah, spinning bird kick straight to your shin.
So all of the head sculpts for all of the Street Fighter 2 action figures are totally unique, but the action
figures themselves, except for a handful
reuse body parts that are just repainted from previous G.I. Joe characters.
The card backs are beautiful, the artwork is great.
They didn't skimp in that.
Sense, but it is a line of recycled parts.
So in the nineties everything had a board game.
Street Fighter 2 had two of them. This is the Milton Bradley version.
I haven't actually played this yet, only got it recently,
but I'm intrigued to see how it works because how do you sort of transfer the game play
of a one on one tournament fighter to some sort of traffic management simulator?
I'm really confused by it, but I'll bet if we open it up it's a lot of cardboard and a lot of plastic cancers.
Take that back. It's just garbled.
The rocket stock and robots Street Fighter adaptation that they brought out, which, that's kind of like saying I have
Street Fighter 2 Monopoly, but at least in this case it was two guys who were duking it out
and they had the Street Fighter 2 skins over them.
From around the globe, the street fighters came bashing and banging til only
Ryu and Guile remained in the Street Fighter 2 tabletop game.
You see some of the stuffies back here.
These were in vending machines like course you know they they hooked me up.
I will say I didn't spend 10,000 dollars in Yen to get these, but I'm terrible at Crane games.
So because we are a sinful people and God chose to punish us,
Tiger Electronics were given the license to just about every video game property
and every movie property in the world and produced one of these LCD games for them.
And if you've ever played one of these and I use the term played as loosely as it can
be in the English language,
Lots of little black drawings flicker about and it beeps at you.
Hundred Hand Slaps and rolling attacks, fireballs and hurricane kicks are your weapons.
The Street Fighter 2 one is I mean it's as bad as all the others.
You can't quite tell what's going on and that's probably for the best.
Street Fighter, it's a move set a lot of people have grown up with.
People know there's respect.
You're a top tier Street Fighter player that a certain level of kudos comes with it.
In particular, Northern California was the hub.
And when we run tournaments, people come in from Arizona or wherever
and they just get stomped because no Internet, so no knowledge sharing.
And so there was just tribal knowledge about like, you know, techniques.
That is when the tournament scene became in overdrive, like everybody was flocking back.
And then all of a sudden it was northern California, Northern California versus Southern California.
And there was a rivalry.
They were good.
That was also the birth of some deep matchup, technology and tactics.
That tournament for sure was the moment that everybody got it and then start talking about it.
This is the first time we had ever heard of a tournament.
We were alien to the concept of a tournament on fighting games. We got sponsors, we got a venue.
Its going down. We've told everyone we've been everywhere, I've been all over the country.
We're going to get these players all together.
We're going to find out who the best Street Fighter in the country is.
We're going to work it out.
Get everyone down to Central London, no one can argue it's too far.
Everyone's got to travel.
The UK players, which was, you know, a combination of different, you know, backgrounds and races and stuff.
But then...
I think the Chinese guys were really good.
The Chinese guys seemed to excel.
There was one guy, though, who did come third at the national tournament
that I told you about, the Trocadero.
He was from Japan, his name was Shin, but I didn't know him then.
We became friends much later on and I'm like, Oh my God, you're that guy.
He said yeah.
And he lived in the UK for a lot of years and was very, very good at every game he played.
Honestly, though, I wasn't that good.
And because I wasn't that good, I didn't really understand why he's so much better
than the others, you know?
So I really wasn't that deep into, you know, the technical stuff here.
I probably didn't understand a lot of the dynamics that makes, you know, a top, top, top player.
So I think the personalities, the people that play Street Fighter have become minor
celebrities in their own right.
I was already heavily into Fatal Fury and World Heroes and stuff like that.
I almost got shunned and banished to like a remote island.
Like, are you playing that now?
Yeah. You know, people just
didn't like to see that I'm not playing the game that obviously I'm only allowed to play.
You know, I could learn something new here.
That Street Fighter didn't seem to offer.
It takes a seismic shift for something new to come along and fully pull people away.
With the popularity
rise of Street Fighter in general, in the arcades, there was bound to be some competition.
The biggest one probably was SNK with their Neo Geo fighting games.
Fatal Fury one, two, three. Fatal Fury Special was amazing.
That was a very, very good fighting game.
I could see from the earlier games that SNK released
like Fatal Fury 2 and Art of Fighting and then the first King of Fighters.
That was when I kind of thought, actually that does feel like it's a more technically involving game.
And I know that as SNK went on with the King of Fighters series and the sequels to Fatal Fury,
they did gain a reputation for being more technically deeper games.
SNK's just outdone themselves. I think they could have had a slow release, period.
They they had absolute classics that were just clustered with other classics.
So they would be overlooked.
After playing sort of Street Fighter 2 and getting into Champion Edition and things like that.
The overall speed and sort of floaty-ness and roughness of the SNK games, especially the early ones,
unfortunately, none of them really resonated.
However, when Mortal Kombat came out,
that was definitely one that influenced people to sort of
take a pause on Street Fighter and jump over and see what this game was about.
Yeah, I remember we were hearing about Mortal Kombat, and so Jeff found where it was being tested.
A rare moment where because it was a big deal and was Midway,
I'd come in, yeah, that thing, that thing had, had a vibe.
You walk in that this was like, "Get over here."
It's the first time you're seeing a fighting game, but you're like digitized sprites.
This is kind of real human beings and it suddenly makes it all the more
tangible and believable because you're like these movies.
When I see a nice high sidekick, someone actually did that.
And the gore it was just I mean, what kid at that time isn't into always wanting to watch 18 movies.
And you know, you saw Robocop for the first time and Predator
and you're talking about when the arm got shot off and it was still shooting on the floor, you know.
So I thought it was really awesome. I love the base, love the swagger.
It had so much attitude, super violent.
We saw a couple of fatalities.
It wasn't really fair to say that Street Fighter or was any better or Mortal Kombat was, you know, worse.
I think they just appeals to different audiences.
Not everybody who like Street Fighter got Mortal Kombat, but people who just played Mortal Kombat
and didn't like Street Fighter, Boy, they loved it.
I was never the biggest fan because it always felt very stiff
compared to Street Fighter 2 in terms of the way the characters moved and animated.
Mortal Kombat in the corner where you're just punching,
just trapping people with these punches.
They were quite fluid, actually.
Some of the punches, it was just different.
You went to every single arcade.
It was Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, just trading spaces and staying in the top
five forever for over a year.
It definitely changed things in a good way.
I mean, it expanded.
I think it brought I think I think it wasn't like 100% of the fighting players got divided.
I think we probably lost, you know, 20, 30%.
Between the two games, averaging about $1,000 a week.
The boost to the industry was tremendous.
Nothing prior to Mortal Kombat had really stuck no other than Street Fighter.
I definitely followed Capcom and SNK in tandem, but wasn't too keen on the Western
developed fighting games because they did feel like they were kind of jumping on a bandwagon.
You had games like Body Blows on the Amiga and stuff like that and all these are that
to a lesser extent Killer Instinct and stuff like that that came out that did feel
they're very much sort of hanging on the coattails of what the Japanese companies were doing.
I think Street Fighter did very well to kind of hold onto its
they had a very even since like Street Fighter the first one, it had a very sort of clear
idea of what it was and who it was for and why people played it and didn't get swayed too much.
I don't think by Mortal Kombat or any of the earlier SNK games.
But when King of Fighters started to gain momentum, that really did take over.
When I look at what games people were starting to get into,
they were games that had a lot more to offer, you know, Bloody Roar, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct.
These had very unique elements to them.
What made those games special that Street Fighter didn't have.
So people were just looking for something new.
It doesn't mean they didn't like Street Fighter.
It was just like, Well, what's that about? Oh, that looks cool. I'm going to, you know.
So I think either Capcom could have released a second fighting game
or made different updates to Street Fighter so that people could feel
that it was still fresh and new and worth investing time into.
I think Super Street Fighter is a great example of a missed opportunity.
We get the Polaroids over and it's four characters.
It's two characters that look the same.
They're just be a head swap like Ken and Ryu, basically.
And color palette change.
And that was Fei Long.
And then T. Hawk, wasn't called T. Hawk at the time,
and there was Cammy, who wasn't Cammy at the time,
And that was it. And so what do you think it was like?
Well, we think that you should do four unique characters and not just do a head swap.
Like, well, it's more RAM and more memory.
You want to... You really think so?
It's like, yeah, you say you're doing four characters,
it's not going to feel like that if you don't do four characters.
Well, do you have any ideas? Well, actually, let me go think.
Y, know, I might.
And so I had been watching
a lot of different movies, and one that really stuck with me was King of the Kickboxers.
If Billy Blanks was in there and I hadn't seen him before
and he just had a lot of crazy kicks, you know, from lots of weird angles.
And and he had one in particular that he would do that would kill people.
He'd jump up, and his legs would clap together. Bam!
You know, I pitched not him, but I pitched the idea of let's do a black character.
It's not the typical Japanese, you know, bad guy, black character
and like, let's make him a hero, you know, let's go down this road.
And so I sent over probably a pretty crummy sketch initially, but mostly a write up,
you know, passed on, passed back like, okay, here's here's what we're thinking.
We looked at T. Hawk.
We had a friend who worked for us at Yellow Brick Road, which Capcom owned,
and so he's part Native American Indian.
And so we reached out to him, went down there and we showed him
the images and got lots of feedback on what's appropriate, you know,
what would be not offensive, what would be good costuming for him, and also what's a good name.
So he actually coined the name T. Hawk.
And then we came up with Cammy for Cammy, because she had camouflage and she seemed really cool.
And so that is how those characters all ended up where they are.
And we just provided lots of feedback and it was great. It's a great time.
So the four characters we first saw in marketing, I think it was big pictures of Cammy and Fei Long
like all amazing, like you've got your obvious Bruce Lee parallel, you've got a new character.
Oh, apparently the stage in Scotland and she's British, so they are...
This is all very interesting.
Seeing Fei Long and seeing some shots with the nunchucks.
I saying, oh, is he going to be able to use nunchucks in a game?
And you're like, no, it's just one of his win poses.
I love the fact that they added like Fei Long because it puts a huge Hong Kong action fan.
So I was like, they added Bruce Lee into Street Fighter.
Like, are you serious?
So I was a big Fei Long player, actually.
I think in general, the characters in Super Street Fighter 2 of the new challengers,
they're pretty excellent.
And if you look at them, especially when compared to later entries in the series,
I think they have a bit of the same or as the original cast,
almost as if they were initially designed and then entered later.
Initially, I thought it was okay.
I think some of them didn't quite fit into the world of Street Fighter or weren't really necessary
like T. Hawk, I felt was just a character made for no real reason.
And then of course, you try and play with T. Hawk, and he's like Zangief,
but with all the fun taken out and for some reason he can fly.
At that point, I had played Guile a lot.
He was a very, you know, horizontal, vertical character.
And I just felt that Dee Jay was similarly like that.
He was just a very horizontal character.
Charge moves for the most part.
The feedback was like, yeah, cool character, but why does he play like Guile?
And he wasn't really supposed to play like Guile too much.
Dee Jay is supposed to be a bit more high flying.
You know, as cheesy as it may be, I think Cammy was the one that seemed to resonate
with me and my friends as far as a unique addition to Street Fighter
feeling a bit different enough with her move set and being enjoyable to play.
And maybe that's one of the reasons why she's one of the only characters
of those of those four that continues to be in Street Fighter, and is still very popular
as a playable character, even now in Street Fighter 5.
But I think they started to really differentiate Ryu and Ken's fighting styles.
Ken was a lot faster. Ryu suddenly now had a much more solid, traditional karate feel.
He was level and straight.
Ken had arching moves and his three hit Dragon Punch
doing a crossover, you know, flying psychic into Uppercut
just... it was great.
As most people know when Super came out the overall game speed of it was pretty slow.
It was almost a shock to the system.
If think about it Hyper Fighting if hadn't happened, and we went from Champion to Super.
It wouldn't have felt slower.
And so that that's part of the context of what went wrong for Super.
They didn't change it to speed it up, you know, to match what had just happened to the market.
There's part of having your vision and not wanting to change because the market changed.
But then there's like, players want this, so give them what they want.
And I'll tell you that game hurt Capcom. It hurt Street Fighter's momentum.
Super had so much potential and Hyper Fighting really diverted its course.
You know it was successful so it's hard to say, you know, was that a good thing or a bad thing?
That is kind of what happened with Super Street Fighter is that Hyper Fighting was such a success,
it blindsided us.
That we just didn't adapt.
When Super Street Fighter two came out
of course console sports would follow Super Street Fighter added more characters.
It added more backgrounds, just more to the game.
So obviously you're going to need a larger, more expensive cartridge.
And it's an interesting time because this was later in the console development cycle.
New machines were on the horizon or out, in fact, in some areas.
So there was another cover that was the logo busting out of a wall
so that was used as a cover, and all it said was Street Fighter 2.
I did the logo and the brick and I mean, usually the logo is always supplied by somebody else.
And then the idea came along that same image
was going to be melded with another brick wall.
But down below they just wanted this kind of high noon
silhouette of the characters shining up next to it.
I think that was part of the idea.
They wanted to.
A little mystery of who these next characters are going to be.
But as far as the actual game play, the visuals being presented,
you know, it's still well within the realm of that original conversion.
And as a result, it is really actually quite good on both the Super NES
and the Sega Genesis slash Mega Drive.
The only issue I guess with Mega Drive is the sound reproduction.
And this isn't the fault of the system.
Its Capcom's own sound driver and the way they implement it,
it's very garbled, scratchy and not optimal for the time.
And anybody that played it back then probably would have noticed that,
especially if you compared the voice clips from Super NES to the Sega version,
That kind of gave you bragging rights.
You could say if you were playing on Super NES.
If you were more of a casual Street Fighter fan or just a casual gamer in general,
then yes, I could see how these near releases of
Street Fighter on the platforms at 70 bucks a pop or so could be a bit much for you.
But for us, we loved it.
We kept wanting them to come out with more.
We wanted to play more.
We would swap between the different versions of the game.
I know I didn't mind the frequent updates.
I was there on day one, waiting in line to buy them all.
Capcom maybe got a little bit too iterative, so when Super Street Fighter 2 was announced,
I mean, you know, I can remember walking into school with the copy of Mean Machines or Nintendo magazines,
whatever it was in, and people were just gazing at the artwork, said, oh, this is amazing.
Look, this new fighter, this new characters, you know, they couldn't believe it.
So that became a point of obsession.
But obviously when it came out, we were already been promised Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.
So I think maybe when the luster started to fade a little bit, I think, well, you know, I'm
going to shell out sixty quid for this and there's going to be a better version six months down the line.
Not having a Super Nintendo or Mega Drive myself, I'd completely lost track of which version was which.
There's like Turbo and then there's Championship.
Which one's better?
Well, the marketing for Sega says Championship's better. But hmm, is the Super Nintendo...
I was completely lost by that stage.
And it wasn't, I think, until Super Turbo came out in the arcade, though.
I actually went back and managed to get straight in my head which version was which and what did what.
So the long run of Street Fighter 2 culminates
in this final release Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, or Super Turbo as it's called.
And the fact that they were able to get to this, what fifth version allows them to really create
this final, perfectly balanced, fully realized version of Street Fighter 2.
So when Super Street Fighter 2
was announced for the 3DO console, it was kind of a big deal, right?
Because while the 3DO was not a huge commercial success,
it was actually well known amongst people playing games.
Obviously, the price was a huge barrier to entry, but that doesn't mean
that there wasn't still a lot of attention around it.
Your impression is that, wow, this is really close to the arcade game.
Unlike the 16-bit ports, everything was larger.
The resolution seemed higher.
And on top of that, you had this fabulous CD audio soundtrack,
which I would only later learned was actually borrowed from the FM Towns version of Street Fighter.
But it's fantastic arrangements of great tracks.
So it's this combination of larger graphics, more colors,
the CD audio soundtrack and remarkably fast loading for a CD console.
It really felt like a huge step up.
The thing is, though, the 3DO did not ship with a six button controller by default.
It actually had five buttons, which is a little better, but two of them were shoulder buttons.
So of course there was that as well.
But honestly, overall
that was the best looking version of Street Fighter
that you could play in your home at the time, and it was something special.
Then I made the fatal error of buying Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
well, for the A 1200, and it's just abysmal.
Half of the frames of animation are missing.
It's almost completely unplayable unless you've got the most powerful accelerated Amiga in the world.
It ran like an absolute dog and it was no fun whatsoever.
I think overall it's probably the most polished and well-balanced and just well-rounded
Street Fighter game, and it's just unfortunate that it came too long after Super Street Fighter 2
because I think it would have sort of gotten us to come back together again
and get excited about Street Fighter again and come back in the arcades to play it again.
Super Turbo showed, it brought back a lot of people and it's considered one of the best of the two series for tournaments.
It's considered also like with Hyper Fighting one of the best balanced games.
I think Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo has that kind of not only
does it have a massive nostalgia hits around it, but also the strength of the game play
is something that still holds up for the excellent balancing.
And it's just much fun to play.
I think that's why people keep going back to it.
They use it as a benchmark effectively.
Well, I was aware of the game because every weekend I would ride bicycles
with my kids to the nearest arcade and watch them throw quarters down the machine.
But I ended up being even more familiar with Capcom,
making a television series and a home video game out of Cadillacs Dinosaurs.
And then the producer called me up and said, I'm in business with them.
Ed Pressman.
The Capcom people are coming into L.A.
to audition writers, producers and directors to make a movie out of their video game, Street Fighter 2
When is this meeting?
He says, well, they're coming on Monday and they already had meeting set up.
And this conversation is like on a Thursday.
My condition is I want to direct the movie, if it happens,
if I'm going to like kill myself and come up with this in 72 hours.
So they said, all right, we'll go with that. And they sent me a bunch of materials.
A lot of it was in Japanese.
It was like for the Japanese home market, but it was a fold out of Bison's secret hideout.
It was like we have in a James Bond movie.
It was under a temple and he had like secret submarine pens and missile launchers.
And I go, wow, this is a whole world of world building that they've done
that hasn't shown up in the game yet, but they're planning far ahead.
So I decided to go out on a limb and I was not going to pitch a tournament movie.
I just felt that there have been so many low budget direct to video tournament movies that I thought that
if this was going to be the big budget, high end motion picture debut of a fighting game,
that perversely as it sounded, I didn't want it to be about the tournament.
So I went out on a limb with that approach.
It's dumb luck would have it.
They were thinking along those lines anyway for the far future.
So I ended up pitching.
What it subsequently said is really the first, and best G.I. Joe movie.
Everybody at the time I was definitely excited about the Street Fighter film.
Video game movies weren't a common and it was an exception rather than normality.
I mean, now you've got a lot of adaptations, but back then it felt unique.
I'm going to be honest, I don't think any of us were particularly interested because we'd already been burned
by Super Mario Brothers, which of course ultimately has nothing to do with the game, and it's pretty bad.
The best thing about that was at the beginning when they had the little "ba-ding!"
And I thought, oh, Nintendo, you know,
and then the movie sort of just went from bad to worse.
They were so literal minded about the Mario Brothers game.
So in the Mario Brothers game, the characters travel by jumping.
So they decided that the storyline of the movie, they had to get these boots with springs in them
to explain why they didn't walk or run, they jumped.
So I'm going like of all the things you could say must be in the movie, the jumping, why were they fixated on that?
Being in the movies was so sort of like a validation for video games.
And it was again, it was like a pop culture thing.
You know, if something can infiltrate movies and music, which obviously it did as well,
we had like singles based on Super Mario Brothers and Tetris and stuff like that.
So I was excited about it, even to the point where, you know,
I saw the first few clippings in magazines and thought, well, that doesn't look quite right, but you know,
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt
because how can you turn a video game with a green man with orange hair and it's like a monster?
How can you turn that into a live action movie?
Well, out of all the people we saw, the only two two studios wanted to do it, and we went with Universal.
It was easier for Universal to decide because Capcom was going to pay
the entire cost of production, so Universal was only on the hook for distribution.
Capcom was determined for this to come off as a major motion picture, as a star studded picture.
They originally were talking about getting, you know, all of the action stars for the character of Guile.
Oh, they were talking about Schwarzenegger,
Stallone, all these people, stuff like that, all of whom were priced out of their range.
But Jean-Claude, at that time, we were going to just hire him for like a month or five weeks.
We were able to afford Jean-Claude.
I was a big fan of van Damme. You know, being an avid martial artist myself.
The accent and the first images, his hair looked almost orange rather than sort of blond.
I was like, look, it's Van Damme.
You know, to hear that we were going to do a live action was awesome.
How do you go wrong with Van Damme? Right?
Him being Guile is going to be amazing.
I got invited into look at some of the initial treatments on how the movie was going to go.
Chun-Li's got a gun.
Awesome.
You know, there's a bunch of military stuff.
We didn't have a lot of details, but the tone just felt way off. Like, way off.
And now they wanted another big name.
They want another name that would elevate the picture.
Now it's an action movie and we make it a major motion picture.
Raul Julia was on the list.
Now, up to that point, if we had not had Raul Julia, we were talking about Stephen Lang,
you know, the villain in Avatar.
It turned out Raul Julia's kids played the game, so they see an envelope come to his house, Street fighter.
Dad, Dad, you've to do that.
So we were lucky that his kids were fans of the game and they encouraged his father to do it.
And it was great. He had this wonderful trip to Australia.
They were down there, we they were they rented a condo at the beach.
So we were like, next we were like, they were both on the same beach.
We had a wonderful time with his kids on this, what turned out to be his last picture.
So I was glad that he was able to have that.
He's so funny in the movie because he's not trying to be funny.
He based a lot of his body language on Mussolini, Saddam Hussein.
He approached this quite, quite seriously.
He approached this like he was playing Richard the third.
You know, the fact that Van Damme was in it.
Kylie Minogue, obviously she was a big part of everyone's life back.
If you were a young teenage boy, you know, that was a big selling point.
Kylie I tell you what, she is not only a beautiful soul, beautiful, hard,
hard worker, and I said, This is what we want you to do.
How do you feel about... She says, What do you think?
I said, I know you can do it.
She says let's go.
As she didn't second guess herself at all.
You know, she's a pro at whatever she does, I mean, her voice and everything else.
But when it came to that action, I really enjoyed watching her performing.
It was basically Ken and Ryu's movie.
And we're going to have, I think, Chun-Li and Honda, Balrog,
I think it was four and four was a couldn't get it to seven, but I had four and four.
But once John Claude came in, his part became much more dominant.
He eats up so much time he can't have time with the other people.
Plus he we did not have him for the whole shoot.
The whole picture was a ten week shoo, but we only had him for like six weeks.
Van Damme, you know, he was always in shape.
That's one thing. You know, I had never had to worry about him.
He was ripped flexibility from his dance background.
He was always fit.
It was easy to work with him because, you know,
he said, okay, I don't want you to do a sidekick and you're going to kick over his head.
He would just stand there, go boop, put it out there.
And I said, okay, that was easy.
As I would write each draft of the script, they would come back and hammer me,
and hammer me, and hammer me, and add more characters and add characters.
And I kept saying to them, look, we've got 100 minute movie.
If you have ten characters, that's 10 minutes each.
But then the storyline, the plot of the movie, right?
You're going to like people are going to be, who was that?
You know, they would say, all right, I guess we could give you another million, 200,000 dollars
but we'd like you to add this other character.
So before we were done, it had like crept back up to like 18 or 19 characters.
Original world warriors, seven eight characters, and focusing on them could have worked.
But you have to have the central heart of the film clearly going to be Guile because is the American or Belgian in this case
All roads lead to Bison, whose road is clearest.
Well, Guile had this friend killed.
Chun-Li had her father killed by this single man.
So we kind of make them in the forefront because people can they can relate to revenge story.
A good revenge story makes for good cinema.
The hype was real and they were very crafty.
One of the first images they released, I think I got it in a games mag and I had the poster on my wall was Vega.
It was just an image of vega. You're like, he's ripped, he's got the claw, he's got the mask.
What's to complain about?
He looks dope, right?
So I remember seeing that and I thought, well, if vega looks this good, then,
you know, we're in for a good time.
The fighting in the game is not the way people fight in streets, it's fantastic.
Now they push the cash back up to 19 people we could not afford
18 like well known martial artists, we couldn't afford it.
So he said since it's disconnected from reality, we have to teach them these crazy fighting moves anyway.
Let's go with actors. So we went with actors.
Each character was different.
So each one of them, I had to train them a little bit different.
Physically, they all they all ran. They all stretch.
But when it came down to the fight game, we had to train a little bit different for each one of them.
Once the schedule changed to accommodate Raul, I was putting a lot of the supporting players
into their scenes, like weeks ahead of when they were supposed to do it
and they had not been trained beyond just the basics of fighting.
It wasn't because of the of the team.
I think they did some great work.
And Benny also plays a character in the movie.
You see him here in there being sinister.
When it came from fighting with the boxing, kickboxing,
grappling, whether it be sword fighting, knife fighting. That was my thing.
At the 11th hour, they wanted to add Fei Long, which is a character that was just added to the game.
It's obviously Bruce Lee.
I don't know how that fits in the movie.
So then they said, okay, well, then another character, Captain Sawada, and they had an actor.
They were pressing on us to play Ryu, but his command of English was not very good.
And at a certain point they finally realized that he would is English, would never up to the level.
So they said, he's your Captain Sawada.
It was a contest. Like who was harder to understand?
Captain Sawada speaking English or Jean-Claude speaking English.
You go like, the audience is used to Jean-Claude,
I would say to them, you know, what about the accent?
And I'm going to kick that on of a bitch Bison's ass so hard.
They said, What accent? Because he was looped in Japan.
In other words, they didn't know he had it.
So we had dialog in the movie.
The Jean-Claude character was from Louisiana.
It fell out of the movie, so his accent remains unexplained.
It's been on a conference call and I start challenging the stuff about it not being authentic.
Right. And not being you know, it's not the IP.
Certainly the video game community are going to have their favorites.
They're going to have a very clear idea of what is Street Fighter.
Capcom didn't have enough stake in the way had done their deal, you know, even though
they had some money into it, they didn't really want to just try and tell Hollywood how to do their movie.
I think bastardization is the word I use a lot.
As I'm shooting the film.
And then a couple of times Jean-Claude would call in sick.
He admitted to having some drug problems in the past.
He had such a beautiful heart and respect,
you know, so when I would ask him to do certain things, he wouldn't argue.
He said, okay, let's do it, and we would do it.
We had a really good rapport with one another, even though, you know,
we all knew that he was going to through some things.
But going through all that when he got in front of that camera,
nobody would know.
Between making sure Raul Julia was on his meds for several weeks
before we shot him and keeping Jean-Claude off meds, this blew up the schedule.
So there's a couple of places there were supposed to be fights and there aren't.
So there's a scene where there's going to be a cage fight
and was going to be a fight there that did get interrupted by Jean-Claude crashing through the wall.
But what I discovered that because of the scheduling change, somehow the word did not percolate down.
To my astonishment, they had not been trained in this knife fight.
Once I was cutting the picture back and losing the fight,
we realized we had to punch the fights up again.
So the last thing we did is we went up to Vancouver
and we rebuilt part of the sets that we had had in Australia.
We filmed the big fight between Kena and Ryu, and Vega and Sagat because the version we shot in
Australia had been cut back so much that it was like really weak sauce.
And the special moves... Ryu's Hadoken was just a flash.
They just put a white frame, in that was like, oh God, is that it?
Finally at the end, the big fight between Raul and Jean-Claude, that was the last week of filming
and I was determined to get, you know, the video game moves in there.
No sonic boom in the end fight with Bison.
And I thought this coming. Sonic boom was going to come, you know,
maybe when the sort of pseudo psycho crusher is coming towards him, he's going to do something.
The flash kicks were there, I guess, without the flash.
But, you know.
It was funny that the movie called Street Fighter that the end of the day, the weakest thing
is the fighting.
And it was just a perfect storm of things that like can sabotage
you happening all at once.
So the movie opened on Christmas Day
and it opened really well and they made 130 million
on the initial release from Box Office and then the toys and all that.
So right away they made $100 million dollars.
And from 20/20 Vision Video Street fighter.
Now available to own on video.
20/20 Vision in hindsight, maybe they shouldn't have made it,
but hell they made a lot of money from it.
Made a fortune on rental.
I rented it every year.
This movie makes over 400 to $450,000 a year.
To this day. It's always on television and it's a cash cow for them.
There were two albums, actually.
We had the soundtrack of the movie, and then there was an album called Songs inspired by
which had a bunch of hip hop artists and stuff like that.
They did the Laser Disc special edition from Universal.
They included Street Fighter with like John Ford and Hitchcock.
I didn't understand how it got on that rack, but maybe because it was their most recent picture.
It's kind of the effect with Star Wars, you have diehard Star Wars
fans of the original three, and anything else that's released later,
they've almost sort of drank their own kool aid and just told themselves, this must be good,
even if I don't feel it's good. It is good, I'm just not...
I'm just not aligning with it yet.
And I think with Street Fighter you kind of, you so want it to be good that you kind of
are in a bit of denial at first and you maybe watch it a couple of and you realize that...
then you see Mortal Kombat and you're like now that a much closer adaptation of the source material.
Fortunately, you didn't get invited to the press screening of it, but I remember one of the writers
coming back and he really struggled to describe what he'd seen because he was just laughing so much,
particularly about like the origin of Blanka.
Zangief looked the business. Actually does a couple of things
you can cherry pick from that, that you're like that element in isolation is good.
Old Thunder Hawk with this little armlet, you know, and all that'll do, that makes him native.
I don't think that guy probably had a drop of native in him did he?
And making Honda Hawaiian? Why? And Balrog a cameraman.
This has been written to troll the audience. Let's makes Sagat the shortest actor in the cast
and just making Ryu and Ken two-bit hustlers.
It couldn't be any more sacrilegious to what they represent.
And what I went to then showcase, and right the wrongs
in Assassin's Fist, down the line.
It's kind of a mess, but weirdly enjoyable.
You got a few laughs out of it,
but it didn't stand up to the action films of the time by any stretch of the imagination.
It's something we look back on now as a bit of sort of campy fun.
But at the time, Street Fighter 2 was kind of important to you.
You didn't want Jean-Claude running around in a weird, invisible stealth boat.
It just didn't fit the whole thing.
But it had Raul Julia in it who was coming off of a huge career high with Addams Family.
Jean-Claude Van Damme was very popular in the mid-nineties.
And then I go into the theater with my friends and we're watching this movie
and then suddenly Kylie Minogue is on screen
and I go, oh my God, that's Kylie Minogue.
And all of my friends look at me and they're like, who?
And that was a little soul crushing for me.
But it also gave me something to hold on to throughout this horrendous cinematic experience.
This is the collection agency Bison.
Your ass is six months overdue and it's mine.
I don't mean to sound so disrespectful to the people who did the awesome work in there.
A lot of work that goes into that and that's why I just didn't.
It just was so far off of the material that it's disappointing, you know, everybody knows it.
It's really weird. It's really that movie is really weird.
And then Mortal Kombat, just to continue to kick us in the ass a bit,
comes out and, you know, and that was a bit campy or whatever, but man, it felt so authentic, right?
It was to this day, I still love the first Mortal Kombat movie a ton.
The fate of billions will depend upon you.
Sorry.
I avoid watching the Street Fighter movie as much as I can because it always upsets the shit out of me.
Didn't Jackie Chan have some slight small Street Fighter clip from one of his movies around that time
that was like a bit of a joke.
It was cool. City Hunter, and they're actually really faithful,
although in a spoof, departure from what's going on in the film at the time.
For example, you see Jackie hit their cab machine on the cruise ship.
He does not become Honda because he had a lifetime sponsorship deal with Mitsubishi.
Just the name Honda will screw up my deal here.
You can't have that, so they actually changed that.
And if you watch the Blu-Ray, kind of see a little crude of a change.
Jackie in drag as Chun-Li doing the jumping winning pose
the sort of knot knees and heels and the kind of peace sign.
It was very well done for the time, but with what kind of visual effects they had at their disposal.
But even that was more street fighter than the entire Street Fighter movie I think.
It's very much like, okay, that's the game.
In my astonishment now,
I saw all these revisionist reviews of the movie say, Hey, this movie's actually pretty good.
The craziest one I've seen now is, you know what?
This movie is supposed to be funny.
And there were the reviews
where the movie came out saying, this movie is so stupid, it's accidentally funny.
Now, I don't know how you could look at a movie like that and look at some of the dialog like.
Quick change the channel.
Obviously is supposed to be funny.
We can all go back and enjoy the, you know,
The day Bison graced your father's village is the most important day of your life.
For me, it was Tuesday.
It's meme worthy now.
Game over!
These things creep into your head and you're like, actually, they must have done something right, you know?
Oh, here's a great quote from it. What a screw up.
What a woman.
Looking out the window at Chun-Li in her black catsuit escaping from there.
Utterly farcical.
I watch it and I think it's one of those so-bad-it's-good
instances where, you know, it's a part of the series history.
It's one of those things that Street Fighter fans can look back on and, you know,
maybe not with rose tinted specs, but it is an interesting piece of history.
Alongside the movie, Capcom has this brilliant idea.
They've hired a bunch of movie stars to play the beloved Street Fighter cast.
They'll just crank out a video game that can take down Mortal Kombat.
It's like Mortal Kombat, but with movie stars.
The arcade game, the Street Fighter The Movie was a game that was developed kind of alongside the film.
The developers, which were in North America, of course, they actually worked alongside
the filming of the movie.
So they got some time with the different actors.
They were able to digitize them directly into game.
Mortal Kombat, this scrappy Chicago team has hired a bunch of local martial artists
who actually know how to convincingly do martial arts, which turns out not to be one of
Kylie Minogue's specialties or some of the others in the cast.
I think of Raul Julia playing M. Bison,
who's not only not a martial artist but is suffering from terminal cancer as of this moment.
I mean really you have Jean-Claude Van Damme
and no one who is able to step into the video capture booth and do this successfully.
Actually, they were going to use me
into one of the characters.
If they did, whoever was going to play against me, they would have had their hands full, that's for sure.
And then Van Damme himself
was reluctant to go to work and do all the motion capture stuff, had to be kind of cajoled into doing his moves.
Ultimately, incredible technologies.
The makers of Golden Tee that produced this game for Capcom did get the performance out of J.C.V.D. that they needed.
That wasn't going to be enough to deliver a worthy competitor to Mortal Kombat.
It really had this look of like fluid motion in a way that Mortal Kombat did not.
The problem is it also highlighted what made Mortal Kombat work so well, and it was the key framing the positions that they used.
Oh, hearing about this thing, and I'm upset.
And then I go look at it and I'm playing it.
I'm like, Oh, you know, hey, these inputs are off, you know, like trying to give them feedback.
And of course it's like, who wants that, right?
The ability to make a fighting game type was, you know, unknown.
And so I knew how hard it was.
And so then to see it shipped that way just kind of bugged me up because I thought I was just early.
And that also comes down to the fact
Capcom themselves did not share the original source code with these developers.
So knowing that, I actually think it's an interesting effort.
It's a cool game and it is worth checking out, but it's very clearly
not a full on Street Fighter game and it doesn't nail the fundamentals
and matching the frames of animation that you need to make a street fighter game work.
I think the failure in that game has little to do with its relationship to Street Fighter
and more to do with its relationship to Mortal Kombat.
It played very little like Street Fighter, though they tried to replicate some of those moves
and the moves just lacked the authenticity of the equivalent game play in Mortal Kombat.
The Saturn and PlayStation game launched very early in the lifecycle of these systems.
It was in fact a launch title for the Sony PlayStation in North America.
Digitized sprites kind of fell out of fashion really quickly,
and I think there was this general perception that Street Fighters should not be digitized
and it ended up looking of cheesy as a result.
It's not my favorite Street Fighter in the series.
It's definitely one of those ones where it's like, I love watching people play it like Maximilian
and Matt McMuscles, and anytime that one of those streamers
pops up that game to play, I'm just I just love I love watching other people play it.
I can't play that game.
It's just kind of a slow version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
with a couple of interesting ideas, like the EX moves that they picked up on later,
but just with sort of quite bad looking digitized sprites,
it was basically just an inferior version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, really.
That has some features that you wouldn't find in other street fighter games at the time,
such as the full story mode with branching paths and digitized speech sections in their where it was more like text.
But you know, you're basically following the story while playing the fighting game.
This is kind of the model that modern fighting games would follow with their story modes, right?
They were doing it all the way back then.
And so when you look at it from that perspective and you just play game,
I think it's a really cool period piece and it still plays well.
Game over.
I associate that nineties period,
mid nineties with the advent of Manga films
Akira
Fist of the North Star
Ghost in the Shell
Legend of the Overfiend
Which none of us should have been watching
Street Fighter two the animated movie. And when that drops, you were like, Oh, My God.
Yes!
I was so excited about that.
And I watched it and I was glued from the first second.
This right here is what we mean.
The Sagat, Ryu intro. It was the perfect intro.
I can't think of any fight
that would have been more hype than that to open the movie.
That was better than the entire the Hollywood version.
The dark screen with the grass rustling in the wind and then the lightning oh, my God.
Once you knew they got that right,
you would sort of settle in and trust them to deliver all the rest of it.
The anime is very different from the mainstream live action film.
Of course, it focuses Ryu for the most part.
It makes him the central focus and then brings in the intrigue of he hasn't seen Ken for a long time.
There's this kind of like rivalry that we saw in the film that being translated to the anime.
So there's this intrigue.
I'll see you with fate brings us together again.
Together again.
I looked at it and said, well, we'll take Street Fighter, we'll take the world and in, but we'll ground it.
And the way you ground Street Fighter is the fighting so they brought in the actual creator of K-1
and had him choreograph the film as a live action film almost is.
A lot of rotoscoping of the moves and storyboards
then transported to the main film.
So they would have actually filmed real choreography,
and you can see even the way Ryu fights, some of the kicks are very Kyokushin karate.
At that point, and what we do, it's more about the voice quality, you know, does it fit that?
And, and I thought, you know, Ryu had this, this kind of, you know, well, you know.
Not John Wayne, but...
He definitely was, you know, when he said something, he meant it.
I'm just passing through here, just the Japanese guy taking in a fight.
He's not a real chatty guy.
If you go back and look, you know, so when he did
say something and so that's, I think was more of what it was about at that time.
And Ryu is my name.
It's Ryu. Oh, okay.
Because I, I don't know, remember, but I might have said Ryu you and now it's, if it's Ryu, you know.
Okay.
And that's what I grew up with.
So that's how I know it is Ryu
When you watched an original Japanese,
the soundtrack is so much slower, it's so much more quiet
and in the background because it's an introspective film, it's all about Ryu's growth.
It's all about his struggles.
So the movie decides to kind of give you space and quietness
to kind of look at him and think like, What is he thinking?
And then you start thinking.
The mythology of Street Fighter
is kind of like a pebble in a pond and the ripples going out with its expanded.
You see Ryu and Ken training, young, and Ken as the long hair.
So of course the Street Fighter Alpha games are set before Street Fighter 2 and Ken had long hair
and had the red ribbon and Ryu actually wore a white one.
So, you know, oh, so how did Ryu get the red one?
And it shows where Ryu get injured sparring with Ken and Ken takes off his headband and uses it
as almost a tourniquet to sort of stem the bleeding in Ryu's head.
Yeah, that's really cool.
So the costumes themselves have story and narrative behind them there.
Thank you, Ken.
So then, shall we? En garde.
I got a copy cheap on videos CD of all things.
I only have anime on video CD. I had like three of them.
But seeing the Street Fighter 2 one of course very excited.
And yeah, it's actually pretty good.
Which blew us away after watching you know Steven De Souza's G.I. Joe movie.
Are you man enough to fight with me?
Anyone who opposes me will be destroyed.
You know, it's nice to see something that was a bit more focused on what the game actually was.
Yeah, I still think that kind of stands up.
Something to represent Street Fighter and actually be an enjoyable watch as exciting.
The characters... I mean, they don't show all the characters.
That's probably a strength because they then get to put, of course,
the time into actually showing the ones that they've got on the roster.
It showed what they want to have the characters be seen like,
but it also showed they're really limited knowledge of culture.
So just what are you trying to prove here, Chief Running Mouth.
I enjoyed the movie for the experience at the time, but after I was like, oh man, I didn't even give this guy...
And also the other thing is, Dee Jay was my main character.
So the entire movie, I'm sitting there in anticipation
waiting for the Dee Jay fight, because all the other fights so far been amazing.
If you boys can't appreciate my music, then you better haul your sorry asses outta here.
Like Dee Jay Maximum was outside his shop. He does had a record shop, whatever.
Of course, the black guys got to associate with music, right?
Obviously. He doesn't get on main stag fight.
He doesn't get a platform to to share, to really beat a street fighter.
He gets to fight these two bit hustlers.
And then Boxer, the other black guy, also doesn't get to fight.
He just gets to like burst a few veins and then his shirt... But and that's it.
So yes, they did what they wanted to do to fortify the way the characters are seen.
But I felt they didn't really do other characters justice at the same time.
So yeah, there's a bit of a mismash for me.
When you watch the American edit, or the English edit, I should say rather,
from Manga Entertainment, you had all these license bands that that key demographic would listen to.
And then, of course, just a central soundtrack.
The overall soundtrack was done by TV composers that were very competent,
kind of following the action.
The two aesthetics matched.
You know, the game was obviously developed by Japanese artists
and the anime was done in the Japanese animation style.
So there was definitely this there was a much stronger synergy between the two things.
Whereas with a live action movie, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn't look like Guile.
So it's like, you know, you've got that, but you've got to have Jean-Claude Van Damme
in there to get the movie made.
So it definitely felt like a closer, more faithful adaptation of what the games were.
Anime Fans are fans like no other fans.
I mean, they just they're diehard.
And I say this to the fans, you guys are amazing, what they know and what they like.
And you can't trick them.
You know, Hollywood cannot fool them by replacing what who they've grown up with is that voice.
No, we need to get a stars name to do that.
They don't... They won't have it.
It's taken it from just two people on a fighting stage to a living, breathing world.
And when you ask for something, you might get it.
It was darker. It was more faithful.
Of course, to the last fight with the tag team of Ryu and Ken
There was some sick moments in that fight, man.
It enriched the mythology.
There's a real world now.
It was like being in the cinema.
I was just blown away every second.
That was Street Fighter, right?
Colonel William Guile.
One of the greatest martial artists in the world,
travels the global tournament circuit, using it to conceal his top secret mission as leader
of an elite group of international crime fighters known only by their code name:
Street Fighter.
Yes, Yes.
The Street Fighter animated series was something that I only caught in clips in 1995
because I was already almost a Junior in High School.
Guile, once again, is the main character in this show,
and he is almost like a hybrid of Duke from G.I. Joe and Matt Tracker from Mask
and he's trying to stop M. Bison's, you know, evil forces.
You could tell that the cartoon writers
didn't quite know where to go with Street Fighter 2 as a concept.
They lean on this idea of all of them
are paramilitary, experienced, independent...
agents that Guile can just call on at any time, and they all have special powers.
The problem is, is there is a line in the second episode where Guile tells Chun-Li:
Remember the Street Fighter Code of Honor, discipline, justice, commitment.
You can't abandon your team for personal motives.
And a lot of the characters
in Street Fighter mimic characters in this martial arts genre of the secret tournament.
A secret tournament is all about the individual and their individual goals, whatever they are.
But once you try and square peg that round hole into a G.I. Joe / MASK format,
it falls apart. It falls apart very quickly.
And then when you glom bad animation onto it,
you might as well put a fork in it.
I think when the interest started beginning to wane on Street Fighter,
was sort of that period between Super and Super Turbo.
Now was a time where we explored a lot of the other fighting games that are out.
By the time Street Fighter 2 had reached the end of its lifecycle, both Nishitani and Yasuda had left the project.
They were working on a different Capcom game, X-Men: Children of the Atom,
which ran on the Street Fighter 2 engine and looked a lot like it.
In some ways you can consider that game to be the true sequel to Street Fighter 2.
Primal Rage came out a little bit later and my friends didn't play it but
Primal Rage was a game that I played in and day out.
I had a binder that I carrried with me
that had other moves, lists and secrets that I discovered, as well as the 3-D fighters,
which started to appear around that time, like the Virtua Fighters in the Tekkens.
Virtua Fighter tried to be a little bit more realistic in its portrayal of characters as much as they could be, given the polygon limitations
Tekken kind of tried to mix up their character designs
and had a little bit more fun with that and the environments and stuff like that
they didn't really care about as being as realistic as Virtua Fighter was.
Once we get to the late nineties, the general public playing numbers are just falling off.
Arcade titles generally are slipping and the home console market is doing what it does.
Street Fighter is still a viable property there, but not the world leader it had been a couple of years earlier.
That feeling that because it's not 3-D it doesn't count anymore so you got Capcom
in the early days of the 32-bit generation was still just porting
to Fight Streeter Zero, Darkstalkers, stuff like that over to the Saturn and the PlayStation.
I do think it's a bit of a shame that some of the others are forgotten.
I think Street Fighter Alpha doesn't get the love it deserves, especially Alpha 2, which is fantastic.
This was arguably one of the finest periods for 2-D fighters in the history of gaming.
People didn't realize at the time what they had and they just felt
maybe we have too many of these games now.
And then when you had the stuff like Tekken and Soulcalibur starting to take off
with the flashy, new, full 3-D graphics that started to feel like the future, right?
Street Fighter just started to feel a little bit older at that point.
Still very compelling, but it didn't have that same push, that same sparkle from the arcade.
I think fighting game fans quickly found out that the Saturn was the place for 2-D fighting games.
If you like 3-D, then PlayStation was the place to go.
So when Street Fighter 2 did inevitably arrive on these platforms
and their more evolved forms, they actually are a pretty good fit.
Really, the first time where everything about the arcade version could technically be replicated on these machines,
right, there didn't have be a compromise except in one area, and that's the loading of course.
I still stuck with it at that point because I still loved 2-D art.
I still thought it looked fantastic.
I still thought it gave these characters, a life that you don't get from 3-D.
But it did seem to be...
You could see from the way the press was talking, in the way that even your mates were talking to.
No one was talking about Street Fighter anymore.
It was like... have you played Tekken?
How have you played Virtua Fighter? Street Fighter was seen as old news.
You're seeing the competition that was nipping at Street Fighter 2's heels superseded
and the games that they put out subsequent to the original did have innovations and changes.
But after a few years, all of us were sitting around going...
Where's that three?
When I was working in the press in the early days in my twenties,
I was invited over to Capcom's U.S. offices.
I got an opportunity to see an early version
of Street Fighter 3 running on actual CPS-3 hardware,
and I just started looking at the intro sequence and I was just like, Oh my God, this is this is amazing.
And I jumped in and I, I was like, shocked that
the cast of characters as far as returning cast was very limited.
It was just Ryu and Ken and everyone else was new.
They tried to reboot everything, all these new characters and just strange new styles and ideas.
And I love it. It's beautiful.
It plays great.
It looks incredible, but it felt too unfamiliar, I think.
And when you combine that with the rise of 3-D,
with the age of the original Street Fighter games with so many different versions.
So I think it still confuses people to this day.
You really have to think about,
especially because the North American and Japanese versions weren't always name the same thing anyway.
You take all of those elements together and you just have
this fatigue for Capcom 2-D fighting games.
But by then the arcades, at least locally to weren't so much of a thing.
So I didn't play Street Fighter 3 until it came out on the Dreamcast years later.
As technology progressed and we got towards the release of the Dreamcast and,
you know, the PlayStation 2, the 2-D fighter was losing its appeal with the mainstream audience.
I think that the 15th anniversary
release for Street Fighter was a really special thing for Capcom to do.
A Hyper Street Fighter 2 was a really neat concept, and what it allowed you to do
is choose any version of a character throughout Street Fighter 2 history.
So would Guile from Street Fighter 2 be able to defeat Guile from Hyper Fighting or something like that.
And this is a game where you could do that.
We had been working with Capcom here at Digital Eclipse on the Street Fighter 30th anniversary collection.
For me, that was like a kid in a candy store because my history of Street Fighter,
my love for Street Fighter, now years later, being able to dive deep into that world again,
bring the excitement of Street Fighter back to fans, what can we do to get them excited again?
This is a celebratory collection of Street Fighter's arcade history.
Street Fighter's Legacy is really about a combination
of that pop culture apex, where this was a mass cultural phenomenon.
Everybody knew it, loved these characters, but then also, and equally,
these are just well-balanced, fun, memorable games that have spurred awesome tournament play for decades.
And as this franchise has found its footing again in the last few years, it's all about combining those things.
You talk about the history of all games ever made.
It has to be in the discussion of the top five games.
I mean, it must be because of its contribution.
They probably brought in more female game players and fighting game players than ever before.
The thing that really hammered home for me was that it was one of those games that everybody knew about.
You know, you could have a conversation with a member of your family
who've got no interest in video games whatsoever.
And know what Street Fighter 2 was, just like they knew what Tetris was and Mario was.
It was one of those games that just became a household name, even with people that weren't remotely interested.
More and more people are coming up to me
with the Blu-ray and the DVD and they say, this is my favorite movie from childhood.
This was the first action movie a whole generation of kids was allowed to see.
So in hindsight, well, it's pretty tame for Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
But if you've only seen Disney movies, this is like, Oh my God, look what's going on here.
So Street Fighter 2 contains a lot of...
This is my childhood.
This is my history. This is where I got started. These are the origins. This is.
I know this.
A lot of players find the new games quite scary, quite intimidating.
There's all these features and meters and resources I have to manage and it's just too much.
Just let's just go back to the classic.
Well, I know when it was simple, you know, and there's a lot of people that feel that way.
People who haven't played video games for 20 years can pick up a controller
and they know the motion is for a fireball.
Its just like getting on a bike again. You never really forget.
So I think because they were there first and because you have got this strong brand
that's really iconic with retro being such a big thing now
and you can get Street Fighter in so many different formats.
That appeal is still there.
The core foundation of Street Fighter, combined with very popular characters,
I think these are the two elements that have kept it relevant for all of these years.
Everybody knows the Street Fighter characters. They're as iconic as Mario or Sonic.
Just something about Street Fighter that's worked without cereal and without action figures.
I almost would like them to go back to basics.
Let's see a much more edgy Street Fighter.
Think of when Alpha 2 came out or Alpha, and you're seeing this the level
from the animated movie in the fields with the grass and a lightning storm.
And you're like, Yes.
When have Street Fighter fans ever said,
Oh, this is too dark and moody and edgy, ever. When does that ever happen?
So why don't they go down that hole as far as it can take you?
Because there are plenty of fans that are like:
I don't like this cartoony eyes bulging, kind of goofy cartoony Street Fighter.
I really want to see something fresh
with Street Fighter 6 that makes me want to pick up the pad and play it again.
Street Fighter it always has a place for people
that want to play a simple fighting game because it just looks very bare bones for me.
That is why it's still really popular and quite frankly it's a very amazing game, is just a really good game,
you know? Why are you having that meal is just a nice meal.
There's no I can't really give you a complicated answer.
It's just really, really tasty.
I'm just glad that I was part of something that was so much loved.
There's a lot of nostalgia that keeps them alive.
The way it moved and sounded.
It's always going to represent a moment in time that got something exactly right.
There was just something magic about it.
I mean, people who have never seen it will stop and look at that game.
I've watched it happen.
It was the game that launched this entire genre.
I mean, it was the one. And it was massively successful at doing it.
It's not like we're talking about a game that is the unsung hero of the fighting genre.
This is the hero. The original.
Starting with Street Fighter 2, today is the best introduction
you can have to the community, to the genre, because the basic reflexes,
the basic intuition you need for a competitive fight can be found in Street Fighter 2.
It's just classic old school gaming and it doesn't get old.
It still holds up.
So no matter whether you play classic Street Fighter,
sort of late nineties Street Fighter or, you're into the more modern stuff.
It's it's all good.
It's ability to just work as a tournament standard
as e-sports has evolved and tournament standard really not only
with the modern titles like Street Fighter 4 and 5 but Super Turbo stands up is an incredibly tournament
friendly, well-balanced, competitive game that allows the greatest players to shine.
To me, it's wonderful 30 years later that we're still talking about something
that was so iconic and cool and still popular with everybody today.
It's fantastic to be part of it.