Today, esports has embraced the series and the world's best Street Fighter players — the likes of Daigo and Bonchan — earn serious money competing in the game professionally in front of thousands. True, gaming has always been about competition, but few games took things as seriously as Street Fighter. It introduced the idea of incremental updates. Street Fighter II was such a success that Capcom realised it could grow the franchise with regular updates rather than having to worry about creating traditional sequels.
This approach was actually triggered by the fans rather than Capcom itself. Demand for the game was so high that pirated arcade boards began to appear, which offered extra features such as new moves, faster gameplay and the ability to play as the four 'Grand Masters' — the end bosses who were off-limits in the original Street Fighter II.
For better and for worse, these incremental updates were massive money-spinners in both the arcades and at home, where regular ports to domestic consoles kept fans contented.
In the modern era, these regular updates have allowed Capcom greater control over the direction of the series, making rebalancing and fixes easier to deploy and keeping players engaged with new content and characters.
Crossover chaos. This year's Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is a long way from being the first game of its kind; Capcom was experimenting with crossover titles way back in the early '90s. X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes were early attempts to shoehorn superheroes into a Street Fighter-style environment — complete with similar special moves — but it was 's X-Men vs.
Street Fighter which gave us what we really wanted: the awe-inspiring spectacle of Capcom's Street Fighter cast facing off against the likes of Cyclops, Gambit and Wolverine.
Ryu and company were practically superheroes anyway, so the set-up didn't seem too ridiculous. Since then we've had Marvel Super Heroes Vs.
Street Fighter, Marvel Vs. Capcom and even Capcom Vs. It settled a console war. A long-time Nintendo supporter, Capcom decided to bring the game to the SNES first, with a domestic release taking place in Sega fans eventually got their hands on Champion Edition a short time later, but this period of exclusivity helped Nintendo's bit system make significant gains on its rival, especially in Japan.
In the west, copies of the Japanese import version of the game changed hands for many times more that its recommended retail price as gamers found the wait for the official release to be too painful; had Capcom decided to support both the SNES and the Mega Drive at the same time, things could have been very different, but back in , any gamer worth their salt simply had to own a SNES for Street Fighter II.
Current page: Page 1. Get the best gaming deals, reviews, product advice, competitions, unmissable gaming news and more! David Houghton.
See comments. Gaming deals, prizes and latest news. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. Initially, Dhalsim's arms and legs didn't stretch as long as they ended up in the final game.
But everybody wanted to make their character better than the others, so his arms and legs just kept getting longer and longer. During development I was thinking, well, in the worst case scenario I'm going to make them stretch about half the length that they ended up. But I was able to make it work in a balanced way. I think the crazy personalities of the staff showed in the gameplay. Because all these unique people got together and everybody had something they wanted to do.
So they gathered all of that and put it together into one game. And because of that, I think it turned out to be something unique. One of Street Fighter 2 's most popular features was a subtle tweak to the original game's control scheme. To reduce the reliance on luck, the team made it easier for players to perform characters' special moves. As it turned out, this opened up the game in a way the designers didn't intend, allowing players to link together multiple hits before their opponents could react.
In short, they invented the combo. Some called it a bug. At one point, I saw him spending time analyzing why it was so difficult to pull off a Shoryuken [special move] in the original Street Fighter — it's really difficult to perform the command, but it inflicts a lot of damage if you do it right.
And everybody just had that idea that a Shoryuken was tough to pull off but when you did it was very powerful. But Nishitani said, "It doesn't have to be like that. If you could make it easier to perform, it would make the game look cooler and be less about luck.
Motohide Eshiro Programmer, Capcom Japan :. Early on in development it became clear that we were being a little too strict and a little too severe with the input methods. So when you did the down, down-forward, forward punch [input to perform a fireball], you had to hit punch at exactly the minute you were hitting right on the joystick or it wouldn't work.
And it was just really hard for people to get their heads around that — it really felt like you were doing it right and it wasn't working. So we decided to open up that timing a little bit, just by a few frames, so that if you hit that punch button within those few frames you'd be OK and your fireball would work. And as a side effect of that — so I guess if you wanted to call it a bug, you could, but really it was a side effect of giving people more time to enter the button — players could perform combos.
So if you were doing a crouching kick by holding down, and then pressed right and punch when your character was doing that animation, you could connect those together. It wasn't intentional to let players combine moves into combos, but it wasn't a bug in that it was planned to make it easier to do your special moves.
No one else we asked was familiar with Ikee-chan or this version of the story, and Okamoto wasn't able to point us in a direction to find him today. To many, Street Fighter 2 's art was its defining feature, thanks in part to the money Capcom threw at the visuals. The art staff accounted for more than half of the development team, with approximately 20 artists split between character designs, faces and backgrounds, all working under Akira Yasuda.
It was probably the most beautiful game for its time — the background animations, the character animations Yasuda] is such a talented artist When he designed characters, he [planned out their moves up front] in a way that the animation looked best No other artist could do that. He was a pioneer. If you look at some of the fighting games out there that are so-so, they don't have good colorform breakup. So when [characters] throw a kick or a punch, it all kind of bleeds together so you don't track the limbs that well.
And this guy was way ahead of his time on all of that. Each artist drew each pixel on the characters, so in general it took about 10 months for an artist to draw a character. So he would go around and teach people how to draw stuff. Then toward the end of development, he would crank stuff out in a really short amount of time, but the quality was really high. That's how good of an artist he was. Chun-Li has big thighs, right? So back in the day, I asked Mr. Yasuda, "Why does she have such big thighs?
And you know, I'm a woman and I asked the question but it kind of got awkward when he started explaining his fetishes. I mean, he has really strong feelings toward his creations. There's a reason for everything being the way that it is. When I heard that, I thought maybe that's something that everybody thinks, but everybody doesn't go out telling everybody. But he just told me. The work was really tough, but now when I look back on it, the work is pretty flavorful.
Like Blanka, for instance — when he moves back, his back gets smaller. It wasn't supposed to happen like that, but that just happened because of how we were creating the art, and that brings me a nostalgic feeling. To celebrate Capcom's 30th anniversary, last year the company organized promotional events across Japan, such as this small art exhibit in the basement of a Tsutaya store in Osaka's Dotonbori district. The display included concept art from various Capcom games, with early Street Fighter sketches showing characters such as Ryu, Chun-Li and Zangief.
Once the team locked in the game's concept and art style, the soundtrack and sound effects fell to Yoko Shimomura, who had also previously worked on Final Fight.
Shimomura would later go on to work on some of the Japanese game industry's biggest franchises including Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.
When a project came around, Capcom usually looked for people in the sound department who were free at the moment, and I was free. There were two projects that needed sound composers at that time, and I just happened to pick Street Fighter 2. At first, I was worried if I'd be able to pull the job off right, because it was a fighting game and I wasn't sure if that would match my style. Before Street Fighter 2 came along, the sound composition across all Capcom titles had a heavier tone, a cooler tone.
But I made it lighter and more upbeat and had more fun with the tracks There were people within the company saying, "OK this seems a little off from Capcom's style. Nishitani said, "No, this is fun.
We should do this. I liked her approach a lot. I remember asking her to make melodies that were clear and easy to remember instead of image songs. And I think she did that perfectly. Each character had a different country of origin, so the main direction I gave was to compose songs that reflected those countries.
Nishitani would come up to me and show me designs of the characters and explain the personalities of the characters and ask me to make theme songs for each character. And then I would look at the backgrounds and the character descriptions and all that, and I noticed that each character had a unique background. And because of that, I suggested making each theme song based on their background country and culture.
So it was kind of like a brainstorming session — he would have his orders and I would come up with ideas. I think the crazy personalities on the team carried over to how the game was made. Usually on a game, the programmers don't have a say about the music.
But with Street Fighter 2 , I composed a track that I was thinking, "Oh maybe this could be good for Guile's theme song or Ken's theme song," but I didn't say anything. I just composed the song and let everybody hear it. And then the programmer who was working on Guile, [Mr. Eshiro], was like, "OK I love this song. I like this track a lot, so I'm taking this track for my stage.
But it turned out that was sort of what I was intending it for in the first place. Shimomura left Capcom before I started there, so I just knew her music as a player. But when I first heard her tracks, they blew my mind. The great thing about her work is not that it's particularly complex, but the way she creates a very catchy tone, kind of like Michael Jackson.
In a short segment she's able to describe a lot. Once you hear a bit of Ken's theme or Chun-Li's theme, you instantly feel like you're in this special place. A lot of people know her for her work on games after she joined Square Enix, but I feel like my favorite work of her's is what she did on Street Fighter 2. Much like the theme songs, the game's character designs were also rooted in the team's interpretations of different countries — the sumo wrestler from Japan, the fire-breathing yogi fighter from India, etc.
And in certain cases, the character names played into those stereotypes, making some in the U. At that time, there was no localization department. Actually, there was no such word as "localization.
Scott Smith:. There was the concern that M. Bison was way too close to Mike Tyson.
0コメント