Fighting Games Friday: Rise of a Street Fighter

The history of Street Fighter II has been well documented over the last several years, to no surprise for the game credited with bringing the fighting game genre to the mainstream audience and spawning several clones. But one key game has been left out here. Not as many features have been written for the original Street Fighter, the game that kicked off the franchise and paved the way for its much superior successor. It wasn’t the most polished game around and felt dated mere years after it released in 1987, but there was no way there wasn’t an intriguing tale behind its development at Capcom.

Polygon’s feature about its development, Street Fighter 1: An Oral History, isn’t the first to dig into how the project came to be and the aftermath following its release, but it is the most in depth yet. The “Oral History” series of features are different from typical long-form features posted on other gaming sites and blogs. Here, the head writer, usually Polygon Features Editor Matt Leone, provides questions for developers and promoters involved in the original games following a detailed lede, and lets them do the talking. This feature continued that trend by including developers who worked at Capcom in the 1980s and 1990s and others who promoted and helped distribute it at Capcom USA. I highly encourage you to read the piece, but I want to highlight the parts that stuck out to me for this post.

The first ideas for Street Fighter emerged during a boring and overly-long board meeting at Capcom Japan, as they all do. Director Takashi Nishiyama explained how the game’s concepts were inspired by Kung-Fu Master (Spartan X in Japan), a game referred to as the first real beat ‘em up, which he previously worked on at Irem. The arcade game, which later received an NES/Famicom port, involved a titular Kung-Fu Master who traveled through five levels to save his girlfriend from a crime boss. For Street Fighter, the developers considered its overall concept, and imagined each encounter as a boss battle. This explains not only Street Fighter’s approach to progression, but also why Ryu bears a resemblance to the Kung-Fu Master in how both wear all white karate gis.

Nishiyama explained how the team came up with all sorts of ideas for playable character concepts, but didn’t have the resources to implement most of them. In the end, the only playable characters were Ryu (Player One) and Ken (Player Two), both of whom have identical move sets. Both characters take on fighters, essentially all boss fights, around the world, with the final boss being Sagat. Other characters could be played in alternate versions of the arcade game and, of course, hacks.

I only spotted a Street Fighter arcade cabinet in the wild a few times in arcades when I was younger, but I thought it was too complicated to learn and that its subject matter was too mature for me. I was just the right age for Street Fighter by the time SFII came along. But this is the first time I’m reading that there were two variants of this game’s coin-op machines.

The original featured joysticks alongside two ginormous red and blue buttons for the main techniques, first chosen because Capcom’s marketing team felt a six-button setup would be too complicated. There were reports of people having problems using the two giant buttons to play, who claimed it was murder on the hands. That’s easy to imagine considering how unresponsive the original Street Fighter game was compared to its progeny. The six-button setup that took off, one still used to this day.

Just how well the game performed in arcades was disputed among the Capcom Japan and Capcom USA staffers who spoke for the piece, even with those in the same region. Ryan Cravens, one son of late Capcom USA vice president of marketing and sales Bill Cravens, said “it was popular, but it obviously wasn’t Street Fighter 2.” Jeff Walker, another Capcom USA vice president of marketing and sales, guessed it only sold around “2,500 to 3,000 units, period.” Nishiyama thinks around 1,000 cabinets with the pneumatic buttons were sold, and 50,000 with the six-button interface. Everything indicates that it sold okay, though as Ryan Cravens said, it was nothing compared to the phenomenon that was its successor.

The piece also highlights the truth between Capcom and SNK rivalry. It wasn’t as deep as rumors in magazines and the early internet suggested, but tension existed between Capcom CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto (still CEO of the company to this day, believe it or not) and SNK founder Eikichi Kawasaki. This started and subsequently intensified when Capcom hired employees like composer Harumi Fujita away from SNK, leading to a brewing lawsuit both companies privately settled. Tsujimoto declined the offer to speak for the piece, while Kawasaki couldn’t be located. The rivalry was largely playful among the regular employees, which culminated with the Capcom vs. SNK and SNK vs. Capcom games.

After Street Fighter’s okay performance, Nishiyama and his team left Capcom for SNK to work on Fatal Fury. There’s a reason why both games are similar in style, where Fatal Fury involves three characters, Terry Bogard, Andy Bogard, and Joe Higashi, fighting against one boss-like opponent after another in Southtown to make their way to crime boss Geese Howard. It’s true that Fatal Fury was never a rip-off of Capcom’s series, which still pops up infrequently to this day. This also explains why Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu had to form a different team with the remaining developers for Street Fighter II.

It’s tough to find a game that doesn’t have an entertaining development backstory, but this Street Fighter feature courtesy of Polygon delivered. Dare I argue that reading this is more entertaining than actually playing the actual game these days, the delightfully goofy voice acting aside. But it’s still worth giving a short for the sake of curiosity if you have it on a retro collection. Hopefully Polygon and other sites can keep this up, perhaps with some SNK games, despite the reading audience for those being smaller than one intrigued by the far more popular Street Fighter.