The Making of Street Fighter II
Taken from Edge Magazine, Issue #108
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Created to catch a wave of interest in fighting games, it was a sequel born from obligation, not desire. Expectations were low; then people learned how to Hadoken. Remember? Remember `down, down/right, right, punch, down, down/right, right, punch, down, down/right, right, punch`. It's that sort of game. The sort of game that breeds obsession. "Oh, there have been many obsessive users", Noritaka Funamizu, the lead producer on Street Fighter II, thinks back and smiles. "I do have one example I can tell you about. One young man, from the Aomori prefecture flew to our office in Osaka and told the security that he wanted to meet me. He said that he had great ideas about a fighting game and he would not return to his home until he made me read his notes. I did not meet him. We gave him lots of goods and made him return to his home safely". Funamizu-san laughs. "It was a great time", he continues. "I mean, it may have been the greatest time for our arcade sales. Our CPS-1 (arcade board) was just finalised and the first game was ready, Final Fight. We all wanted to make new things. I have real good memories of those times", and then he pauses, and that brings the inevitable futuristic caveat. "On the other hand, during the following years, the company became too big and we were always asked to make the same kind of titles. Final Fight-type games or fighting games. I became bored of this. But of that particular time, I have very good memories. I really enjoyed it." It was 13 years ago, 1989, and Capcom, under pressure from its US branch, decided to start work upon a follow-up to its mediocre `87 beat-em-up, Street Fighter. Funamizu-san himself was unsure. "The first Street Fighter was not a success. But when everybody forgot about it, fighting games started to become popular in the US, so we were asked to make a sequel. When we presented Final Fight to the US, they asked us to make fighting games our priority. I felt uneasy. I mean, when we finished FF they told us we were wrong, that it would never succeed in the US. Final Fight became a huge success. It sold more than 80,000 units in the US." CRAZY PEOPLE Despite its concerns, the Japanese developer threw all its resources into the game, installing Funamiz-san as producer and bringing in two more of its most respected designers alongside him. "Yasuda Akira was in charge of the character design, while Nishitani Akira [now CEO of Akira] was in charge of the game design. Two crazy people for sure. There were a lot of staff on the project, around 35 to 40 people, a hell of a size at that time - the maximum you would expect then would be 20. This was a record: I mean, there were 20 designers in charge of the characters alone. The entire project took around two years, and people said that if Street Fighter II had failed Capcom was over, but hey, come on, Final Fight was such a success that there was never going to be a problem." Funamizu-san's plan wasn't built on subtlety. "I put everything I'd wanted to do for a while into it. I think that character design was half of the game's success - when we made them we had the feeling it would become something great. We started thinking what special attack each character would use. Ryu and Ken were already defined, but, for example, we wanted a pro wrestling fighter so we started to think what kind of attack he would perform. When we had one (`Pile Driver'), it was obviously too unimpressive for the game so we had to make it much more spectacular. As we went deeper in the game we took an incredible amount of time finalising their moves... an incredible time." But there was one thing that Capcom didn't really worry about. "Many think, wrongly, we put a lot of attention into the game's balance but it's not true. Why do people play our games? Because they are fun. A game based on good balance alone is crap. What kind of fun can you provide when you push a button? What fun is there in pushing a button several times? Only a child has fun simply hitting a wall or a surface again and again. The answer is in animation patterns. You have to design them, modify them until you have a very enjoyable result, optimal visual comfort. Even if you're designed everything from the beginning, you always find during the development process the need to have a new kind of damage in the face of a given attack or situation. The relationship between the move and the damage is very important. That gives the player the comfort, the incentive for him to play the game. Then all you have to do is to polish the thing, set the balance." Accidental Hero Bu the need for extra animations wasn't the only thing that arose during the development process. "One thing is quite amazing: the combo. It was an accident really. While I was making a bug check during the car bonus stage - you know the one in which you have to destroy a car - well, while doing that I noticed something strange, curious. I taped the sequence and we saw that during the punch timing, it was possible to add a second hit and so on. I thought this was something impossible to make useful inside a game, as the timing balance was too hard to catch. So we decided to leave the feature as a hidden one. The most interesting this is that this became the base for future fighting titles. Later we were able to make the timing more comfortable and the combo into a real feature. In SFII we thought it you got the perfect timing you could place several hits, up to four I think. Then we managed to place eight! A bug? Maybe." The quality-control reminiscence produces an afterthought, "Speaking of bugs, SFII had a mountain of bugs. I think it was a record inside Capcom. We built around 26 masters. So many days I spent in the office. But we made it at the end." Millions of twitch-fighting thrill seekers will be glad that did. Street Fighter II was the defining point in the one-on-one beat-em-up's genesis, a game which offered instant entertainment for casual arcade browsers an alongside unsurpassed level of depth and strategy for dedicated players. Not bad for a company which, at the time, was something of a minor player in the beat-em-up community. "I always considered our company as someone fighting with a bamboo stick. We didn't have the resources to equal Sega's or Namco's hardware. We had our own level of resources. While they were racing in F1 cars, we were in basic Honda's. However, we had a great skill. If you take this little Honda, it has a very good engine and with only one litre of petrol it can cover quite a distance. Of course, distance is not an issue." He laughs. "Our CPS-1 was made with this in mind. While it didn't offer the latest technology or CG, it was flexible, able to give the creators the possibility to use and modify data in all ways. It could handle a large amount of different graphics data onscreen. A rock would not be the same from one part of the screen to the next. It addressed many memory issues, which made our work easier compared to others. While Ryu was made in 8Mbit, we were able to make Zangief in 12Mbit. On other boards you would have to make every character in 8Mbit. The hardest issue was to make the game fun. And..." Another pause, another moment of future regret. "We did it so well with SFII that we've been asked to continue that for a long period, always fighting with our bamboo stick, and to keep people finding the same fun in our games." So Funamizu-san would eventually find himself a victim of his own success, of his impulsive desire for over-the-top fighting fun, but oh, what fun: eight playable characters, each with an overwhelming arsenal of moves at their disposal, and, crucially, special attacks whose intricacy was proportional to their success. SFII soon dominated the arcades, and, regardless of whether it arose by chance or through design, the level of balance was stunning. Not flawless, though; dedicated arcade players would soon discover flaws like `the tick`, the act of using a light jab with Guile, forcing the other player to block, and following it up with an unstoppable throw. Still, the kinetic pull of the game was enough to see dubious tactics morally outlawed in all right-thinking arcades. Cabinet Shuffle At the end of Street Fighter II's development cycle, the team finally got a chance to join the public in relaxing with its product. "The work was over and we had so much free time. We gathered in the office and played games. We all thought the game would never sell much in Japan. We were sure the fighting boom would never happen. Well, in the US it already was and soon, fighting games started to be popular in Japan. The main reason is the cabinet. The normal way at the time was to have two players looking at the same screen, so they would sit together side by side. One day we started to get complaints from people angry the game could not be displayed correctly. We were very concerned and unable to understand why. Then we saw it: someone had made a Vs cabinet. It was one cabinet with two screens connected to it. Vs. We were astonished... well, it was obvious that the game would have difficulty in displaying the data correctly. So, anyway, we addressed the issue and the fighting game boom started all over the country. We made Street Fighter 2 Dash, and sales were so high. I mean the game cost around ¥150,000 or ¥160,000 [£820] and we sold about 140,000 of them. I can't even imagine such numbers now. We were selling arcade games as consumer games. Can you imagine? 140,000 units. At the same time copies started to flow in. When these copies were coming in great numbers from overseas, we had some feedback with people delighted by the high speed action of versions in Hong Kong for instance. So we decided to make the Turbo version - we called it Turbo because it was faster". Recalling the increasingly strained titles - Hyper Fighting, Dash, Championship, Super, Turbo, and so on - of the hundreds of cross-system Street Fighter tweaks and spin-offs, Funamizu-san grins. "I tried to make sense of the titles back then." Halcyon Days And that brings more 16-bit romanticism. "Those days were much more interesting than now. I mean many new things were possible. Now we are focused in making huge projects, costing a lot more money, ¥500 million [£2.6m] or ¥1.5 billion [£7.9m]. Adventure is not possible any more. Of course we were naive, and we got low salaries thanks to the company head, but we had this incredible sense of adventure you don't find today. Well, maybe it's not that impossible, but the meaning of adventure is different, faded." Thankfully, some things don't lose their colour. Those who've experienced the recent Revival on the Game Boy Advance - those obsessives who've memorised the combos, who can't put their hand on the D-pad without twisting it through quarter rotations - they will testify, Street Fighter II shines brightly, shines like a fireball.
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