The Making of Street Fighter II

The arcade craze of the 1970s opened up new opportunities for companies already active in the coin-op business. Sega, Namco, Taito, Konami and Midway adopted it and made a name for themselves in this new field. A brief golden age for developers would soon follow. arcade owners and fans in the early 1980s, global icons and new trends followed one another in rapid succession as the foundations for many game genres, combat sports or the genre of wrestling were represented from the beginning by the '76 Sega boxing game, Heavyweight Champ. In the mid-80s Nintendo and Technos took their first steps in this combat sports genre with Punch Out and Karate Champ.

Konami broke with the sports field and developed Yie Ar Kung-Fu inspired by Bruce Lee films. This 1985 game pitted the player against one another. against a gang of martial arts masters with their own distinctive looks and moves, its home computer sequel added a two-player mode in which players could choose from several characters, including the Chinese warrior Lan Fang. The arcade boom also led to business success. Like Irem and Capcom, who would contribute to the fighting genre, a man who had worked for both companies was Takashi Nishiyama in his Irem days, he worked on the beat'em up Kung Fu Master, after which CapCom pursued him.

Upcoming Osaka-based CapCom had quickly gained a reputation for its action-shooter titles. Nishiyama would continue his passion for martial arts themed projects, resulting in the 87th release of Street Fighter, this title would focus on an international fighting tournament in which young martial artists Ryu and Ken would participate along with a planner. Nishiyama gave it a cinematic quality, drawing inspiration from Enter the Dragon. They spent a lot of time developing the personalities of the characters beyond what was present within the game as the arcade industry had evolved. In a highly competitive market, the large number of new arcade machines that entered the scene had to fight for their own place within shopping centers or cafes, competing not only with the new machines but also with the proven and still successful ones from previous years. , so game designers had to be inventive to capture the attention of gamers and arcade owners.

The Street Fighter team added pressure-sensitive controls to make it stand out. This feature eventually caused more pain than enjoyment and was replaced by a six-button setup despite its initial problems and rushed development. The Street Fighter show became a decent hit and would advance the genre with additional elements like special command attacks. By the mid-1980s, the trend had emerged to streamline development and manufacturing with standardized arcade hardware that could be used in multiple games, companies were designing their own games. With home systems often featuring similar components like Sega, Capcom chose the 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, Zilog Z80 co-cpu, and a Yamaha FM audio chip as the basis for its arcade hardware called the cp system.

This was a three-board configuration with board A, which included the main hardware components, similar to a games console, board B stored the game data and therefore acted as a game cartridge, while the C board could host future extensions, the innovative shooter Forgotten Worlds would be the first Capcom title developed for CPS. Capcom had three developments. teams at the time The two former Konami employees, Fujiwara and Okamoto, managed the first and third development teams respectively, while the second team was headed by Nishiyama, who led Street Fighter Forgotten Worlds would be under Okamoto's team. He asked two young game designers to further develop his ideas, they added concepts such as changing the roll to have full control over the character's aim, being the first game developed for the CP system, it had its challenges, the long process of Development and the large amount of memory the game required contributed to its financial failure, however, it was the beginning of an important partnership between two young game designers Akira Nishitani, a pur-sang game planner, and illustrator Akira Yasuda.

The arcade market had been in steady decline since the mid-1980s. Genres such as shoot-em-ups were losing popularity in the West and were generally less profitable for arcade owners. It was time for Capcom to focus on a different genre of fighting games and beat them. Ups were starting to gain traction and had a much larger coin flow due to their multiplayer aspect, so the desire for a Street Fighter successor was growing within Capcom. The main forces behind the original game had left the company to work for competitor SNK, so a new team had to take over.

Young talents from Capcom's third development team, including Akira. Yasuda began developing plans for Street Fighter 2 with massive characters, however the project was quickly shelved when the company faced a massive memory chip shortage in 1988. Yasada teamed up with Nishitani to develop a simpler game plan. Instead of the beat em up Final Fight, since Capcom could only get a fraction of their ordered rom chips, they had to work with a smaller rom capacity than Forgotten Worlds and learned from their experience in this shoot-em-up. The two game designers established an efficient working style and made sure to get maximum results in the limited ROM space, for example by shortening the width of the character's walking animation, they were able to save memory.

Nishitani's understanding of game design really came to the fore. During this project, while his fellow planners started out as graphic designers or programmers, he was hired specifically for this role. Nishitani did not take any game mechanics for granted, but worked hard with the programmers to improve the gameplay. Final Fight was ready for release after six months. of production and would fit within the designated memory capacity. The beat-em-up was a huge success for the company and helped put Capcom in a more financially stable position. Quickly following this massive success, Yasuda and Nishitani revised the ideas for Street Fighter II.

The price of rom chips had dropped to the point that the two were able to start the ambitious Street Fighter 2 game plan in late '89, despite Nishitani's designs for new game ideas, management requested a simple game in line with the original, so the core structure was established. At first, a roster of 8 playable characters and 4 bosses participated in a global fighting tournament. It was within these limits that they had to find ways to establish the next big step for the genre, as in Final Fight, designing the characters was the first priority. It was decided early on that Ken and Ryu would return for this sequel keeping in mind the character sketches from the first Street Fighter 2 concept.

Nishitani and Yasuda began

making

lists of nationalities and fighting styles they wanted to represent in the game. His philosophy was to play with stereotypes but make them exaggerated in a way that talked about them and contrasted them a lot. Under Yasuda's direction, a small group of lead character designers would begin developing their sketches and notes over several months. Ninja was assigned Spanish nationality, which gave his designer a healthy challenge. Fist of the North Star's character designs put him on the right path to drawing the bull

fighter

ninjutsu warrior. A key strategy in the workflow was to give each artist only a few characters to develop.

This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged them to make their own characters the most skilled and iconic. The designer in charge of Guile was passionate about his character and decided to turn the low kick on its head to create his iconic reverse overhead kick. Strange ideas like these were embraced by Nishitani as he had an open directing style and did not want to hinder the creative flow; for example, Dhalsim's limbs began to get longer and longer with each iteration. Nishitani was confident that he could counter it in-game by

making

it move noticeably slower. Developing special attacks was also part of the designer's responsibility.

They were given a list of moves as an initial guide, but it was up to the artists to bring them to life. Eri Nakamura, who was in charge of E Honda, thought a lot about how to perform “Super Headbut” he decided to make the character fly to really justify the term “super.” It became clear that Street Fighter II would cross the line from realistic to unrealistic, but this gave the game its charm. The directors jokingly agreed that only once a year. This move made them laugh. Would it be accepted that the project was allocated 48 megabits of memory, ten times more than most console games at the time and also exponentially more than Final Fight?

This allowed for smoother animations in combination with large character sprites, but even at such a large size. capacity, the need to track data was a necessity, as was the norm in the past, they used custom sheets called rom boards. Each sheet visually represented the amount of graphics space on a single rom bank and allowed them to align all the artwork in a way that would be most effective, however characters would slowly begin to outgrow their designated memory once in production. Yasuda had his hands full running the art team, drawing his own artwork while also being assigned to other projects when his colleagues couldn't find him. working at his desk, he was most likely sleeping under one to recover when he finally had time to work on his own character, Chun Li, right at the end of the first milestone, the memory space had almost run out, forcing the team to reduce the animation frames. several characters unlike other companies Capcom artists primarily used their keyboards to draw the pixels each of the 16 colors on a palette had its own assigned key and with a little practice it really boosted production the art package was limited to 32 by 32 pixel blocks so that artists could only work on one part of a character at any given time, a group of background artists began working on the set art and were directed in a similar manner.

Fashion artist Asae Nishitsuji was told he could draw anything for E Honda. scenario provided that it included Mount Fuji and a sumo ring after submitting countless drawings and ideas, he presented a sumo ring inside a bathhouse to his surprise, it was immediately accepted, although the background artist was considered to be the Entry level job within the company. The work contributed greatly to the final feel of the game. The programming team was able to improve their work even further. They implemented a routine that shifted horizontal lines of pixels at different speeds to simulate a 3D perspective with the artwork taking shape in the tedious balancing process, and Akira Nishitani and the programmers began developing the gameplay.

It was in the gameplay and controls where he saw enormous potential for improvement over the original. To begin with, making sure the movements and animations had the right and satisfying feel was the main priority, for example the weight. The variety of characters was not only conveyed in their speed but also in their animation frames, this made a character like E Honda feel heavier compared to an agile character like Chun Li, the input for special attacks was also programmed to that was less strict. longer time window to enter your commands, which made special attacks a central part of the player's arsenal, as a side effect, accidentally opening up the opportunity for combos.

The game designer had wanted to include some sort of combo system, but the one that ended up in the final game was actually the result of a longer input window. Hitboxes were a common practice for implementing hit detection. Each animation frame had its own set of hitboxes. More frames meant more CPU power was required. Hitboxes would be assigned parameters for attack and damage, making this potentially possible. To implement body part damage alteration or make characters more vulnerable during specific moves, the team tested these concepts but abandoned them in the final version because they thought it would be too confusing for players.

A fragment of this concept accidentally remained in the code for the creation of Ryu. made him more vulnerable in some animation frames were thesmall details that sometimes caused unexpected headaches. They failed to find a satisfactory acceleration routine for the characters' recoil animation. In the end they manually plotted the movement on graph paper and programmed it into the game as a series of position changes demonstrated the lengths they would go to set new standards in the fighting genre. It was time to start adding another layer of substance to the game. Yoko Shimamura of Capcom's sound team was between projects.

TheStreet Fighter. Concept II appealed to her and she decided to join the project. Shimamura had no experience composing when he joined Capcom a few years earlier and had to bluster his way through. After a stressful initial few months at the company, he began making valuable contributions to the sound team in a supporting role. Nishitani explained the concept to him. of the game. Shimumura opted for a light-hearted approach in which she would interpret what the music of a specific country should feel like rather than looking for a faithful representation that fit the overall style. Shimamura made sure the drums and sound effects were loud enough to be distinguishable in the noisy game rooms while the art team was finishing all of the game's visual elements, from bonus stages and character portraits to the intro sequences.

And finally, memory space continued to be a struggle, each character had an entrance animation planned, but it had to be scrapped to free up some memory, leaving only M Bison's entrance animation in the game, a huge differentiating factor. The game's concept focused on two-player versus mode, a feature that had been underdeveloped in previous

fighter

s and had the potential to greatly increase coin flow, so a full versus mode meant a lot of work. extra for the team in their effort to balance all the characters countless hours of gameplay testing was required and new members of Capcom were constantly brought in for a fresh perspective.

It was tradition to demo early versions of arcade games in select arcades to get initial feedback. Certain statistics could be stored in memory for developers to analyze to their surprise. discovered that one player had 85 consecutive wins with Zangief, leading to the decision to reduce his strength in the final build. After about a year and a half of development, the final version of the game was delivered and the team held their breath and hoped that the game and its two-player mode would be a success much to their surprise. The Japanese test audience had largely ignored this feature and therefore profits were lower than expected.

The development team prepared for a possible failure. The situation at the US test locations was the complete opposite of how the game played out. Therefore, the machines cost over $1,400 in the first week and were easy to sell to American distributors. The following months machines were built and shipped to appear in arcades around the world in April 1991. Street Fighter II the World Warrior was an instant smash hit and would not. It took a long time before the Japanese public got used to competitive versus mode and turned it into a global phenomenon. Street Fighter II's controls managed to revolutionize the fighting genre and paved the way for versus fighters, but competitors did not stand still Takashi Nishiyama, one of the protagonists of the original Street Fighter had been working on his own spiritual sequel at SNK as head of development.

He contributed to the initial concept of titles such as Fatal Fury, King of Fighters and Samurai Showdown and was thus able to continue his passion for this genre in a versus crowd. Fighting games would enter the scene in quick succession. Technical advances made it easier for developers to realize their own vision, resulting in a wide range of graphic styles and settings, from digitized actors to stop-motion puppet animation and pre-rendered CGI characters. All Hollywood tricks. Both old and new were used to attract players, while Nishitani continued to modify Street Fighter II's gameplay after its release, although there were no official plans from Capcom for a major update, it was community input collected. by capcom u.s. employee James Goddard who launched the game's first major overhaul, demand from distributors was high enough to justify Capcom making an updated version called Champion Edition that includes improved character balance, mirror matches, and the four bosses as playable characters.

The next big update was Once again, reaction to events outside of Japan's Capcom pirates had been a major problem from the beginning, but when a pirated accelerated version called Rainbow Edition began to gain traction, something had to be done. At first, Nishitani was skeptical and feared that increasing the speed would completely break his well-balanced game, but once he proposed it to him he realized that it would actually work. Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting hit arcades in 1992, and even then it would only mark the beginning of the game's longevity. The days of the successful Nishitani. and the Yasuda production team would soon come to an end.

Both men were encouraged to spread their knowledge throughout the company, but would go their own way as new talent would step in to lead the franchise. The impact of Street Fighter 2 would not be limited to the arcades. Both Nintendo and Sega pressured Capcom to release their machines on home consoles. A game of this magnitude could play a big role in the success of the Super Nintendo or Mega Drive. At the end of 1991 rumors circulated about a debut on Sega's Mega CD, although in reality Capcom would soon begin porting the game to the Super Nintendo, the development schedule was tight requiring porting this 48 megabit arcade game to a 16 megabit cartridge in just a few clicks.

A few months ago the resolution of Nintendo's console was one step lower than that of Capcom's arcade board, which automatically meant less memory was needed for graphics resources, but the console team still needed to take shortcuts, it was reduced the number of animation frames and simplified voice samples and ending sequences. They successfully managed to reduce the scale of the game without it affecting the feel of the game the port was set for. in the summer of 1692 and helped greatly boost sales of Nintendo's 16-bit console as production of new games for the console lagged behind, it was the game Nintendo needed to take on the fierce competition from Sega that year selling Street Fighter II in these quantities.

It was a good business for Capcom, although the profit margins were relatively low. Capcom was a loyal partner of Nintendo in the domestic market, but the situation for a third party was far from ideal. Cartridge manufacturing was under the control of Nintendo, which also generated higher external costs. In addition, the license fee further reduced third-party profit margins. Capcom's consumer division was becoming more important to the company. Its US office had been pushing to extend its development to Nintendo's competing platforms since the late '80s. Japan's Capcom was unwilling to do so. Damage their strong relationship with Nintendo, they would go no further than licensing some of their existing arcade games to Sega, who would have to develop the ports themselves.

Street Fighter II would increase the pressure on Capcom's exclusivity for Nintendo. Sega continued to push hard for a port of their smash-hit arcade game, and it remained a delicate situation that required many behind-closed-door negotiations between the various parties from November '92 onwards. Rumors of a Mega Drive release began to reach the media in early '93. Capcom publicly announced their partnership with Sega and a new port. of his successful fighter was already on the way. Capcom did not have a Mega Drive development team at the time and opted to outsource development, although that effort seemed promising. Capcom was not satisfied and decided to abandon that approach in favor of developing the game in-house with the project already greatly delayed, it was up to Capcom's console division to deliver the port as quickly as possible.

Many members who worked on the Nintendo port participated in the project in the fall of '93. Sega fans were finally able to play Street Fighter II Special. Champion Edition, as expected, was a huge success, but delaying the game until the fall had the unfortunate side effect of having to compete with the much talked about Mortal Kombat and therefore affected final sales. There's no denying the impact of versus fighters on the home console. market would not only boost console sales but were also a focal point in the very heated discussion about violence in video games in the arcade scene.

Their arrival was more than welcome, they revitalized arcades for years to come.