Cammy

• 1. Introduction

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  Cammy, the blonde British commando from Capcom's Street Fighter series, once won a fan vote by a margin that startled the company. In 2008, Capcom asked which character fans most wanted in Street Fighter IV. Cammy collected almost as many votes as the other seven names on the list put together.

  That devotion is odd, because Cammy arrived as an afterthought and has never had a stable history. Games, films, comics and cartoons have each given her a different past. In some she is a hero. In others she is a weapon aimed at the heroes.

  Who decided the series needed her, and what did they build? Which version of her life is the real one? And how did a fighter with no ranged attacks end up on lager posters, in light novels and inside a battle royale game?

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• 2. A Second Woman

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  Noritaka Funamizu, who led research and development at Capcom, felt that Super Street Fighter II needed one more female fighter besides Chun-Li. Cammy was his answer. Her original design came from the same artist who had drawn Sagat for the first Street Fighter and who would later create Morrigan Aensland for Darkstalkers.

  There was a practical consequence to the choice. Chun-Li and Cammy lack the raw strength of the heavier fighters, so the game makes up the difference with speed. Both move faster than the rest of the cast.

  Her build suits that role. Cammy has a small frame, slender but visibly muscular. She has blue eyes, long blonde hair usually tied in two braided pigtails, and a scar on her left cheek.

  The character sheet describes a hard personality. One wrong word to her could end with a snapped neck, and she will not go down in a fight without making the other person pay for it. She is driven and determined, and she sees herself as a protector. In the Street Fighter V story she looks after Juni, a young woman recovering from the brainwashing that turned her into one of the Dolls.

  The same profile calls her gentle, respectful and kindhearted. It also admits she can be irritable and dismissive, and that she is hard on herself after mistakes. One trait stands out above the rest: she loves cats.

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• 3. Two Pasts

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  Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers introduced Cammy as one of four new fighters. In that game she is a teenage agent of Delta Red, a fictional commando task force inside Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Its job is to investigate and eradicate global crime syndicates. Her teammates include Commander Watson, Colonel Wolfman, Matthew McCoy and George Ginzu. Lita Luwanda, a first lieutenant, treats her like a little sister.

  Her ending changes depending on where you played. The Japanese version reveals that Cammy once worked for the villain M. Bison and lost her memory during an operation. The American version made her a former lover of Bison instead, still struggling with amnesia.

  Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold then showed a younger Cammy working as an assassin for Bison's Shadaloo organization. Her codename was Killer Bee, and later games describe her as one of the Shadaloo Dolls. She was a hidden character there, reachable only in the second player and training modes. Street Fighter Alpha Anthology later gave her a full arcade storyline and ending.

  Ultra Street Fighter IV added Decapre, an early product of the cloning experiments that produced Cammy. In Street Fighter V, Cammy frees Decapre from the brainwashing, and the rescued Doll joins her. The surviving Dolls fight alongside them in a final war against Shadaloo. Street Fighter 6 sends Cammy to investigate the first attack by Amnesia at Nayshall and the whereabouts of Shadaloo's remnants. There she grieves for Marz, a fellow former Doll who has died.

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• 4. Wardrobe Changes

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  Over thirty years, Cammy's clothes have mattered almost as much as her story. The look known as Delta Red Cammy debuted in Super Street Fighter II. It has a green sleeveless leotard, a red military beret, red gauntlets with armguards and black combat boots. Her pantyhose are stained with green camouflage.

  This version appears across the Street Fighter II games, the American film and television productions, many manga and comics, and the home versions of Street Fighter IV. Street Fighter V keeps the outline but adds a black harness on her torso and a gun holster on her right thigh. The camouflage pantyhose are gone. That version became her classic costume in Street Fighter 6.

  X-Men vs. Street Fighter introduced a second look. Her moves and style there resemble those of Spider-Man and Psylocke. She wears a light blue long-sleeved leotard, a matching garrison cap, brown leather boots and a small yellow necktie. The red gauntlets stay, with an added elbow pad on the right side, and her leg stains become blue lightning bolts. This is Shadaloo Cammy, also called Killer Bee, and she is approximately 16 years old. She appears in the Alpha, Marvel vs. Capcom and Capcom vs. SNK games, in Namco × Capcom and in several manga and comic adaptations.

  Street Fighter IV gave her alternate outfits as well. One is a blue fleece leotard with knee-high boots trimmed in wool, a Delta Red garrison cap and blue camouflage. Super Street Fighter IV added a costume echoing M. Bison's, borrowing his red color and the shape of his hat. It also added a catgirl-style outfit with metal gauntlets and leg coverings.

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• 5. Screen Roles

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  Before casting the 1994 live-action Street Fighter film, director Steven E. de Souza ran into a problem. He said they were having trouble finding Cammy, and described the auditions this way: "We're seeing a lot of English girls, but they're not very thin or they're wimpy." His verdict on the rest was blunt: "they couldn't beat up Pee Wee Herman."

  He searched through hundreds of actresses in the UK, the US and Australia. Then he found a Who magazine issue on the World's 30 Most Beautiful People. In his words: "Kylie was on the cover. Right away I said, 'There's our Cammy.'" Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue played her as a British intelligence agent, intelligence officer and aide-de-camp to Colonel Guile in the Allied Nations Army. Minogue also played Cammy in both Street Fighter: The Movie video games.

  Animation treated her very differently. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, from the studio Group TAC, is where she first received her full name. Early in the film, a brainwashed Cammy assassinates the British minister Albert Sellers. Chun-Li later interrogates her. Her fate then goes unclear, because Bison's final orders to Sagat are to eliminate Vega and Cammy. The English dub gives her an American accent.

  Group TAC's Street Fighter II V series reimagines her as a former special forces operative turned assassin. Balrog hires her to kill Chun-Li's father, but Fei Long stops her. When she learns Balrog tricked her, she nearly kills him. This Cammy wears black leather pants, a black fitted shirt, red gloves and boots, and a black necklace with a silver cross. She has no scar and wears a single ponytail. Its English dub also makes her American.

  The American animated Street Fighter series gave her the longest arc. In season one she is Guile's ally, flirts with him and joins his team. Bison then brainwashes her and she fights both the Street Fighters and Delta Red. She turns on him when she learns he killed her parents. At the end she chooses not to rejoin the Street Fighters and sorts out her life alone.

  Elsewhere, Street Fighter: Resurrection mentions her in the episodes "Fight & Flight" and "Mission Critical." She makes a cameo in the 2012 animated film Wreck-It Ralph beside other Street Fighter characters. An upcoming reboot casts Mel Jarnson in the role, based on the Killer Bee version.

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• 6. Ink and Merchandise

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  Masahiko Nakahira's 1994 manga Super Street Fighter II: Cammy, published in English by Viz Communications, made her the lead. It follows a 19-year-old Cammy through her commando training in the UK, the years she lost to amnesia, and her run-ins with M. Bison and his minions. Its story stands apart from the World Warriors tournament and brings in many new characters.

  Nakahira's 1996 adaptation of Street Fighter Alpha introduced her as a brainwashed test subject called Killer Bee. The video games later adopted that codename. His 1997 manga Street Fighter: Sakura Ganbaru! offers a gentler origin for her name. There, Sakura calls her Cammy by chance, after a cat in her neighborhood that the character reminds her of.

  UDON, which also published English editions of the Alpha and Sakura Ganbaru! manga, produced its own comic series. In it, Cammy is the Killer Bee assassin directly responsible for the death of Chun-Li's father. She is tracking Ryu in San Francisco when Rose captures her and undoes the brainwashing. Rose leaves her in front of the British embassy in Italy with no memory of anything before. A terrorist attack on the embassy triggers her latent fighting skill, and Delta Red signs her on.

  In the second series she takes leave to learn about her past and travels to Mexico with Chun-Li to meet T. Hawk. M. Bison intercepts them, recaptures her and demands she represent Shadaloo in his tournament. The brainwashing resumes during the third series, which covers Street Fighter II Turbo. Vega frees her before the tournament ends. She pretends to obey Bison while recruiting Chun-Li and Guile, and afterward she rejoins Delta Red.

  Yuka Minakawa wrote Cammy History, a two-volume light novel published by Wani Books in 1995. Merchandise ran from the ordinary to the strange. A lenticular-print wireless joypad for the PlayStation 2, from NubyTech and UDON, was announced on the 11th of May 2005 but never released. A Mad Catz wireless joypad for the PlayStation 3 carried her art. Figures came from makers including Funko, Kotobukiya and S.H. Figuarts. There was also a line of women's lingerie and a figurine that came with a DyDo drink.

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• 7. Guest Appearances

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  In X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK, Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Street Fighter X Tekken, Cammy plays in her Alpha form. The shoot 'em up Cannon Spike puts her in two outfits, her Super Street Fighter II costume by default and her Alpha costume as an alternate. She wears roller skates in both. She is redesigned for a feudal Japan theme in the browser game Onimusha Soul, and appears as a super-deformed character in the mobile puzzle game Street Fighter: Puzzle Spirits. She is also in the browser-based Street Fighter Battle Combination.

  In the tactical role-playing game Namco × Capcom, she starts as a brainwashed enemy and later joins the player as a partner to Chun-Li. She has also shown up in non-Capcom games, including Destiny Child, Gunslinger Stratos 2, Power Rangers: Legacy Wars and Valkyrie Connect.

  The beat 'em up Final Fight: Streetwise features a redesigned Cammy as one of the underground pit fighters who challenge the player. The game even has a brand of lager named for her, advertised on posters in its pool hall level. In Monster Hunter Frontier Online, players can dress their hunters in her Shadaloo outfit. Breath of Fire 6 and Monster Hunter Explore offer her Delta Red costume, and Frank West in Dead Rising 4 can wear a Cammy outfit.

  Fortnite Battle Royale added her on the 7th of August 2021, alongside Guile.

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• 8. Reception

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  Cammy was already a fan favorite before the 2008 vote. In Capcom's poll of 85 characters for the 15th anniversary of Street Fighter II in 2005, she placed second. She was also the most successful of the new characters from Super Street Fighter II.

  A separate 2008 Capcom poll asked fans which character they wanted back for Street Fighter IV. Cammy won it, and the result pushed Yoshinori Ono to put her in the game as quickly as possible. In a Namco poll about adding a Street Fighter side character to Tekken X Street Fighter, she was fourth most requested, with 15% of the votes. Users of the Japanese message board 2channel ranked her the second most kawaii female Street Fighter character in 2014. In a 2018 worldwide Capcom poll, she placed 11th among all Street Fighter characters. At ResetEra she was voted second most popular, behind only Chun-Li.

  Praise came from some unexpected places. Official Sega Saturn Magazine in the UK called itself "big fans of Cammy," and her fans included Jamie Lee Curtis.

  Critics focused on how she plays. IGN ranked her ninth in 2008 and noted she was the only one of the four new Super Turbo fighters to return in later games. GameDaily put her seventh, praising her assassin skills. UGO Networks also chose seventh in 2010, observing that although she has no projectile attacks, she compensates with quick, close kicks. The Gamer's Christopher Sanfilippo ranked her the third-best female character and singled out the satisfaction of launching her Hooligan Combination. At Den of Geek, Gavin Jasper placed her eighth and credited her twisty, flippy offense and determined coldness. Destructoid writer CJ Andriessen went furthest and called her the best character in the whole series, citing her moveset, back story and costume. SNK artist Falcoon said Leona Heidern is the company's answer to Cammy, since both are implosion assassins.

  Her appearance has drawn as much attention as her play. GamePro called her one of the most risque characters ever seen in a video game. Electronic Gaming Monthly gave her its Hottest Game Babe of 1993 award. GamesMaster renamed the game "SSF2: Cammy Forever," and the German magazine Video Games included her among its Miss Consoles in 2000. In 2012, NBC News listed her outfit among the five most preposterous in games, with the advice: "Put on some pants."

  Street Fighter V altered the angle of her entrance pose and removed what fans called the crotch shot, as it did for R. Mika. The change drew backlash. Then, at a 2017 Street Fighter V tournament, ESPN would not allow players to pick her default costume.

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