Street Fighter: The Movie (arcade game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Street Fighter: The Movie is a 1995 arcade fighting game that arrived at an unusual crossroads: a video game adapted from a film that was itself adapted from a video game. Capcom, the franchise's owner and the film's financier, handed development duties to Incredible Technologies, a small Chicago company better known for low-budget projects. What followed was a production plagued by royalty disputes, an angry visit from Capcom Japan, and a final release that critics widely panned. How did a game with 600 to 800 digitized frames of animation per character end up rated two stars out of five? And what strange techniques buried inside it would quietly influence Street Fighter games for years to come?

• 2. An Unlikely Developer

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  Incredible Technologies had experience with both fighting games and digitized graphics, which is precisely why Capcom came calling. The company was small, and the staff were not confident they could handle a high-profile project. They accepted the job anyway, partly to keep themselves financially afloat and partly to fund their own independent work.

  To capture the footage needed for the digitized characters, a five-person team made the journey to Australia, where the film was being shot. The group included Elaine Hodgson, Incredible Technologies' president and CEO; co-owner Richard Ditton; game designer Alan Noon; project manager Leif Marwede; and art director Ralph Melgosa. They brought rented camera equipment and planned to wrap the shoot in under two weeks.

  The plan fell apart almost immediately. The film's actors demanded a share of the game's royalties, forcing the Incredible Technologies team to wait in Australia for several more weeks while negotiations between the actors and Capcom dragged on. Capcom paid for the team's room and board throughout the delay.

  Once the shoot was underway, other complications arose. Many of the actors could not perform the full range of moves required for the game. Marwede and Noon handled all the choreography themselves, and Marwede would sometimes physically hold actors in position for a shot. His presence was then erased from the footage in post-production.

• 3. Behind the Digital Faces

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  Jean-Claude Van Damme, who played Guile in the film, was only available for four hours of the shoot. As a result, stuntman Mark Stefanich simultaneously performed the role to fill out Guile's required animation set.

  Raul Julia, who played M. Bison, is credited in the game for reprising his role. His likeness appears only in archive footage pulled from the film itself. For the actual in-game character, Darko Tuscan, Julia's stunt double, was digitized instead.

  The technical scale of the project was significant. Each character had between 600 and 800 digitized frames of animation, adding up to 32 megabytes of graphics in total. Each character used a 256-colour palette. For context, previous CPS-based Street Fighter games used 16 colours per character, and Mortal Kombat used 64. The Japanese instruction card for the game listed the original Japanese names of the characters in parentheses beside their western names, because Street Fighter: The Movie is the only game in the series where boss characters Balrog, Vega, and Bison, along with Akuma, are addressed by their western names in the Japanese release.

• 4. Gameplay Experiments

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  Air combos, called "juggling" in the game, received far more emphasis here than in previous Street Fighter titles. A player could chain a series of attacks against an opponent while that opponent was still falling through the air.

  The throw system was also reversed. Holding the joystick toward an opponent while throwing sent them in the opposite direction, and vice versa. Players could also attempt to escape a throw entirely with no damage taken, counter a throw, reverse that counter, or even answer the reversal with a "slam master" technique, creating a layered chain of responses.

  Several characters gained new Special Moves exclusive to this game. Bison received the "Electric Arc", Cammy gained the "Whip Choke", and Guile's "Handcuff" was based directly on a glitch from the original Street Fighter II. Zangief and Balrog gained the ability to deflect projectile attacks back at opponents.

  Two broader systems debuted here before appearing elsewhere in the franchise. "Interrupt moves" could be performed after blocking an opponent's attack, and "comeback moves" activated only when a player's life gauge reached the danger level. These would later appear as Alpha Counters in Street Fighter Alpha and as Ultra Combos in Street Fighter IV. A Regeneration move, which restored a portion of the vitality gauge when the Super Combo gauge was full, later showed up in Street Fighter EX3 and Street Fighter III.

• 5. The Roster and Its Secrets

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  Akuma had been a hidden character in Super Street Fighter II Turbo and in X-Men: Children of the Atom, but Street Fighter: The Movie made him a regular selectable character for the first time in any game.

  Fei Long was absent because the character had not been used in the film. Dee Jay, T. Hawk, Dhalsim, and Blanka were also missing from the standard roster, though Blanka appears as a rare easter egg: he briefly jumps into the stage, electrocutes himself, and leaves.

  Two original film characters joined the lineup. Sawada was an original character created for the film. Blade, a member of Bison's shock troops, also appeared, along with three palette swaps of Blade named Arkane, F7, and Khyber, all accessible as secret characters.

  A powered-up version of Bison, called S. Bison, served as the final computer-controlled opponent in Tag Team Mode and could be unlocked via codes. Leftover data inside the arcade version reveals that Blanka was planned as a playable character; an ending for Blanka is accessible by playing as S. Bison in arcade mode. Blanka and Dee Jay were eventually added to the selectable cast of the home versions, which were separately produced games rather than ports of the arcade release.

• 6. Capcom Japan's Unhappy Visit

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  For most of development, Incredible Technologies worked without meaningful oversight from Capcom. Near the end of the project, a group from Capcom Japan traveled to the company's Chicago offices to assess the game.

  The visit was tense. Akira Yasuda and Katsuya Akitomo both recalled that Yoshiki Okamoto appeared angry for much of the time. By that point, development had progressed too far for any major changes to be practical. The Capcom Japan group offered suggestions and made small adjustments to the graphics before leaving.

  The game launched into arcades and landed at thirteenth place on Game Machine's list of most successful arcade games in Japan for July 1995. In North America, RePlay ranked it ninth among the most popular arcade games for the same month. The trade publication Maximum described it as "reasonably successful in the arcades." Next Generation gave the arcade version two stars out of five, noting that the game featured the familiar fighting moves from Super Street Fighter II Turbo alongside excellent new ones, even as critics broadly judged the overall project a failure.