Street Fighter: The Movie (console video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Street Fighter: The Movie arrived on store shelves in September 1995 as a launch title for the PlayStation in North America, and it sold out within a month. That commercial triumph looked, on the surface, like a win. But the critics had already made up their minds. The reviews were brutal, the retrospectives were worse, and one writer at USgamer would eventually call it "largely remembered for being an abject embarrassment."

  How does a game sell out and still become a punchline? What happens when a film adaptation spawns a game based on a game that was itself based on a film that was based on a game? And what does Raul Julia, one of the most celebrated actors of his generation, have to do with a stunt double named Darko Tuscan filling in at the last minute?

  Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Game Within a Game

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  Capcom released two separate games called Street Fighter: The Movie, and the confusion between them is not a footnote but a genuine source of the home version's critical problems. The arcade game and the console game share a title, share the same digitized photographs of the film's cast, and were built on the same basic premise. But the console version is not a port of the arcade game.

  Instead, the home version is far closer to Super Street Fighter II Turbo in its combat structure. The arcade's roster included an original character named Blade, plus a collection of palette-swapped soldiers called the Bison Troopers. None of them appear in the home version. The backgrounds are entirely different from the arcade's. Even the sprites, though drawn from the same photographs of the film's actors, were processed through a different pipeline.

  Several critics who reviewed the game did not realize the two versions were distinct products. A reviewer for Electronic Gaming Monthly was among those who failed to make that distinction clearly. The confusion mattered because it led critics to judge the console version against the wrong benchmark, docking it for failing to reproduce an arcade experience it was never designed to deliver.

• 3. The Mechanics Underneath

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  Captain Sawada, an original character created for the 1994 film, appears in both the arcade and the console version, though his special moves differ between them. The console version also added two characters from the film who had been absent from the arcade release: Dee Jay, played by Miguel A. Nunez Jr., and Blanka, played by stuntman Kim Repia.

  The combat system introduced what the game called Super Special Moves. These sat between a regular Special Move and a Super Combo. To execute one, the player needed the Super Combo gauge at least half full, at which point the filled portion of the gauge turned blue. Executing the same input as a normal Special Move while pressing two attack buttons instead of one would trigger the Super Special. The mechanic echoes the ES Moves from Night Warriors and the EX Specials later introduced in Street Fighter III 2nd Impact.

  Four modes gave players different ways into the game. The centrepiece was Movie Battle, a story-based mode in which the player controlled Guile on a mission to infiltrate Bison's Lair in Shadaloo City. Branching paths after certain matches altered how many opponents stood between the player and the final confrontations against Sagat, Bison, and a more powerful form called Final Bison. Completing Movie Battle unlocked a music video for the film's theme song, "Something There" by Chage and Aska. The other modes included Street Battle, which ran twelve consecutive computer-controlled opponents culminating in Zangief, Dee-Jay, Sagat, and Bison; a standard two-player Vs. Mode; and Trial Mode, where players fought the entire roster chasing a high score or a fast completion time. Akuma, played in the film by Ernie Reyes Sr., could only be accessed in this last mode via a secret code, and only appeared as the final opponent.

• 4. Raul Julia's Absence

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  Raul Julia was set to return as M. Bison for the video game. He did meet with the development team, but by then he was already seriously ill. He died in October 1994, before the game was finished. The role of Bison in the final product was performed instead by Darko Tuscan, Julia's stunt double from the film.

  Julia was not the only cast member whose participation ended before the game shipped. Robert Mammone, the actor who played Blanka in the film, also did not reprise the role. The stunt performer Kim Repia, brought in specifically because Blanka's moveset was particularly demanding to capture, took over.

  The North American and European distribution of the game was handled not by Capcom but by Acclaim Entertainment. Capcom kept its own publishing role in Japan, where the title was released under a different name.

• 5. Japan's Different Version

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  In Japan, the game was sold as Street Fighter: Real Battle on Film. The name change was deliberate. A separate, unrelated game called Street Fighter II Movie existed in the Japanese market, based on an animated film rather than the live-action one. Capcom needed to make clear these were different products.

  The voice samples throughout the Japanese version differed from those in the English release. The naming conventions also shifted. The three Grand Masters from Street Fighter II, whose names had been swapped between Japanese and Western releases, were referred to by their westernized names in the Japanese version, matching how those characters were dubbed in the Japanese version of the film itself. Akuma, known in the West by that name, was called Gouki in Japan.

  Capcom also announced a version of the game for the Sega 32X, described as an enhanced port, to be developed by a newly formed USA research and development department within the company. That version was never released.

• 6. What the Critics Said

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  Radion Automatic, reviewing the Sega Saturn version for Sega Saturn Magazine, focused on two complaints: excessive slowdown during play, and the fact that the game was not a conversion of the arcade version. The reviewer for GamePro reached the same verdict on the Saturn version by a different route, pointing to slow and choppy animation, weak battle voices, unpredictable frame redraw, and a recovery time so fast between hits that the game became, in that reviewer's words, "a wait-and-strike defensive game rather than a true competitive Street Fighter match." The publication's own editors noted that a firmly negative score from GamePro was unusual for them at that time.

  A critic for Maximum zeroed in on the digitization quality and the low frame rate, writing that the game's underlying structure was basically Super Street Fighter II Turbo but "crippled by bouts of slowdown." The same writer quoted the feeling directly: "The fluid, instinctual response of the previous SF games seems to have been lost and with it, any real compulsion to play it."

  Not every voice was negative. A reviewer for Next Generation praised the range of characters and the number of modes available, concluding that the game "looks and plays great." But the same publication, in a shorter assessment of the PlayStation version, reversed course and called it "A major misstep all around." The PlayStation version drew its own separate wave of criticism: long load times, conspicuous glitches, control lag, bad voice acting, and sprites that failed to resemble the actors they were based on.

• 7. Retrospect and Rights

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  Marissa Meli of UGO.com placed the game at number 102 on her ranking of the 102 worst games of all time. Bob Mackey of USgamer framed it as one of the worst launch titles the PlayStation ever received.

  The commercial story took a quiet turn decades later. In October 2018, the Canadian production company Liquid Media Group acquired the game's Western publishing rights, along with other titles that had originally been owned by Acclaim Entertainment. What that acquisition means for the game's future availability remains, for now, an open question.