Street Fighter Alpha

• 1. Introduction

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  Street Fighter Alpha arrived in arcades in 1995 carrying a question that Capcom had not answered in four years: what comes before Street Fighter II? The last all-new Street Fighter game had been Street Fighter II itself, released in 1991. Now Capcom was reaching back, imagining younger versions of familiar fighters and pulling in characters from the original Street Fighter and from Final Fight. The result was a prequel that also felt like a new beginning. It had a new art style borrowed from Darkstalkers and X-Men: Children of the Atom. It had a revamped combo system. It even had a secret character named Dan, a deliberate joke at the expense of rival company SNK. Before Street Fighter Alpha could reach players, though, Capcom's own engineers had to solve a production puzzle: two completely different arcade hardware platforms, developed side by side, each with its own audience and its own constraints. The story of how this game got made, and what it became, is not what most people expect.

• 2. Building From Scratch

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  Production for Street Fighter Alpha started in October 1994, immediately after the release of Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors. Capcom gave the development team three months to build a game from scratch. They took six. The pressure was real, but so was the hardware puzzle the team walked into.

  Capcom had been buying back its older CPS-1 arcade boards from operators in order to push them toward the newer CPS-2 hardware. The buyback program created an unexpected stockpile of CPS-1 boards sitting in Capcom's inventory with nowhere to go. Street Fighter Alpha was initially built for that older hardware, a way to put the surplus to use. But then Capcom accumulated a stockpile of CPS-2 boards too, so the team pivoted and developed both versions simultaneously.

  The two versions were not identical. The CPS-1 edition had a different-sounding soundtrack and fewer sound effects than its CPS-2 counterpart. The practical advantage of the CPS-1 version was access: arcades that could not afford the upgrade to CPS-2 hardware could still carry the game. Publicity testing versions of the CPS-1 build were distributed to arcades in limited quantities before the full release.

  The game's name went through its own journey. The prototype title was Street Fighter Classic, which described its intent to fill the narrative gap between Street Fighter and Street Fighter II. That became Street Fighter Zero. Then Capcom's North American public relations team objected, finding the word Zero too negative in tone. The U.S. market heard the title announced as Street Fighter Legends before the team landed on Street Fighter Alpha, chosen for the way it signaled a fresh start.

• 3. New Rules, New Fighters

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  The three-level Super Combo gauge was the mechanical heart of Street Fighter Alpha, and it changed how players had to think. Super Street Fighter II Turbo had introduced Super Combos in the first place, but Alpha expanded the system. Players could press different numbers of punch or kick buttons simultaneously when executing a Super Combo, spending more or fewer gauge levels depending on how many buttons they pressed. A single block could generate a counterattack called an Alpha Counter, which cost one level of the gauge.

  The two play styles, Normal and Auto, gave beginners a way in. Auto mode automatically guarded against a limited number of incoming attacks and allowed players to trigger a Super Combo instantly by pressing a matching punch and kick at the same strength. The trade-off was a hard cap: Auto mode locked the Super Combo gauge at level one, permanently.

  Air Blocking let fighters guard while airborne. Chain Combos, also called Alpha Combos, let players interrupt one basic move with another of equal or greater strength. Players could also roll along the ground after being knocked down, something earlier Street Fighter games had not offered.

  The roster brought back Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Sagat from Street Fighter II, while Birdie and Adon made their first appearances as playable characters, having previously appeared only in the original Street Fighter. Guy and Sodom crossed over from Final Fight. Two characters were entirely new to the series: Charlie Nash, described as Guile's combat buddy who uses the same special techniques, and Rose, an Italian female fortune teller who draws on an energy called Soul Power and has ties to M. Bison. Dan, Capcom's parody of SNK fighters Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia, was a hidden character making his series debut.

• 4. The Dramatic Battle's Secret

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  Buried inside Street Fighter Alpha was a mode that most players never unlocked: the Dramatic Battle, a two-on-one fight in which two players controlling Ryu and Ken faced a computer-controlled M. Bison together. The match was not invented for the game. It was taken directly from the climax of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie.

  The Japanese arcade version made the connection explicit. Over that confrontation, the game played an instrumental rendition of the movie's battle theme, a track called "Itoshisa to Setsunasa to Kokoro Zuyosa to". Outside Japan, licensing issues forced Capcom to swap in M. Bison's regular in-game theme instead. Players in North America and Europe heard a different battle, even if they were watching the same characters fight.

  When Street Fighter Alpha Anthology collected the series for PlayStation 2, the Dramatic Battle mode returned in an expanded form. The compilation's version let players select any pair of characters, not just Ryu and Ken, and pit them against a series of four computer-controlled opponents in sequence: Adon, Sagat, M. Bison, and Akuma. The compilation also added an option to enable Super Cancels, allowing players to cancel a special move into a Super Combo mid-execution.

• 5. Ports and Platforms

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  Because Street Fighter Alpha's character animation data was relatively small in volume, Capcom was able to port the game to the Sega Saturn and PlayStation without stripping it down. Both home versions incorporated source code from the arcade release, and both offered an arranged soundtrack alongside the original. Players could switch between the two. The home versions also introduced Training Mode to the Street Fighter console lineup for the first time, letting players practice against a non-hostile character with no timer pressure.

  In Europe, the home versions were published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment under a Capcom licensing deal, not by Capcom directly. The PlayStation version reached the PlayStation 3 and PSP via the PlayStation Network on the 14th of August 2008 in North America. Japan received the CPS-1 version of the arcade game through Capcom's CPS Changer hardware as a mail order release in 1996. A Windows PC version followed in 1998, built from the PlayStation version as its base.

  A Game Boy Color version, converted by Crawfish Interactive, came out in 1999. It ran with downscaled graphics and sound, had no link cable support, and was single-player only. Notably, the Japanese Game Boy Color release used the Alpha name rather than the Zero name that Japan had used for every other version of the game.

  Street Fighter Alpha was among the twelve games included in the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, which released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Windows with save state support.

• 6. Reception and Rankings

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  Game Machine, a Japanese trade publication, listed Street Fighter Zero as the second most successful arcade game of July 1995 in Japan. By the end of the year it ranked as the second highest-grossing arcade game of 1995 in Japan, trailing only Virtua Fighter 2. In North America, the trade publication RePlay reported Street Fighter Alpha as the most popular arcade game of August 1995. In the United Kingdom, HMV counted it among the nineteen best-selling PlayStation games of 1996.

  Critical coverage was largely positive, with some reservations. Computer and Video Games praised the improved sprite graphics and called out the revamped Super Combo system and the Alpha Counter mechanic as genuine innovations, calling the game "fast, exciting, visually explosive and for our money a dead cert hit." Next Generation acknowledged that the changes were subtle rather than sweeping but concluded that Street Fighter's gameplay foundation was strong enough that subtlety was appropriate.

  Electronic Gaming Monthly gave the PlayStation version its Game of the Month award. Reviewers for Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, and Maximum all found the PlayStation port nearly indistinguishable from the arcade version, though load times drew complaints. GamePro described the PlayStation version as "easily the best argument that the PlayStation is not just a polygon-based system." Maximum called it "the next logical evolvement of the most popular fighting game of all time."

  For the Saturn version, GamePro and Maximum both singled out the coloration of the Super Move shadows as a particular achievement of that port. Maximum gave the Saturn version its Maximum Game of the Month award. In 1996, GamesMaster placed Street Fighter Alpha 43rd on their list of the Top 100 Games of All Time.

• 7. Legacy and Sequels

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  Street Fighter Alpha 2 followed in 1996, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 arrived in 1998. All three games in the series, along with their upgraded editions, were collected in Street Fighter Alpha Anthology for PlayStation 2 in 2006.

  A manga adaptation drawn by Masahiko Nakahira, based on the original Alpha and Alpha 2, ran in Gamest magazine from 1995 to 1996. UDON adapted it into English in 2007. Two animated works followed the game: Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation in 1999 and Street Fighter Alpha: Generations in 2005.

  The Game Boy Color version earned a runner-up position in two of GameSpot's annual awards, finishing second for Best Game Boy Color Game behind Dragon Warrior I and II, and second for Best Fighting Game behind Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000. The character Dan, introduced in Alpha as an internal Capcom joke about SNK's Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia, went on to become a recurring and beloved figure in the Street Fighter series long after the Alpha sub-series concluded.