Street Fighter III

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Street Fighter III arrived in arcades in 1997. It followed 1991's Street Fighter II, the game that had turned the series into a phenomenon. Capcom's own general producer, Noritaka Funamizu, explained the biggest gamble behind the new game in blunt terms. He said: "We feel that 3D is not really suitable for the head-to-head fighting... and, to be frank, Capcom doesn't really have the techniques to display high quality graphics in 3D." Rival studios were chasing polygons and three-dimensional arenas at the time. Capcom's newest fighting game stayed flat and hand-drawn instead. What made Capcom so confident that two dimensions still had room to grow? Who would carry the series into a game that reshuffled almost its entire roster? And after all that risk, how would players and arcade operators actually respond?

• 2. Betting Against The Trend

  ›

  Production on what would become Street Fighter III began in 1994. It was initially planned as an entirely separate fighting-game franchise. Series producer Noritaka Funamizu had grown tired of the Street Fighter name by then. He felt worn down by falling home-console sales and by the rise of three-dimensional fighting games like Virtua Fighter. When Capcom's executives pushed for a direct follow-up to Street Fighter II, Funamizu chose instead to build something new. Producer Tomoshi Sadamoto took charge of that new project, then called simply New Generation.

  Despite the era's enthusiasm for polygonal fighting games, Capcom held firm on two-dimensional sprites. That decision drove development of a new arcade board: the CD-ROM-based CP System III. It was built to render far more elaborate 2D graphics than the CPS II hardware behind the earlier Street Fighter Alpha games. Capcom's polygon ambitions went elsewhere instead, into a separate spin-off title called Street Fighter EX.

  Committing to hand-drawn art meant Sadamoto and his team would have to build an almost entirely new cast from nothing.

• 3. Shaping A New Roster

  ›

  Ryu and Ken were the only fighters Capcom carried over from earlier games. That is why this entry carries the subtitle New Generation. A new lead character named Alex headed the fresh roster. A previously unseen villain named Gill took over the boss role M. Bison had held in earlier games. Character designer Akira Yasuda thought the emerging roster still lacked personality. He believed the game would end up carrying the Street Fighter name regardless. So Yasuda pushed to fold in the franchise's own protagonist, Ryu, ahead of time. He turned out to be right, and the project was rechristened Street Fighter III: New Generation.

  Sadamoto also weighed bringing back Street Fighter II veterans such as Ken and Chun-Li. The team committed to a mostly original lineup instead. Designing convincing female characters proved especially hard for Sadamoto, since the earlier games had set a high bar. Yasuda's fix was simple: make the first female character a ninja, reasoning, "Ninjas are cool!" The idea produced Ibuki. A separate pitch imagined a character as "Yuki in Africa," modeled on the real-world model Yuki Uchida. Yasuda designed her, and the result, Elena, helped the team settle on a vision for the rest of the cast. Ken himself was folded back in only once development was already underway. The American fighter Alex was picked as protagonist partly because the team believed martial arts held particular appeal for American audiences at the time.

  Yasuda kept working inside constraints Sadamoto set, a departure from earlier games where Yasuda had directed the designs himself. Chris Tang, who supported the project from Capcom's North American office, said he was shocked on first seeing the finished designs. Oro's look in particular made him wonder whether Yasuda had left the company. Software support for the new CPS-3 hardware was thin, and its higher resolution demanded far more design detail than earlier games required. Character balance suffered too, since each developer fine-tuned their own fighter, leaving some feeling true to Street Fighter and others closer to Capcom's Darkstalkers series. Years later, speaking to the gaming website Polygon, Yasuda was asked whether the game might have fared better without the Street Fighter name attached. He answered: "If I had to change the past, I'd rather just not have worked on that game at all."

  One planned fighter, Hugo, missed this first game entirely. He debuted instead in the follow-up, Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact, alongside a returning character named Akuma.

• 4. Faces Of The New Cast

  ›

  Alex, the new lead, fights with close-range grappling and heavy punches. He chases a single goal: avenging his friend Tom, whom Gill had defeated. Ryu himself ends up defeating Alex in 3rd Strike. Dudley, a British boxer, wants to recover his late father's antique Jaguar convertible, also taken by Gill. Elena, a princess from Kenya, fights with capoeira, striking with her legs and feet even on punch-button moves, and wants only to make new friends. Ibuki, an aspiring ninja, is sent to retrieve something called the G File from Gill's organization.

  Necro, a Russian character kidnapped and experimented on by that same organization, seeks revenge but barely escapes with his life. Oro, a reclusive hermit, binds one of his own arms in battle to avoid accidentally killing an opponent, all while searching for a fighter worthy of inheriting his style. Sean, a young Japanese-Brazilian fighter, appoints himself Ken's apprentice. Yun and Yang, twin kung fu experts from Hong Kong who lead their own city, share a single roster slot and identical movesets in this game. Yang gained a separate moveset and slot only later, in 2nd Impact.

  Gill leads a secret organization bent on turning the Earth into a utopia, wielding fire and ice. He stands as the final opponent for nearly every fighter across the series' first two entries.

  Only one cast member kept a single voice actor across all three games: Ibuki, performed throughout by Yuri Amano.

• 5. Parries And Super Arts

  ›

  Dashing and retreating, lifted directly from Capcom's own Darkstalkers series, gave fighters new ways to close or open distance. Super jumps and quick recoveries after a knockdown arrived from X-Men: Children of the Atom, another Capcom fighting game. The game also introduced leap attacks, small jumping strikes aimed specifically at crouching opponents. Aerial guarding, a staple of the Street Fighter Alpha series, disappeared entirely. It was replaced by a new defensive option called parrying, known as blocking in the Japanese version.

  Samurai Shodown II, a 1994 fighting game, is often credited as the first to use a parry system. In Street Fighter III, a player deflects an incoming attack by moving the controller toward or down at the exact instant it would land, avoiding damage entirely. A successful parry leaves the attacker open to a counter. It even works against Special Moves and Super Arts, sparing the defender the small chip damage ordinary blocking allows through. The technique demands precise timing, which made it one of the game's defining skills.

  Super Arts gave each fighter a powerful move in the tradition of the Super Combo seen in Super Turbo and the Alpha games. After picking a character, a player chooses one of three character-specific Super Arts to carry into the fight. A Super Art gauge fills as the player lands regular and special moves, and only a full gauge allows the move to be used. The gauge's length and how many stocks a player can bank both depend on the Super Art chosen. Players could also cancel a special move directly into a Super Art, a technique carried over from Street Fighter EX.

  A newly animated "turned-around state" left a struck character with their back to the opponent, a hit-stun state only certain attacks could trigger. Because recovery from it took longer, grabs and throws could now be strung together into combos in a way earlier games never allowed.

  Whether these new systems would land with players was still an open question when Capcom kept the game hidden through most of 1996.

• 6. Rumors And Ports

  ›

  On the 27th of March 1996, Capcom announced during a meeting in Tokyo that Street Fighter III was in development. Capcom later said the project had taken more than two years to finish. The game's existence surfaced publicly in September 1996, at the Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association show, shown in just a few minutes of footage inside Capcom's promotional reel.

  Shinji Mikami, a Capcom senior planner, said shortly before that show that porting Street Fighter III to any home console on the market would be impossible. That comment fueled speculation the game might instead land on the unreleased Panasonic M2 console. In January 1997, the gaming site IGN reported watching the game run on Nintendo 64 and 64DD hardware. IGN guessed it could launch alongside the 64DD peripheral in Japan, then still scheduled for later that year. Capcom dismissed the Nintendo 64 talk as "just a rumor," and Nintendo ended up delaying the 64DD anyway, until December 1999. By late 1997, Capcom said a Sega Saturn version might be possible if paired with one of that console's RAM expansion cartridges.

  Running on the CPS-3 engine, each character was built from roughly 700-1200 individually drawn animation frames, with the game itself moving at 60 frames per second. The arcade cabinet carried the onscreen title Three: A New Generation of Street Fighters. Two follow-up versions arrived afterward: 2nd Impact in 1997 and 3rd Strike in 1999.

  In 1999, Capcom finally brought a home version to the Dreamcast: a compilation called Street Fighter III: Double Impact, known as W Impact in Japan, pairing the original New Generation with 2nd Impact. That package added Arcade, Versus, Training, and Option modes for both games, plus a Parry Attack Mode in 2nd Impact's bonus round. There, players could practice the parry technique directly. It also let players control Gill in both games and Shin Akuma in 2nd Impact, two fighters who were computer-controlled only in the arcades. New Generation returned once more in 2018, folded into the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

  None of those re-releases touched the game's music, which had a separate life of its own on CD.

• 7. The Sound Of Street Fighter

  ›

  First Smile Entertainment issued the original New Generation soundtrack on CD in 1997. Mars Colony Music followed in 2000 with the 3rd Strike soundtrack, later paired with an arranged version. That 3rd Strike release included three songs and announcer tracks recorded by the Canadian rapper Infinite. The scores leaned heavily on drum and bass, blended with touches of jazz, hip-hop, house, and techno. Yuki Iwai composed for New Generation and 2nd Impact, while Hideki Okugawa worked across all three games in the series.

  How that music and everything built around it landed with players was about to be tested in reviews.

• 8. A Mixed Verdict

  ›

  In Japan, the trade publication Game Machine named Street Fighter III the most successful arcade game of March 1997. Even so, the game struggled to break even there, carrying a budget of 1 billion yen, roughly $8 million, against sales of only 1,000 cabinets. Worldwide arcade sales estimates ranged from 1,000 to 10,000 units.

  Next Generation reviewed the arcade version and awarded it four stars out of five. The magazine still questioned Capcom's choice, writing: "The great mystery is why Capcom called this SFIII instead of leaving that honor for a more powerful and revolutionary 3D title." It added: "Gameplay in the SF series reached the ceiling of 2D possibilities a while ago, and as good as this game admittedly is, besides the stunning graphics there's little to distinguish it from the 11 games before."

  GamePro likewise praised the outstanding graphics and flawless controls. The magazine felt the game lacked real innovation for the series, describing the new characters as a mix and noting some felt more suited to Darkstalkers. It concluded the game left players looking forward to the next installment rather than excited to keep playing this one.

  Famitsu scored the Dreamcast compilation, Double Impact, at 31 out of 40. Reviewer Jim Preston, writing for Next Generation, rated the Dreamcast port three stars out of five, calling it "a no-frills port of the arcade game that is great at a party but pointless for single players."

  Reviews were mostly positive, but Street Fighter III never matched the commercial success of Street Fighter II. The series would not return until Street Fighter IV arrived in 2008.