Over at the Shoryuken forums—where all things Street Fighter are discussed—is a currently ongoing, constantly updated thread on the making of Street Fighter The Movie (the game). A former Incredible Technologies employee, Alan Noon, who credits himself with the titles artist and co-designer also performed the roles of playable characters Blade, F7, Arkane and Khyber. He provides fascinating insight into the development of the almost universally reviled video game adaptation of the film adaptation of the video game.

Fascinating insight? Really? Really.

According to Noon, the game was at one point positioned by Capcom to be Street Fighter 3 and include the oft-rumored character Sheng Long. Noon even got the enviable task of designing what the character would look like.

Sheng Long was going to be awesome. He wore black Gi pants and a long, green, padded/quilted, sleeveless Gi style top which was tied off with a black belt. His hair was very long and white, being done up in a single big braid running down his back. He also had a very long kung fu movie style Fu Manchu moustache. Now this is where things get a bit wilder... He also wore a thick black ribbon over his eyes. The reason for this I explained, was that Akuma had attacked Sheng Long in an attempt to kill him, and while he failed in slaying Sheng, he did succeed in taking his eyes out and blinding him. Sheng Long was so badassed though, he didn't even really need his eyes to fight.

Ok, so now the design really gets crazy... the final component of Sheng Long's design was his arm. So as I understand it, originally Ken and Ryu's hadoken specials were supposed to representations of their Chi, focused into a single high powered attack. "Hadoken" supposedly translates roughly into something like "force wave," and in the original art, you can see phantom representations of their hands in the projectile. I believe that what the happened was that for the most part, your typical westerner arcade customer wasn't familiar with the concept of Chi in that day and age, so these attacks were generally referred to as fireballs.

At some point during the series, Ryu actually started throwing fireballs, and Ken developed the flaming dragon punch. As part of Sheng Long's design, I tried to explain these phenomena. So my idea was that at higher levels of enlightenment, these karate master guys would start to take on aspects of "the dragon" as it suited their fighting style. Sheng Long was to be so advanced, he actually started to physically manifest dragon like attributes. Seeing as the words "Sheng Long" were actually a translation of "Dragon Punch" it seemed to make sense that his dragon manifestation would appear in his punching arm. The arm was green and scaly, with several horns protruding from it's length. His fingers had fused together into 2 larger claws. Capcom signed off, and we were all set to create my Sheng Long!

Apparently, the Sheng Long character was even fully digitized before Capcom execs pulled the plug.

There are a ridiculous amount of details in Noon's various write-ups and Q&A posts. Highlights include how Incredible Technologies secured the license (via Time Killers, believe it or not), working with Jean Claude van Damme and Raul Julia, visiting the Street Fighter The Movie set, trying to get actors to record voiceovers for attacks like "shoryuken" and "hadouken", and a behind the scenes look at the digitizing process.

An amazing read worth your time if you consider yourself a Street Fighter fan or marginally interested in game development. Michael McWhertor

Street Fighter the Movie Broke My Heart [SRK Forums via NeoGAF]

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