Street Fighter II was an important video game. It was one of the very first video games I ever fell in love with, and I know I’m not alone. So many of us just have the tiniest details of Street Fighter II embedded in our consciousness. That’s what makes the Twitter feed of Akira Nishitani so fascinating…
As the original Game Director Nishitani has been filling his feed with little snippets about the creation of Street Fighter II — explanations for some of its quirks or facets of the game that were canned during development. It’s become a real treasure trove for information on the greatest fighting game ever made.
A fascinating thread over at Mugen Fighters Guild has cataloged a whole ton of these tweets and translated them. There’s some incredibly interesting nuggets…
Like the fact that Chun Li’s stockings were resprited three times before being finalised!
Yasuda-san was extremely particular about the rendering of Chun-Li’s stockings, he ended up respriting them about 3 times. And thanks to that we ran right up to the deadline and ran out of memory. We had a hard time.
This one completely blew my mind…
A random SF2 memory. A programmer told me he didn’t want the rock in Sagat’s stage being used as a landmark for Ryu’s corner traps, so he proposed having its position change randomly by a small amount. I can’t remember if that was actually implemented or not. If someone has some free time, please investigate this. Maybe it applied to the drum cans in the other stages, too? Or maybe it was in Champion Edition?
Apparently someone tested this and the rock does move. Whoa…
I wonder how differently the game would have played had this mechanic been integrated…
This one kills me because I used to think the red hadouken was something to do with the speed of the movement made. I spent way too long experimenting with this!
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I recommend heading over to the Mugen Guild thread. Lots of interesting stuff there.
Akira Nishitani Speaks (SF2 Director) [Mugen Guild]
This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia, where Mark Serrels is the Editor. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.