Chismillionaire Shaking with Glee over Street Fighter IV

Inside Street Fighter IV's Nostalgic Allure

By Chris Kohler February 26, 2008 | 6:07:02 PMCategories: Arcades

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nostalgia can be a disappointing thing, says the producer of Street Fighter IV.

"Sometimes, you remember things as looking cooler than they did," says Capcom's Yoshinori Ono. "Since it's been 15 years since Street Fighter II came out, you might envision something that looks better. What we're trying to do with Street Fighter IV is to build a game that looks like your ultimate memories."

Capcom will release the long-awaited 3-D followup to their epoch-making fighting game series into Japanese arcades this June. But the game's makers haven't forgotten the sting of Street Fighter III, an immensely demanding and complex game that only appealed to a tiny sliver of hardcore players.

Somewhere along the line, Capcom lost the millions of casual quarter-droppers that made SFII the biggest game that video arcades ever saw. With Street Fighter IV, Ono wants to get them back.

Ono, general manager of Capcom's online game development group, was faced with the Herculean task of creating the first Street Fighter game to be built from the ground up for online play. But he is also adamant that SFIV is a throwback, a step away from SFIII.

"Street Fighter III was kind of an exclusive club where if you didn't know what you were doing, there was no reason to even try and play it," says Ono (pictured right). "This time, we're trying to re-open the fighting genre to people who haven't played it in a while."

That's why SFIV will feature, first and foremost, the eight well-known fighters from SFII: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Zangief, and Guile.

Ono didn't select these characters one by one, he says. "They all made the cut individually as one group. It's important, because this game is starting its life in the arcades, where you have a limited time to sit and play. You don't want people flushing their 100-yen coins down the toilet; you've got to give them some level of familiarity."

It certainly worked for me. Sitting down at the arcade cabinets that Capcom had hauled up to its hotel suite offsite of Game Developers Conference, I immediately settled into a groove with my old standby Chun-Li, despite not having put more than a few hours into a Street Fighter game for the last five years or so.

SFIV has the slow, deliberate pacing of 15 years ago, before fighting games became a frantic coke-fueled nightmare. This might turn off Capcom's deeply hardcore base, but Ono insists he's creating a game that is accessible but deep.

"It's going to be a lot like chess," he says. "There are grand master chess players who play on ESPN2, but you could also have a grandfather and his granddaughter playing chess. You're in charge of playing at whatever level you're capable of. We give you the board and some pieces and rules."

Ono wants beginners to at least derive some satisfaction from fighting high-level players. "Even if you can't get a checkmate, you're going to get his knight, you're going to get a couple of his pawns. That's the driving theme of the game."

Saying you want to reach out to casual players is one thing, but making it happen is quite another. Ono has chosen as his first battleground the arcades of Japan, which today mostly feature music games like Taiko Drum Master and UFO Catcher machines in their front lobbies to draw in schoolgirls and window-shoppers. Fighting games are shoved in the cigarette-stained basement.

Ono would like to get as close as possible to the street, for one particular reason. "Envision the front doors. First is the Taiko Drum Master. Right behind those are the gun shooting games like House of the Dead. We want to be right behind those, because we want people who walk by the doors to hear the nostalgic sound, hadouken!, and say, 'Did I just hear a Hadouken? I want to check that out.'"

When they get there, they'll be greeted by some amazing visuals. I enjoyed playing SFIV, but I enjoyed watching it perhaps even more. Seeing the cartoonish cel-shaded visuals in still screens is one thing, but watching them move is quite another. I observed, standing there, that they looked like the illustrations in the classic Super Nintendo instruction manuals come to life. As it turned out, this was exactly Ono's goal.

"Capcom has a history of great artists, and the paintings we have for the characters are really compelling. What we wanted to see if we could do with this was make a game that looked like those paintings, moving before your eyes," says Ono.

The challenge, of course, was replicating those paintings in 3-D. SFIV's gameplay takes place entirely on a 2-D plane, but the graphics are in three glorious dimensions. "There was a lot of back and forth between the art director and the tech guys about what the (cel shading) should look like, finding a middle ground between too much realism and too much cartoon," says Ono.

To perfect the look, the tech team used a game design technique that Ono says he hasn't used in the last 20 years, not since the days of drawing pixel art by hand. "We had a picture that the (art guy) had drawn on the left-hand side of the monitor, and they were trying to imitate it on the screen by tweaking the shaders," he says. "It was fun to do that, but it took forever."

The end result is an absolutely gorgeous end product. Although Capcom has only announced the game for arcades, it's a dead cert that we'll see a version on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But isn't that an issue, I ask Ono, because all those casual players you want to court own the lower-powered Wii?

Ono goes back to his chess analogy. "You could have a gold-inlaid board, knights with diamonds in their eyes. Or you could just draw a grid on a piece of paper and use cheap plastic pieces. And you're having the same amount of fun," says Ono.

In other words: "Street Fighter IV, as it stands now, would be well-suited for the higher-level platforms. But the game doesn't have to have these visuals in order to be fun. We could go, potentially, to the Wii. We could make it on Game Boy, for all we know right now. As long as the rules are the same, that can be independent of the visuals. So we're not going to be limited by any hardware specs; we're going to aim as wide as possible," he says.

Driving the point home, Ono name-checks Nintendo's game design genius. "This hearkens back to what Miyamoto said at a previous E3, that the evolution of console technology really is independent of fun, games aren't getting any more fun."

Potential home versions of the game should offer something else to hardcore Street Fighter fans, says Ono. "If and when there are console versions, we could see someone like Sakura-chan (from Street Fighter Alpha) or Ibuki (Street Fighter III)," says Ono. "For a home version, you can sit and practice the characters as long as you want to before you take them online. So there will probably be a move to add even more characters to the home version."

"Of course we know that there are people who want Alpha characters, who want III characters, who want all-new characters. We get emails, we read the message boards. We're listening to all of those voices. We have to respect those users as well, they're terribly important," Ono says.