Turned out alright in the end.

October 28, 2013 6:57 AM

"Akira Nishitani, who directed Final Fight and Street Fighter II at Capcom before forming his own company Arika has recently started a Twitter account. Since then he has been sharing lots of trivia and behind the scenes anecdotes, mostly related to the original Street Fighter II [...] I've decided to go about translating some of his Tweets." [via]
posted by griphus (13 comments total)

This is incredible, thank you!
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 7:19 AM on October 28, 2013

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.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:32 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

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?
(Amazingly, someone investigated this and it turns out that the rock's position does indeed change.)

That and the thing about Ryu taking extra damage (even though it was accidental) while dizzied are awesome little details that only a team that really cared would bother with.
posted by ignignokt at 7:34 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm just going to leave this here and if anyone has any additional knowledge or opinions, I look forward to it.

nin_akira said:

One time when I was visiting Capcom USA way back then, I was shown the American SF2 comic. And right at the beginning they were making it look like Ken had died. I'm pretty sure Ryu had gone to Ken's house and found Ken's scalp with blonde hair and all, and Ryu was crying his eyes out. I wonder what happened after that?

(It would seem that Nishitani-san had the misfortune of seeing the infamous Malibu Street Fighter comic which was so bad that it was cancelled after only 3 issues.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:06 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Here you go.
posted by griphus at 9:08 AM on October 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

Wow, there are a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes mechanics that I never realized. For example, the leniency for inputting special moves varies randomly in order to reward skill but to also make it possible for new players to sometimes pull them off. That explains why I was so inconsistent at Shoryukening at first.
posted by painquale at 9:43 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I wonder if that was a reaction to the original Street Fighter design decision to make special moves nearly impossible to pull off without perfect timing.
posted by griphus at 9:53 AM on October 28, 2013

It's an interesting decision. I've often thought of Street Fighter as a game like chess where there is perfect information and no randomness. You still almost get that in SF2 if you're good enough to always pull off the moves (though there's a bit of other subtle randomness that Nishitani mentions, like when two players try to throw each other at the same time).

I'm not sure I can think of any other games where skilled play allows for complete mitigation of the RNG, but where randomness is put into the game to *help* less skilled players. (Maybe getting bonus items from Toad's House in Super Mario 3 is similar? Skilled players won't need the items; unskilled players can make the game easier by getting a random power-up.) It's a pretty unique form of game design.
posted by painquale at 11:06 AM on October 28, 2013

Aw geez, I was hoarding this link secretly to put into a fighting game mega-post later. I guess that it's still For The Greater Good that it gets posted here at some point, though.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:32 PM on October 28, 2013

That said, this link rocks and is fascinating.
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:25 PM on October 28, 2013

Sodom's sword in Final Fight is the "MURAMASA!". This is an homage (LOL) to the "MURAMASA BLADE!" of Wizardry. I was pretty into that game back then.

Wizardry being an early computer RPG from the West and Muramasa being famous in Japanese history. I love this global culture where things halfway around the world are as accessible as things in your own country.
posted by cyberscythe at 5:50 AM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Aw geez, I was hoarding this link secretly to put into a fighting game mega-post later. I guess that it's still For The Greater Good that it gets posted here at some point, though.

Wait you're still going to make that post eventually, right?
posted by griphus at 6:03 AM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Of course I am.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:34 AM on November 8, 2013