The Negative Edge News Report 06.27.07
Posted by Tommy Coloma on 06.27.2007
Manhunt, the ESRB, and trailers. Plus a look at how Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game almost had Sheng Long as a playable character!
It's been a pretty dull week as far as video game news is concerned. Of course, there's the whole Manhunt II debacle over in Europe. For some odd reason I didn't really care about it all that much. Sure, I hate censorship as much as the next guy, but we've seen this stuff happen before. Take-Two is gonna buckle and edit the game so that it conforms to whatever standards it is required to follow. Case closed. The only thing that bothers me is the way the ESRB asked for the removal of the Dark Sector trailer from various web sites. (credit: Gaming Today) Coincidence? I think not! I had no idea that the ESRB had that kind of power. Though I never really cared for it, I can see the reasoning behind a ratings system for games. But advertisements? Bullshit! Unless there's gratuitous sex and violence (two things that our fragile minds can't handle according to those old fogies), those damn age gates (their term, not mine) are good enough. Wouldn't seeing in-game footage allow prospective buyers who don't like violent games to make an informed decision beforehand? Control over advertisements doesn't seem like a big deal now, but that sort of power can lead to worse things in the future. Are you worried? You should be!
Time for some news -
The news as I see it
Everything was just way off this week. Something else must have been on my mind. Things should pick up next week seeing as how it's the week before we get to what's left of E3. Of course, I didn't want to leave you hanging, so I finished the Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game overview that I've been meaning to put together for the past few months. Scroll all the way to the bottom or click here to check it out!
The Week In Releases
Hoshigami Remix (DS)
This is a remake of a tactical RPG that was originally released on the PS1. I'm glad that they're breaking the convention that PS1 remakes only belong on the PSP. DS owners want console-quality games too! I read somewhere that it takes fifty hours to finish this game. I just hope that it's fun for those fifty hours.
Grim Grimoire (PS2)
A 2D side-scrolling realtime strategy game made by the same developer that made Odin Sphere. That's an interesting concept. And, we at least know that the game will look good.
Super Robot Taisen Original Generations (PS2 in Japan)
This is a remake of Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 1 and 2 for the GBA. I previewed the second one last year and I have to say that it was a pretty enjoyable game. Though the Super Robot Taisen games are usually playable even without any knowledge of Japanese, I'm still hoping that someone will pick this up and give it the same treatment the GBA games got.
This week's background wallpaper
Note: To get a high resolution version, first you have to go to the DA site by clicking on the picture. Then, just click on the picture again or the magnifying glass with a + in the middle. The picture that you see in this column is just the small view...
Back in the days of Super Mario Bros., Bowser was a boss that I used to fear. By the time I reached him in level 8-4 I was usually small so any hit would have done me in. Unfortunately, these days Bowser is just a big joke; he is nowhere near as menacing as he used to be. Just look at his role in Super Paper Mario. Don't make me laugh! It's sad, but this picture is the closest we'll come to a having a tough looking Bowser on our screen for a long time.
That will be 255 Rupees please
The Toys R Us "buy two get one free" sale
or
The Toys R Us "help us get rid of the games that nobody's buying" sale
I went over to Toys R Us the other day to get myself a copy of Pokemon Pearl when I came across this deal. It looks like it's only for this week, so take advantage of it while you still can.
Lumines for the PSP
All PSPs can now be made homebrew friendly with a copy of Lumines. That pretty much means that soon it'll be hard to find this game without resorting to the evilness that is eBay. Don't have a copy? Pick one up before it's too late!
The Anime Circle
Gantz (manga)
I'm retooling this section. Yeah, I know I just started it last week, but seriously, doing an entire series in one week is tiring. I need to work you know! I'm currently trying to figure out how to do this section without driving myself crazy. Until then, go here to read some Gantz. You can thank me later...
Warning: Gantz contains large amounts of violence... and maybe some nudity. Actually, upon further inspection, I can see that there's a lot more nudity than I remembered there being. If violence and nudity offend you, don't click on that link!
But it's badass so check it out anyway!
Paprika
Check out Chad Webb's review of Paprika. He gave it a 9/10. I saw the trailer for this a few weeks ago and I thought that it looked pretty trippy. It was definitely something I wanted to check out. Unfortunately, it only got a limited release so most of you will probably have to wait for the DVD unless you know where to look. (Edit: Oops, it's rated R for violence and sex. I guess it wasn't a good choice for balancing out Gantz...)
To be continued...
That's it for this week. Now, I just took out the some guards, an eagle, and the big boss. If I can keep the princess from killing me with one swift kick to the gut, I'll be back next week.
Street Fighter: The Movie - What happened?
In January, Alan Noon, the co-designer and art director of the video game adaptation of Street Fighter: The Movie, started a thread over in the Shoryuken forums that detailed how the game ended up being what most consider to be the worst Street Fighter to date. The entire thread, titled Street Fighter the Movie Broke My Heart, can be found here.
The thread is a good read for anyone that wants to know how things can go horribly wrong with something that has so much potential. Those of you who wish to get a job in the gaming industry might also want to take a look as Alan gives a pretty detailed account of how he was able to land the project as well as a good rundown of what he would have done differently. Some of the highlights include the reasoning behind a lot of the design decisions and info on some of the characters that never made it to the finished product, including Sheng Long.
Since I know that a lot of you are the type that would only use three licks to get the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, I personally went through the whole thread to pick out the choice entries. The stuff in black is what forum-goers wrote. The stuff in blue is what Alan wrote himself. Info that I found to be particularly noteworthy has been bolded. I included the post numbers just in case. So sit back, relax, and read about how this train-wreck of a game came to be.
#43
Street Fighter the Movie Broke My Heart.
Alan Noon
01.23.07
It's true. I am certainly not proud of this fact, but I am one of the people responsible for one of the most loathed games in fighting game history. I apologize.
It was the project of my dreams. A one in a million, golden opportunity. I was in the right place, at the right time. I was going to be part of something sensational. I was going to help design and create the next Street Fighter! But what should have been a career defining moment turned into a nightmare; a nightmare that haunts me to this day.
#13
so.... did you guys test the game for 5 or 10 minutes?
Ok, that was honestly pretty funny. believe it or not, we tested it like crazy. As far as I know, it is bug/crash free. if you are referring to the gameplay... well that's another matter, which I will eventually get around to.
Funny enough, at the start of the project, I was adamant that the right way to execute the project would be to request the art from the original games so we could have the actors match each pose exactly during digitizing. Ultimately this did not come to pass and each character had an entirely new moveset for coin op. it appears as if the console team did more manual editing of the capture data to create many of the signature Street Fighter poses. I wish we would have done that too.
HURRICANE! DRAGON! Fuck, that's messed up
LOL. It seemed like such a good idea at the time! Seriously though, it was impossible to get the hollywood actors to say the real japanese wording. IMPOSSIBLE. believe me, I tried. We had an actual SSF2 on the set to demo it. We played recordings. We had the Japanese Capcom guys there coaching. We wrote it out phonetically. I believe we even had sound sessions with Japanese speaking voice actors, but in the end, you have to understand that there was a movement to Americanize the game somehow, so the English stuck. Again, I can go into that further later.
#31
I can understand that. But why doesn't Jean-Claude say "Sonic Boom"?
Honestly, I cannot remember why. He really doesn't say it? It's been so long since I've played the game. I do know that Jean Claude was, ummm... "interesting" to work with. As part of our deal, we stipulated that we'd have each actor available to us for digitizing and sound recording for at least 8 hours. Being the star he is, Jean Claude could only afford us 4 hours, unfortunately. It is very possible we never did a sound session with him. I do not remember doing one with him. Maybe I was focused on other stuff at the time.
I for one, would like to get an opinion of how people saw a shitty game once and for all before they released it.
Game dev is a long and complicated process. You can have the best license, the best engine or hardware, or maybe the best ideas ever, but it only takes one or two weak links in the chain to doom the whole thing. You try to do your best to make something special, but often time it just doesn't come together. As a life long devotee to video games, I can assure you that it is absolutely soul crushing to put so much of yourself into something, only to know that it isn't going to be all that you had hoped. Given unlimited time and resources, every game could be polished into something good, but the reality is that there are very real monetary concerns or time constraints. At some point, the game just needs to be done.
#53
THE CAPCOM/I.T. CONNECTION.
So how does a smaller, American game developer like Incredible Technologies get handed one of the most important franchises in video gaming history? It might be cliche, but it's all about who you know. Oh, and I figure location had something to do with it too.
Street Fighter the Movie, The Game, (as we ended up calling it,) seemed like a no brainer. Trouble was, Capcom apparently did not know how to do digitized graphics. (Or so I seem to recall hearing second hand.) Not only that, but probably more importantly, their hardware couldn't support the amount of colors required to do those fancy graphics justice. But apparently one of the members of upper management in Capcom's Midwest office knew of a company that had some really great hardware. This company was Incredible Technologies, and we had some custom built, proprietary hardware that kicked butt. This hardware was virtually unsurpassed when it came to the sheer numbers of colors it could display on screen at once. (I need to check my facts on this, but if memory serves, we eventually heard that MKII was doing 64 colors per character. The I.T. hardware could do 256. Sounds great, right? We thought so too. We eventually came to wonder if perhaps there was wisdom in using 64 colors. More on that later, if anyone cares.) it just so happened that I.T.'s offices were a short ten minute drive down route 53 from Capcom's new Midwest offices, which I'm sure didn't hurt our chances of landing the deal!
#65
STREET FIGHTER 3, OR STREET FIGHTER THE MOVIE???
Perhaps this is all my perception, but looking back, I remember that there was some amount of confusion as to what it was we were making exactly. It could have been the international game of "Telephone," but somewhere along the communication chain from the Capcom Japan guys to the Capcom USA guys, to our management, down to the team, there seemed to be mixed signals. I distinctly recall that originally during the pitch process the game was billed as Street Fighter 3. We were to pull out all of the stops and make the greatest Street Fighter ever. More characters! Digitized graphics! New combo system! The works! We set about writing up all kinds of great stuff to include in the final product. One of those things was even Sheng Long.
#76
SHENG LONG
All this was going down sometime during ‘93/'94 and we thought we were initially going to be making Street Fighter 3, (or at least, I seemed to think so, for whatever reason.) Now at this time, if the whole Gouken,Gouki/Akuma, Gotetsu story line existed within Capcom somewhere, we were never privy to that info. The whole Sheng Long controversy was still fresh in everyone's mind; was Sheng Long a character? Was it a mistranslation? We didn't know either, but what better way to get people really excited about Street Fighter again than to include the most hyped up character ever? Capcom Japan wasn't too hot on that idea initially, saying something to the effect that "When Sheng Long does appear, it will be like God making an appearance." What is curious at this point is that they never corrected us on the character's name. We always referred to him as Sheng Long. Perhaps much like the way Gouki is known as Akuma in the states, Gouken, (or Gotetsu? It was never clear which one Sheng Long was a true parallel of,) would be known as Sheng Long in the US? At any rate, Sheng Long was shelved, for the time being…
…But he almost made it in after all. I'm skipping ahead quite a bit here, but I might as well put the Sheng Long business to bed. Towards the end of the project we had already digitized the majority of the actors from the film while on location of the movie set in Australia. That art was largely done, processed, and in game. There were still a couple more characters we had to do though. Chun Li, (The beautiful Ming Na Wen,) was never captured in Australia, due to contractual issues. (More on that later.) What ended up happening was that we set up a new, temporary digitizing studio in our Chicago warehouse and flew her in for the session. While we had the studio set up, we also captured two more characters. One was an alternate Ken, which I'll mention briefly later. The other was in fact Sheng Long.
For whatever reason, the idea of adding Sheng Long came up again, and suddenly the Capcom guys were all for it. Maybe it was them, maybe it was us, but somebody apparently realized at that point that the game was going to need something a little extra other than the new fangled game play to propel it to stratospheric levels of success. Itook it upon myself to designing the look of and move set of Sheng Long. What an opportunity!!! Again, I was in heaven.
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!
The practical execution of Sheng Long went fairly well too. One of our artists served as the actor on the digitizing set as he was into body building and martial arts. The outfit was pretty simple: Black Gi pants, and a custom tailored top. The sash across his eyes was actually a mesh so that he could see while acting, but still appeared blindfolded. We hired a professional make up artist to do the hair, moustache, and arm effects. The arm looked pretty good, for the most of the shoot. Digitizing sessions typically lasted for 6 hours on average and after all of that time under the hot lights, the make up of the arm started to melt. By the end, green make up was running everywhere, and the horns were barely clinging to the actor's arm. But it held up pretty well, all considered. (Fun fact: The artist that played Sheng Long went on to work at Midway games, where he has been creating characters for Mortal Kombat!0
Naturally, he was supposed to play like your typical Ken/Ryu character with some super Akuma style extras, as far as I recall. One major difference however was that he wouldn't have typical block animations. Instead, the idea was that Sheng Long was so advanced, that you could never hit him unless you scored an unguarded attack. Sure, you would play him like a regular character with "back" on the stick putting your character on the defensive, but when blocking, the animation would look like a dodge instead of a traditional Street Fighter block. All of the game play would be the same, with block slide kicking in and all that, but Sheng would appear to have stepped out of the way of the attack. Would it have worked? I like to think so, but I was afraid that it broke SF convention too much, so we digitized two full sets of blocking animations so we had a back up plan: traditional and dodge style blocking anims. Looking back, we broke just about every other SF convention, so would it have really mattered? I guess we'll never know.
In the end, Sheng Long never made it into the game, and my grand designs for what was to be a near divine fighting game experience never saw the screen. Due to time constraints, we never were able to process the artwork. All of this stuff was burnt off to CD. I hope it still survives somewhere in the vaults of Incredible Technologies. I'd love to see that footage again.
#90
That Sheng Long bit was great! Do you have any artwork or pics or anything of him?
Thanks! I thought you guys might like that. Unfortunately, I do not have any images of him that I know of. It's possible I have some old sketches tucked away somewhere, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.
#100
2. How "successful" was this game and did how did it compare to the team's expectations?
As far as expectations... I'll only speak for myself, rather than the rest of the team here. At the start of the project, I fully expected that we were going to make the greatest fighting game ever. I really thought we could. I felt that we had the right people, with the right knowledge, with the right resources and backing to do it. It was truly a golden opportunity. Not many people get a chance like that in their careers.
As time wore on, it became apparent to me that this would not come to pass. I am trying to write my account of that time in an entertaining tone to keep the text interesting, but the truth is that the end result of the SFTM project was a grave personal tragedy for me. Nobody loved Street Fighter more than me, and there I was: partly responsible for one of the most reviled games in history. I'm not proud of the game by any means, and the wasted opportunity truly does haunt me to this day.
whose idea it was to have all those secret characters that were color swaps of Blade.
I really couldn't say specifically. It was probably one of those groupthink things as palette swapping just seemed like the thing to do at the time. More characters for relatively little extra effort.
#101
We ended up with some huge, broadcast quality Sony camera and some supposedly high end capture card which was installed in a PC with one of those (at the time,) fancy new CD ROM burners. The camera connected directly to the card/PC. I really wish I could remember the specifics of the makes and models, but they escape me now. What I do remember is that the card was not capturing data fast enough. Ever wonder why some of those SFTM animation look stiff? Get this: It's because the actors basically had to perform each motion IN SLOW MOTION! If they moved too fast, the image would get split across fields, resulting in tearing of the image which was a real bear to deal with for the artists as they would have to somehow extract the background color from character image while somehow rebuilding the field interpolated data. We experimented with all kinds of camera settings, capture settings, lighting schemes, you name it. We minimized the effect as best we could, but in the end, we were capturing animations in slow motion. The slower the better. (Supposedly we had purchased the same capture card as the Mortal Kombat guys had, but I really don't know where that info came from, as it couldn't possibly be true. When we did a project with Midway later, I got to see just how advanced their capture setup was. It was no surprise they had such beautiful artwork!)
As far as props went, we had a turn table, a wooden box roughly 2'x2'x3', and a small wooden staircase maybe 4 feet long and 3 feet high, with four to six steps up it, all painted blue to match the background. The turn table was for moves in which the character had to spin. The box and staircase came in handy for faking "in air" moves or posing an actor's legs on to simulate high kicks. Remember, we couldn't capture at full speed, so many of the kick type moves had to be posed out, frame by frame for a clean shot. Besides, the majority of the actors weren't martial artists, so they were not going to be performing good looking kicks anyway. BTW, special mention goes to Peter Tuiasosopo, who played E. Honda. Peter is a big man, and not a martial artist, yet he got his legs up way higher for the kicks just about all of the other actors. Half naked. Wearing a skirt. And a Wig. All greased up in baby oil under those hot lights. That guy was a real class act. Super good natured and fun. A true professional.
Also on set was a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which we'd use to demo some of the moves that were more difficult for the actors to visualize. Many months before arriving on set to shoot, we mapped out every characters animations/move set. These were all storyboarded and assigned a four letter code. This naming convention was something to the effect of SCFP, for Standing Close Fierce Punch. These codes were all printed onto standard 8.5"x11" paper in big bold letters, and then arranged into a big binder. This binder would be held up in front of the camera before each take so that we knew which move was which by looking at the first frame of the capture. It also helped to make sure we got every single scheduled move. Sounds dumb, but it was an important little piece of the process.
#107
Also i sat through the end credits and a certain Alan Noon was credited for the actor of blade
The initials "AVN" show up in 4th place on the game's default high score list too
Yep, that's me in the credits, and those are my initials on the high score screen.
#124
were all the normal move graphics in the arcade version the same as the home version?
Yes and no. I say "Yes" because we delivered our raw digitized capture to the Capcom USA guys that were doing the console versions out in California. I also say "No" because each team processed and animated that data completely seperately.
For animation, it appears that they reworked and edited the captured frames to more closely match the frames of the SSFT2 character anims, where we cleaned up and used the frames in a more straight forward manner. I prefer their animation to ours since they had more dynamic poses, though I think it could have maybe used a few more frames of animation.
In terms of image quality, I favor our character art as it was more vibrant and colorful than the console version. We did a lot of processing on the art by adjusting contrast levels, color balance, and so forth. I have no info as to what the console team's clean up processs was.
#125
AKUMA
Speaking of Akuma/Gouki, many people have asked why he is in SFTM at all, since he wasn't in the film. Good question. The short answer was: because Akuma kicked ass! Remember, we approached SFTM as if it was to be the biggest, baddest, Street Fighter ever. We wanted to put in as much great stuff as possible. We had already pitched Sheng Long and had that shot down, so once we learned of Akuma, we wanted him in.
I say "once we learned of Akuma," because when we started the project, I don't think he was public knowledge. In fact, if I have my time line correct, I personally did not know Akuma existed until we had been in Australia for a few days. We were on location in our digitizing studio which contained the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo as previously mentioned. Before shoots, during lunch, on breaks, and during data backup to CD I would play SSF2T. Often times, I would play against the Capcom Japan guys who were there too. I can't recall if it was Mr. Minami, Mr. Meshi, or Mr. Okamoto specifically, but they showed us the code to unlock Akuma as a playable character, which had only just been released or something.
Obviously, Akuma was totally cool. The arcade scene seemed to be afire with the news that he was playable. Even later that week, when I went to an arcade one night in Surfer's Paradise, people had learned of him and were using him like mad. We wanted him in SFTM, bad.
As it turned out, we had an opportunity to create and capture Akuma for the game. The specifics of our digitizing schedule and working with Hollywood actors is a topic for another time, but suffice it to say, we found ourselves with some open days on our shooting schedule. In addition to the big name Hollywood guys, there were a number of real life martial artist types, serving as fight and stunt coordinators, and/or appearing in the film as various villains and background characters. One of these was Ernie Reyes Sr.
Mr. Reyes was a really cool guy. Super friendly, very professional, and he genuinely seemed to be very interested in the whole video game thing we were doing. We approached him with the idea that perhaps he could play a role in the game, to which he responded very positively to. We were overjoyed to be working with a real martial artist who had the kind of physical control over his body that we needed. We worked out the scheduling and we set about preparing for the shoot.
The digitizing session was a dream. Mr. Reyes was able to take our direction and really execute upon it. If we needed something slower, he did it slower. If we needed him to perform an action that wasn't true to real martial arts form, he didn't question it, he just nailed. We relied on the box and staircase very little that day. The shoot was one of the shortest we had, while still capturing the full move set. He was awesome.
Skipping ahead in time and back in Chicago we were cleaning up our images at a furious pace. We knew we wanted Akuma in the game, so his art and implementation was under way. In a perfect world, Akuma probably would have been a hidden character, and I believe this was our original intent, as he did not appear in the film. Ultimately I think a combination of events led us to put him up there. Unfortunately, we were not able to digitize all of the "regular" Street Fighter characters for the movie, so we had open slots in the select screen. We wanted a lot of characters in the game and we wanted to add to the hype as much as possible. Since Akuma was one of the characters featuring better digitizing quality, (due to Mr. Reyes' superb performance,) and also one of most popular characters, we figured he should be right up front. Was it a good idea to do so? Did it make sense, considering the game was based off of the film "Street Fighter the Movie?" Probably not, though it seemed like a good idea at the time. It annoys me now when I see that select screen, but there are probably bigger issues that need fixing in SFTM first. My opinions on that particular subject are destined for another section.
#139
Reflecting fireballs, come on!!
Speaking of fireballs, the fireball art in SFTM was actually a tennis ball, soaked in gasoline, suspended on a wire. We lit the thing in the parking lot of the I.T. office in the middle of the night and digitized it.
#146
SAWADA
Another digitizing session that went amazingly well was that with Kenya Sawada. Yes, Sawada is his name in real life, as well as in the game and film. (In order to try and clear up any confusion, "Kenya" will refer to the real world actor, where "Sawada" will refer to the character in the game and movie.)
So where did Sawada come from? The whole Sawada situation is fairly interesting and kind of mysterious to me in some ways. Capcom really seemed to be looking to promote Kenya where ever possible. I never got the specifics, but some how I was under the impression that he was being positioned to be some sort of Capcom action hero, as if he would go on to be the face of Capcom and perhaps eventually star in his own films or something. I am purely speculating here, but perhaps Capcom had intended in starting a motion picture division? What better way to know the business than fund your own film first and hire real Hollywood people to learn from? Perhaps inserting Kenya into the film of Street Fighter the Movie as himself was part of some plan like that? I have a vague recollection of seeing one of the early script treatments featuring Sawada to a much larger degree. Anyway, this is all pure conjecture on my part. His relationship with Capcom was definitely different from the other actors though. He seemed to have more of a direct interaction with the Capcom staff.
The Sawada character was another instance where we deviated from the look of the film. In beginning of the movie, he appears in a khaki A.N. uniform, while later, he appears in the A.N. field outfit of camo pants and blue shirt. We went more with the latter, though we ditched the shirt. The blue would have given us trouble, but we could have easily had a new shirt of a different color made up that we could palette shift later, I suppose. Kenya was in great shape though, and since we were deviating from the movie costumes all over the place anyway, we made Sawada shirtless. Besides: Mortal Kombat 2 had a bunch of buff characters and they were selling tons of games and earning money; we wanted buff characters too. Maybe we'd make some dough as well.
The Sawada digitizing session went really well as he had some form of martial arts background. While Kenya did know some English, we largely relied on the Capcom translators to help us direct him in Japanese. FUN FACT: In the film, Sawada's voice was overdubbed by some body else. I'll never forget seeing the final cut and laughing hysterically when Sawada spoke for the first time!
As for Sawada's in game implementation, his move set was somewhat based on a Fei Long/Guile hybrid type of arrangement; which can be seen in the similarity of his many kick based specials. He was an A.N. soldier in the film, so it stood to reason that he might have similar military training to Guile, hence some of the flash kick type moves. In one of the very first scripts, Fei Long was included, and I believe he was to be played by Kenya, so that lent some flavor as well. One final word: No, he does not have a lightsaber!!! Based on the hardware limitations of the day, we couldn't do motion blur, glows, or any of that fancy stuff we have access to today. While Sawada does have slashing type moves, the art was supposed to be a more ethereal representation of the force behind the attack, (much like Ken and Ryu's hadoken,) rather than the character actually pulling out a light saber type device. It didn't help that American game developers seemed to have a difference of opinion from their Japanese counterparts regarding special effects at the time. It was my observation that Japanese developers would flicker special effect graphics on and off every other frame to give the impression of transparency, where American developers seemed to prefer "solid" special effects that did not flicker. I had argued for flickering, though that was overruled, and we went with a Mortal Kombat style implementation of "solid" special effects.
#153
Was the idea to base it on the movie secondary then?
At the time it seemed like there was talk of SF3, SF3, SF3, then it was SFTM, SFTM, SFTM. I wasn't privy to the early discussions, so I can't say for sure what was going on in the higher ranking meetings. I can only relate how I percieved things at the time. I will say though: there was never a decision or any direction to faithfully stick to the film Street Fighter The Movie; we included what we though would give the game the best chance of success. (Akuma, for example.)
How much creative license were you given?
Quite a lot. In terms of art, we were able to choose which backgrounds to use, which costumes to shoot and so forth. In terms of game play the engine and systems were completely devised and written by our programming staff.
Did the Movie studio and/ or Capcom Japan put restrictions and give guidelines for you to follow? How strict were they? What were they (including what may seem obvious)? Or was it loose and played by ear?
I think I answered most of these, but to recap: It is my recollection that we were really given free reign for the most part. I can't remember any real big discussions or butting of the heads regarding game content or features between Capcom and I.T. I think this was largely due to a couple of factors:
A.) They did want an american developed game, for the american market.
B.) They were unfamiliar with digitized graphics and the process involved
Did you still feel that way at the end of preproduction?
Yes. By the time we wrapped the game up, I was pretty unhappy with the result. Here I was, one of the biggest Street Fighter fans ever, given a golden opportunity to make the best Street Fighter game ever, and at the end, I couldn't hardly stand to play it.
#166
Blanka Found
We did do a Blanka digitizing session, though we did not clean up his capture or implement him in game as a playable character (either by human, or AI.) There was a secret scheduled for Dhalsim's Lab. I think it went in... I have forgotten how it was supposed to be done, but after some set of circumstances are met, Blanka would roll out, electrocute the players, and then take off. I believe this increments the Blanka Found counter.
I suppose CoJ never gave Hi Tech [Incredible Technologies] access to their control algorithms or something
That is true. The game was written entirely by Incredible Technologies. As far as I know, we never recieved any code from Capcom, unfortunately.
#215
the hoppy kicks (i think they were done by hold RH, release it and mash?) were hilariously van damme also
That hoppy kick in particular was something we added after the Van Damme digitizing shoot. That dude had amazing control and balance over his body. He had his foot up at head height and could literally kick with it a dozen times in a couple seconds without the rest of his body barely moving an inch. We captured it and it became a move.
also, the secret easter egg in the monitor room is the greatest shit ever (press start and all the monitors show van damme flexing)
credit for that idea goes to the head of Gamestar/Capcom Chicago. He was big on this trip about having real video play. "It will blow the kids minds!!!" (Hand gesture of brains exploding out of his head included.) We were skeptical, but I have to admit, it is one of the things that people remember about the game.
a lot of the special moves were like... why? chun li being able to throw bats?
Uhh... those were birds. Like as in "Spinning Bird Kick!" C'mon, the art wasn't THAT bad, was it? ;)
Was there a tendency to want to focus the game around any particular character or not focus as much on Guile as the movie did?
Good question. the first drafts of the script were apparently Ken and Ryu centric, as we would all expect. We got word that once Van Damme signed on, he insisted on being Guile and making him the central character. personally, I was baffled; how do you do a Street Fighter Movie without Ken and Ryu being the focus? There was early internal discussion of keeping the game true to established Street Fighter conventions, but that wasn't to be. You pay for Van Damme, the customer gets maxium Van Dammage!
I second the people who told you not to beat yourself up... etc
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt, but IMHO, we blew it.
#250
what is your own insider's take on the viability of fighting games today?
Actually, I think the current generation systems (360/PS3) are the perfect platforms for a new resurgence in fighters. For many years, fighting games were some of the most demanding games to develop. They often taxed the hardware to the limit. But now, these new consoles have enough horsepower to really do some special stuff. Stuff that could make the fighting fans, but more importantly, perhaps the non hardcore players to stand up and take notice.
Do you think Chun's 3S quote "No, I've never thrown any of my bracelets away. Why do you ask?" is a result of the old rumor, or a way of Capcom trying to distance itself from the SF: The Movie game where she actually threw them?
It's probably the result of the old rumor. I don't think Capcom needs to make any extra effort to distance itself from SFTM; on the whole they seem to disavow any knowledge of its existence already! Seriously, of the Street Fighter data I've seen out of Capcom, the SFTM games are never mentioned.
#263
RAVEN???
One of the fight/stunt coordinators on the film was famed martial artist Benny "The Jet" Urquidez. Our Lead Designer/Engineer was a huge fan of his, and we had a hole in our schedule, so we made arrangements to digitize Benny. We went down to wardrobe, and they made a costume: Black quilted vest, red athletic/karate style pants with a black stripe, and taped up feet. His session was a bit different than the others. I believe it was the Lead Designer's idea, (and a great one at that, IMHO,) to digitize Benny performing his moves set in several different styles. The plan was to include Benny in the game as the character "Raven." His unique ability would be that he could change fighting styles on command. I wrote the character background, which was approved by Capcom as far as I remember, though I have completely forgotten the specifics. While we never got to put Raven in the game due to time restrictions, it wasn't too long before a Street Fighter character with a similar style switching ability debuted: Gen of Street Fighter Alpha.
#269
T.HAWK
T.Hawk was never digitized. I don't have the details, but for whatever reason, Greg Rainwater did not show. It became apparent that after the first few digitizing sessions, many of the actors weren't coming up to do their session with us. This was largely the reason we were not able to leave Australia after the originally scheduled two weeks and instead stayed for a month. In the end though, just about everyone was digitized, with just Ming Na and Greg Rainwater holding out. Fed up with wasting time, dealing with Hollywood personalities, and with members of our team missing their families, we headed back home. Capcom arranged to have Chun Li shot back in Chicago, but T. Hawk went missing. (At the time I figured it was no big loss in my book, I never liked T.Hawk anyway.)
DHALSIM
Dhalsim was another character that was never digitized. I don't recall there being any scheduling conflicts or contract negotiations involved, just that digitizing him posed a few problems: First, there was concern that the actor would not be able to perform the session. Second was costuming: would players accept Dhalsim in lab coat? Asking the actor to strip down to a yellow diaper didn't seem like it was going to fly. In the end, Dhalsim was such a small part of the film we figured we'd skip him, unfortunately.
DEE JAY
Dee Jay was actually digitized in Australia. I feel really bad that he never made it into the game. Miguel Nunez was a really cool dude, and one of the actors that genuinely showed enthusiasm for the video game aspect of the job. Again, time was Dee Jay's primary enemy, though the costuming situation didn't help much either. Initially we didn't feel that the Bison Soldier outfit that he wore in the film was going to be a great look for Dee Jay, so we aimed to recreate the costume from SSF2T as best as possible. The best we could do on short notice was a pair of plain grey athletic pants.
#270
However- WTF is with Guile's win pose?
There were a few different Guile win poses. I assume you are probably referring to the hair comb one? What can I say? That was Jean Claude's interpretation. We didn't have a lot of time to direct him during the shoot.
#295
Actually, since Capcom basically said 'Here, do what you want. We really don't give a shit,' would y'all still have tried as hard if y'all had known that to begin with?
Well... I'm not sure I would characterize Capcom's attitude towards the product or us exactly like that. I'm sure they cared about the project. These days I tend to think that perhaps they didn't realize what it was we were going to deliver until it was too late. But to answer your question: We absolutely would have tried our best, no matter what. We were contracted to do a game, and you always do your best. It's no help to anyone's career or the franchise your hired to work on to slack off and not care.
how far into development do you start to realize the game isn't going to be as good as you hope?
I couldn't tell you the exact date that I realized SFTM wasn't going to be everything I had hoped. There were a lot of little signs along the way I suppose. I do very specifically remember the first incident that raised a red flag in my mind. The story is a bit long, so I think I'll save it for a bit later. Please stay tuned.
Ken is not a white guy, but an Asian (3/4 or something) with blond colored hair
Funny you should mention that. Now, you have to keep in mind this was before internet access was truly widespread and that there wasn't a lot of (any?) data coming out of Capcom regarding the background info of the SF universe. Pretty much all of the info available was what you got after you played through the game with each character. Two win screens with a handful of sentences. Done. I remember when the Capcom JP guys told me that Ken was Japanese. I was like "What are you talking about? He's obviously American!" They explained that actually he was Japanese, but was so enthralled with the U.S. that he left Japan and moved over seas. His hair is dyed in an attempt to be more American.
#312
I know for sure we proposed Geki (The ninja) from the original Street Fighter 1, (Fighting Street,) but we wanted to make the character female. Capcom did not want to do a gender switch, so they instead suggested we make a new character and supplied us with a short list of popular Japanese female names. Once we were on the track to make Street Fighter The Movie (The Game,) rather than some uber Street Fighter, our Geki fell by the wayside. In retrospect, our Geki would have shared numerous similarities to the later Ibuki of SF3.
The last three characters escape me at the moment, but I want to say that there were four additional characters included in our early documents that were never digitized. They were all Capcom characters from other games, with at least two, maybe three from the Street Fighter series. The name Eagle seems to stand out as one that might have been included. I am 100% certain that Mike Haggar was not one of them as I despise Mike Haggar. (I have a theory that any game prominently featuring Mike Haggar is doomed to failure.)
#337
Have you looked into getting a SFTM arcade cabinet?
lol, no. First off, I wouldn't be surprised to find that every SFTM was converted into something else, so there probably aren't any around. Second, I wouldn't want to wake up every morning to Jean Claude's visage staring me in the face from on high, looking down and silently mocking me as if to remind me of my failures!
#338
A TECHNOLOGY TOO LATE?
During the development of SFTM, Virtua Fighter and the 3D games were first hitting the scene. While we weren't exactly fond of the low poly, untextured artwork, we saw that there was something amazing about moving around the arena in 3D. I believe it was this exciting new revelation that fueled one of the most interesting developments I saw during my time at I.T. One of the programmers devised a way to simulate a 3D arena just by layering and scaling various pieces of 2D artwork. The demo he put together was a simple box, not unlike a boxing ring without ropes. On this he had placed our Zangief and Cammy art facing off. By scaling the assets by differing factors, he approximated the effect of the camera swinging back and forth from character to character. While apparently fairly performance intensive, it really was convincing as a 3d scene, and we had digitized, recognizeable characters rather then Virtua Fighter's flat shaded, shoe box men. Unfortunately, this development came too late in the project for us to implement across the game. Who knows what it would have done for SFTM? It was absolutely, undeniably stunning for its day.
#368
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION
I believe it was shortly after we returned from Australia and had just begun the real grunt work. There was a meeting at our offices between the project leads, I.T. management, management from Romstar/Gamestar, and project management of Capcom Japan. The Capcom JP guys began asking questions about the fighting engine. The issue of the combo system came up. One of our team members answered by describing SFTM's combo system to be as a MK2 style, "pop 'em up, juggle ‘em" type system. While this alarmed me greatly during the meeting, I kept cool, not wanting to rock the boat with all of those important people in the room. I figured that perhaps our guy was just telling them something to keep them satisfied, as I did not understand how that type of game play fit into a Street Fighter game.
Though I did not believe it at the time, I came to realize later on that this proposal was not just lip service. That's what we got: juggle combos.
Should I have spoken up? That meeting was probably not the best place to enter into a heated debate. Should I have argued against the excessive juggle combo system later? Probably, though I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Truth be told, things got pretty ugly towards the end of the project. Tensions were running high on the team. Many of the improvements I wanted to make were disregarded outright, largely because of personality conflicts, as far as I can tell. This was truly unfortunate as the game suffered as a result.
One example would be that of the throws. When they first went in, throws were not implemented in true Street Fighter fashion, but rather more akin to a Mortal Kombat style throw: All throws would launch the character the opposite direction from which you initiated the move. Naturally I commented that Street Fighter allows you to decide which way to throw, and we should remain true to that convention. A heated debate ensued and in the end I had to sit down and demonstrate throw mechanics on a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo machine. Then, after remaining "broken" for weeks, throw directions were eventually implemented, though incorrectly; pushing right while throwing tosses the character to the left, and vice versa. There was no good reason for implementing throw directions backwards. I can only assume it was done out of spite. While the backwards throws may not have been the key reason SFTM did not succeed, this story illustrates one of the little things that could have easily been fixed to make the game just a little bit better.
#369
I had completely forgotten about Mega Man as a hidden character. That would have been an interesting costuming and digitizing session.
#395
STREET FIGHTER THE MOVIE, WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
On many occasions over the years, I've thought about what we should have done differently with SFTM.
For starters, we should have stayed truer to the film in terms of character design. That would have meant costumes DIRECTLY from the film. If Sagat wore a suit in the movie, he should have appeared that way in the game. Cammy should have worn her fatigues or officer's uniform. We took some liberties with costumes in an attempt to keep them truer to the original game and to facilitate the digitizing process in some cases, but ultimately, we were hired to make a game based on the movie. What we ended up with was an odd amalgam of movie and game based costumes. This would have meant better communication between our group, Capcom JP, and the movie studio.
In terms of the roster, Akuma should have been hidden, if included at all. Greg Rainwater should have been coerced into performing his digitizing session with us so we'd have a T.Hawk. Dee Jay should have appeared, as well as Dhalsim. We should have cleaned up the Blanka footage and included him as well. A non-transformed Carlos Blanka would have been interesting too. I would still include Blade, though a better name, or even "Bison Trooper" would have been a better choice, as well as excising the silly Gunloc reference and his palette swap clones. This would have made for an extraordinary amount of work however. More character artists would have been required.
As far as animation goes, I initially asked for the original Street Fighter character art so that we could alter our digitized content to match the source material. If this request made it through our organization and back to Capcom, I do not know. It appears as if the team doing the console versions took this approach, and as a result I think their game is better for it. Gaining access to those materials should have been a top priority. Matching the animations would have really helped with the over all "Street Fighter-ness" of the product, (though I would look to increase the over all frame count of each animation.)
Perhaps reducing the color count in the characters would have been of benefit. Our characters were from palettes of 256 colors. I heard that Mortal Kombat 2's characters were 64 colors. I think that bought them a few advantages. One, our characters shimmered a lot from frame to frame. With fewer colors, hopefully some of that could be reduced. It would have also made manipulating the digitized images to match the original character art a bit simpler as well.
As far as game play went, I would still have argued against the excessive air juggles. Air juggles went on to great success in the VS. series, but that style of play is definitely different from what makes Street Fighter, Street Fighter. The day I found E.Honda's infinite juggle should have been evidence enough to tone it down. I only scored a 143 hit combo because I was too bored to keep it going.
"Hit stun" is a small feature that has a big effect on the feel of a game. On each hit, the game pauses for a split second. It really adds to the impact of each strike. From what I recall, SFTM either did not have, or had very small measures of this feature and as a result the attacks lack any real bite.
Priority was a hot button issue. Much like the great throwing debate, I had to prove my position on the matter. I claimed that Street Fighter's fighting was entirely rules based; that is: The result of any move vs. move conflict is always consistent. SFTM did feature that quality. Late in the project I proposed a priority table system for each character versus character scenario. The owner of I.T. set me up with a laptop and I stayed awake for many consecutive days filling out those tables. I'm told the tables were put in, but I'm not sure to what extent. It didn't seem like a lot of programming time was devoted to implementing them correctly, and there wasn't enough time left on the project to fully test it. Consulting Capcom and attempting to get their source code so that we might remain true to the classic Street Fighter game play should have been another top priority.
SFTM shared one thing in common with Bloodstorm: balancing issues. In either game, it seems there are no moves that have any real distinct disadvantage in any given situation. It is as if every single move was programmed to be the best move. As a result, game play deteriorates into a spastic button mashing contest and special move fest. There is no pacing, no strategy. I would have liked to have seen this addressed. "Balance" does not mean "equal." In my experience, many designers do not understand this.
Throws should have been implemented correctly!
The pseudo 3D environment effect would have been something really special. I do not know the performance limitations or restrictions that accompanied it, but that technology would have really gained some attention for the time, had we been able to implement it successfully.
So there you have it: the big ticket items we should have addressed. Would all of this have made the product better? I sure would like to think so, though who can say. Game development is a long and wildly unpredictable process.
#412
Do you think that any of the ideas you and your team brought to the fighting genre were original and hadn't been done before? Were any of them ripped off to become staples for other, more popular games?
It's really difficult to look back to those days and try to remember where we drew inspiration for everything. There were a TON of fighting games out at the time, all trying to make their mark and stand out of the crowd. Some of the SFTM features were evolutions of things we liked in other games, others stemmed from our own ideas developed as hardcore players. It's nearly impossible for any developer to claim they are totally original. Everything has been done already.
"Ripped off" is an ugly term. Did we inspire new features that went on to evolve in other titles? I would like to think so, particularly in the Street Fighter franchise, but who can say for sure? I believe I mentioned a few of these things that seem to have deascendents in later SF games such as the Alpha and Vs. series, but I have no proof. The Capcom JP guys were very complimentary concerning a number of our concepts, so I like to think they found some value in our input.
#415
5) Megaman? You serious? PLEASE tell me you had someone go through the digitization process for Megaman! Was it a kid? A grown man? Did he have the helmet and everything? Did you get a real dog for Rush?
The Megaman idea didn't go too far. It was included in a couple of documents, and discussed briefly around the office, but we never got so far as to design or to have a costume made. There was talk that we'd get a young kid to play him.
#396
CONCLUSION
Street Fighter the Movie. Probably one of the biggest opportunities one could ever have been handed. It's easy to look back on it now and laugh, (or cry,) over what could have been, but we did the best we could, given the situation. Unfortunately, it just was not good enough.
On a positive note, I like to think that many of the things we tried were indeed decent concepts and did eventually evolve into systems and features we now know and accept in other games of the genre. While there is no direct proof, one might speculate that a handful of SFTM ideas lived on:
-Reimagining characters from older games: (Retsu, Lee proposals?Gen, Eagle, etc.)
-Character crossovers: (Mega Man proposal?The VS. Series)
Though Street Fighter the Movie is largely considered the darkest chapter in the Street Fighter story, I still am deeply grateful that I had opportunity to play a part in the history of one of the greatest game franchises of all time.
I hope it has been as much fun to read this as I have had retelling and reliving it all. It has been very rewarding for me to read the responses and answer the questions.
