Of clouds and silver linings (cont.)

As I was saying, sometimes even the things that will seemingly destroy your soul may one day be the source of something really useful.

Case in point: remember that god-awful fighting game, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game (SFTMTG)? You know, that one, the black sheep of the SF family. The one with the Mortal Kombat-style digitized graphics? In all honesty I never really got the chance to play it, they never brought it at the arcades in my hometown, and the reviews I read all mentioned that it was horrible, so neither me nor my friends ever bought it. It is however commonly known as the worst Street Fighter game ever, and perhaps one of the worst fighting games ever as well, though that may be pushing it a bit. Still, the fact that it is based on Street Fighter: The Movie, a movie that succeeded in eroding the souls and minds of an entire generation of children, is bad enough to probably give it a place in that list.

At any rate, it's been more than a decade since both the movie and the game were released, so our memories of either started fading over the years, our wounds started healing. One question always puzzled me however; why did Capcom, a company I practically worshiped at the time, create such an awful game? Not that they had never created a mediocre title before, but the Street Fighter franchise has always been precious to them, especially back then in the mid-nineties, when fighting games still ruled the arcades. And hell, why did they even make a Street Fighter game that looked like Mortal Kombat, when most people acknowledged that Street Fighter was the superior franchise? Which it always has been, you MK fanbois reading this can go play Deadly Alliance if you disagree.

Over the years I would find out that Capcom had in fact outsourced the game to a little (and little-known) company called Incredible Technologies. That explained a lot, it wasn't created by the original team, such a change is usually a recipe for disaster. Still, it couldn't have been a crappy game from the beginning, otherwise it would have just been scrapped early on. So my questions still remained, how could the game end up like this, what went wrong?

So what do you know, about a week ago Alan Noon, a former Incredible Technologies employee and one of the main people responsible for the creation of SFTMTG decided to start sharing the story behind this game over at the ShoRyuKen forums. He's really going into a lot of detail, describing the whole procedure, from early designing to... actually I'm not sure since I'm still on page 6 of the thread, but I'm assuming he'll go as far as mentioning the feedback they received after it was released.

It's a really interesting read, and not just for people wondering how a game so bad could ever be released under the Street Fighter name. Noon's description of the whole game-designing procedure is really detailed, I think it's actually very inspirational for aspiring, well, game-designers. And yes, I fall under that category. Hell, even if you're not into that and just want to see what's going on behind the scenes of a game, it's still a good read. If nothing else, it shows that even though we now idolize the 90's as the "golden age" of gaming and a time when people cared more about the quality of a game than its potential sales, people still only cared about the money back then as well. I mean, do you actually remember the shit that Acclaim used to release in the SNES/Genesis~Mega Drive days?

Still, truth be told, back then there were less executives trying to boss around people like Warren Spector into making a mascot-based cart racer ("JC Denton's Ultimate Kooky Wheelz" for the win!) , but it was hardly the developer heaven that people claim it to be. Naw, that was old Infocom in the 80's. For more on that, you can read an interview of Brian Moriarty (Loom) over at Adventure Classic Gaming, another great read.