[Gaming] Keeping "Street Fighter" Relevant

(A.K.A., how the Street Fighter series is shaping up for a spectacular comeback)

Staying relevant for a prolonged amount of time is no mean feat, for any product, in any industry. The videogame market is no exception to this, in fact this applies to both different genres and different franchises. Platformers, adventures, role-playing games, they all had their proverbial moment in the sun several years ago, and at that time, each respective genre dominated the sales charts as well as gathering excellent reviews. Nowadays, their appeal mostly limited to a niche* audience, with the odd excellent game coming out every now and then, only to remind us that every rule has its exceptions, few though they are.

Same goes for gaming franchises that used to be huge, such as Tomb Raider. Even though TR has recovered from the near-catastrophe that was the early 00’s and Angel of Darkness, it’s nowhere near the sales behemoth it used to be in the mid-90’s.

The fighting game genre is amongst the ones that enjoyed massive success initially, only to slowly wither away with the years. Starting with Street Fighter II back in 1992, which inarguably started the whole fighting game craze and also breathed life back into the arcades scene, the genre had its last massive commercial and critical success with 1999’s Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, a game which became the flagship of Sega’s last entry in the hardware market. Since then, it’s all gone downhill**.

That’s not to say that the genre hasn’t had any worthy recent entries, games such as Virtua Fighter 5 for example are as good as any of the classics from the 90’s, if not better. However, mainstream appeal has been all but lost for contemporary fighting games, a side-effect perhaps of the merciless milking of the genre in the previous decade.

The Street Fighter franchise is no stranger to neither declining popularity, nor milking. As a matter of fact, it was pretty much the franchise that invented milking, given that SFII had five different versions of the same game, while the subsequent Street Fighter Alpha/Zero and Street Fighter III series had three each***. That’s excluding the various spin-off series, such as the Marvel Vs Capcom and Capcom Vs SNK.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that people were eventually tired of Street Fighter. It also didn’t help that the SF games took place exclusively in a two-dimensional plane, when 3D graphics were the new “it” thing in the late 90’s.

Another factor that played a big part in the eventual decline of SF’s popularity was the eventual sequel to the supremely-successful SFII, 1997’s Street Fighter III: The New Generation. Not only did it take Capcom two years to come up with the definitive, balanced version of the game with 1999’s 3rd Strike(*4), it was such a radical departure from its predecessor that mainstream audiences felt overwhelmed with its complexity.

To make matters worse, the majority of its characters suffered from a complete lack of charisma (an unfortunate trademark of late 90’s Capcom design), which only alienated casual audiences even more. Let’s not forget that most people are more likely to choose a character that looks “cool” than a freak show, when first playing a game.

The game itself was fantastic, and inarguably a worthy follow-up to the franchise, but that mattered little when only but the most hardcore fans could appreciate it for what it was, and also the only ones that could pull off the most difficult combinations of moves.

So how do you go about making people interested in a franchise again, almost a decade after its last appearance? Firstly, you have to remind them why they cared about the franchise in the first place. Capcom succeeded in doing this about a year ago, when they released the first teaser of SFIV, which featured the quintessential street fighters, Ryu and Ken sparring as they always seem to do.

It was enough to get several people excited, but this was only the beginning. Soon after, they released the first in-game trailer with actual gameplay, revealing to us that most (eventually this became all) of the original fighters from SFII would be featured in the game. One might accuse Capcom of playing it safe, instead of creating an all-new cast as they did with SFIII, but you can hardly blame them for giving the old fans of the series a cast they already know and love.

When it comes to maintaining relevancy, it’s always important to keep your original audience. And that audience is mainly made up of people who remember E. Honda as “That Sumo guy that does that handslaps thing”, rather than the vocal minority that knows how to spell Tatsumakishenpukyakugodonlyknows(*5).

Naturally, you can’t just stop there. SFII is sixteen yeas old and SFIII is a mere five years younger, several of the people that used to play both games frantically back then have probably moved on from videogames all together. Not to mention that the videogame market is vastly different these days, the audience is almost nothing like it used to be.

In other words, you need to reach an all-new audience, an audience that probably grew up on different games than Street Fighter. The way used by Capcom to reach this audience is two-fold.

The first thing they had to do is teach this audience why SF was simply that damn good. In other words, they had to create a game that plays like a dream and is appealing to both a novice and a seasoned player. The way Capcom went about doing this was by reinventing the old SFII gameplay, doing away with several of SFIII’s features, such as the parrying system. Initially, I had voiced my displeasure over this, since I am a big fan of SFIII even though I pretty much suck at it.

Seeing where Capcom is coming from though, it makes perfect sense. As the recent Edge review so cleverly put it, for most players a combo is nothing more than a jumping kick followed by a sweep kick(*6). With that in mind, SFIV is built around a system that is far more forgiving when it comes to creating combos than its predecessor, but is still so deep and intuitive that experienced players will always have the edge over a newcomer, as it should be.

The best gameplay in the world, however, won’t mean a thing if people don’t get to actually play your game. And for better or worse, the best way of doing that is a strong presentation. If you get people excited enough through a trailer, they’re more likely to take a further look, while if they only see a generic “From the makers of a game that was huge fifteen years ago!” teaser, they’re more likely to pass it by.

In Street Fighter’s case, it’s not really that hard to make people care given its legacy. Many videogame fans may not know that Ken Masters is Japanese and not American (true story), but most of them would have a good idea of who he is, and subsequently would be more willing to play a game with a familiar character, rather than "Generic Bulky Male #11378", given the right stimulus.

At this point, I have to confess that the above paragraph is nothing more than a pretty clumsy attempt of declaring my unrelenting love over the brilliance that was the new SFIV trailer from the ‘08 Tokyo Game Show.

While certain members of the vocal minority I mentioned earlier complained about its content being composed of mostly seen-before footage, that view is ignoring the fact that this is a trailer meant to appeal to the oh-so-important masses. It is incredibly impressive, superbly edited, with the combination of in-game footage, computer-generated segments and anime working wondefully together, and the remix of Ryu's theme is phenomenal.

It is, in other words, impressive enough to appeal to both old and new fans of the franchise, as well as people unfamiliar with it.

Watch the trailer for yourselves here:



TL;DR version:

Capcom has managed to get people excited about a franchise that hasn’t seen an update in more than a decade. That is no mean feat, and more companies should take a note of how to revisit an old, beloved, franchise.

It also helps that Street Fighter II was pretty much the game of forever (there’s a reason why it’s still being played today, and why Ryu’s theme is just that good), but Capcom always managed to build on its success, even when they were releasing new versions of the same game every year.

* Oh gods, that word again

** For example, if Tekken 2 had been announced as multiplatform during the Playstation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 years, the entire Milky Way galaxy would have exploded by the amassed nerdrage. In direct contrast, the recent announcement of Tekken 6 for the Xbox 360 was met with what can be described as a collective “Oh. Cool.”

*** There was no Street Fighter EX series, that’s just rumors spread by people made out of pure evil. There was only one game, Street Fighter EX2 and it was actually pretty fun.

*4 It’s always a charm

*5 It’s Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku

*6 Sadly, I'm one of them