Feature: Takashi Nishiyama And The Story Of The Original Street Fighter

Introduction

Most people who grew up in the 90s with Street Fighter II remember it having a huge impact on gaming. It’s probably most people’s first fighter, it defined genre conventions and it’s characters are recognisable all over the world.

In pre-internet days, this led me to wondering what exactly happened with Street Fighter I. It became this mysterious game to me that no-one I knew had ever played. One person told me that Street Fighter I was a side scrolling game where you play as Ryu and beat people up like in Streets of Rage. As it turns out they weren’t too far wrong; the game in question, Final Fight did have connections to the Street Fighter, and this must have been the game he remembered playing on the SNES.

As for the actual real game, I didn’t come across it until years later when it was included on the Capcom Classics Collection for PSP. And it was very different than I expected…

Part I: A Very difficult Game

Released in 1987 by Capcom, Street Fighter is an arcade game directed by Takashi Nishiyama, who had pretty much invented the beat-em-up genre with Kung Fu Master. For his next game, he wanted to focus more on one-on-one fighting. He produced the concept for a new fighting game which was pitched to Capcom, and in it is contained many hallmarks of the series, such as the 8 way directional movement system.

However, if you go into the game expecting it to play like fighting games you’re used to, you might be in for a rude awakening.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Ryu has red hair. It’s not a negative point, it’s just weird. Then, as you begin playing you’ll notice other differences. For one, the movement that you might be used to is way more clunky here. Nothing about the game feels like Street Fighter II even though the actual moves are the same.

Managing to pull of the hadouken in this game is extremely difficult, and you’ll need to be able to do it to progress as the enemies hit for huge damage as the game goes on. There are ten fighters included in the game, but you only get to play as Ryu, which is fair enough as he’s hard enough to master as it is. One hidden trick to doing the moves consistently is you have to do negative inputs, where you release a button instead of pressing it.

When Street Fighter originally released in arcades, it used two huge pressure pads that reacted to the sensitivity you hit them with, allowing for light, medium and heavy attacks. Without these pads, the controls feel laggy in terms of input, and most of the attacks don’t function in the way they do in Street Fighter II. The low sweep for instance, has very short range, and your moves knock the enemy backwards rather than off their feet.

It’s very difficult. While I do remember beating this game on the PSP, and being pretty proud of myself, I had to really grind to beat it on Xbox One. Seriously, my hands get fatigued from mashing the inputs. In order to Dragon Punch I believe the timing is at 1/6th of a second after the typical diagonal input, which leads to the difficulty.

With all of that said, when you finally do start hitting some of Ryu’s special moves, they are extremely powerful, and actually more satisfying than they are in Street Fighter II.

There’s a funny way I interpret some of the lore of the series. In Street Fighter’s story, Ryu only beats the final boss Sagat by tapping into a dark and evil technique called the Dark Hadou. It’s this move which scars Sagat with that big mark on his chest in the sequel.

When you actually achieve a dragon punch here, it really does feel like you’ve tapped in to some forbidden technique that can annihilate anything the game throws at you, but you’ll probably have a good chance of injuring your fingers while trying to pull it off. I think this must be the opposite of whatever ludo-narrative dissonance is.

Part II: Paving The Way For Narrative And Fighting Game Tropes

There are so many elements pioneered by Street Fighter I which would go on to be used in the sequel. One of them is bonus rounds. This particular mini-game where you have to chop through bricks seems to have been used later on in Mortal Kombat, and even though the bonus stages are more fun in Street Fighter II, it’s cool to see they originated here.

We also get to see the first version of the world map, where Ryu travels from country to country fighting international opponents. This is something that hasn’t really been used since Street Fighter II and I don’t know why. It creates the feeling of being on a journey and makes the world feel bigger.

We also get the opponents insulting you after losing a fight, in the most hilarious voice over ever. If you win you get to see their face get all mushed just like in Street Fighter II, so again the originals ideas would go on to define the rest of the series.

The Narrative of Street Fighter

One of the elements of Street Fighter that separates it from other games of the time, is the focus on a story. In contrast to the rest of the series, Street Fighter I follows only one character, and it is essentially the story of Ryu. That said, many of his opponents would return in other iterations such as: Ken, Balrog, Birdie, Gen, Adon and of course final boss Sagat who takes up most of the screen.

It gives the rest of the ensemble a mystique since you can’t play as them. Each character is of a different nationality, and the backgrounds you fight them in reflect their own setting. Ryu is fighting on their turf.

As it turns out, Nishiyama put more into the story of Street Fighter than you might initially realise.

“I wanted there to be a story so it would feel like a movie. We even conceptualized details for the characters that we didn’t put in the game itself -what the characters might like to eat, do they have sisters, other family members etc. Street Fighter was different from prior games in the amount of depth we gave characters.”

It’s not something you can put your finger on while playing, but this sense of depth can definitely be felt. It has something to do with the globe-trotting adventure Ryu is taking on, and his training in between bouts, as well as the faces of the characters displayed outside of the fights.

All of this would go on to be used in other Street Fighter games, but the idea started here. One of the elements that suggests a darker aspect to the narrative, is the ticking time bomb you can see on the continue screen. This really heightens the drama, and it suggests Ryu may actually be fighting for his life.

At this point, the player might wonder if they are fighting a shady organisation as well as entering a tournament. Of course this concept would be developed later on in Street Fighter II, where the organisation was named Shadaloo.

Part III: Development of the Six Button System

Upon release, it turned out that Street Fighter’s pressure pads as envisioned by Nishiyama didn’t really appeal to players. It made the game far more difficult, and many critics noted the amount of physical stress it put on the player in making the inputs.

Commodore User magazine gave the game a mixed review:

“the fairly repetitive nature of the game, and the large amount of physical effort needed to play it, will prevent Street Fighter from being much more than a novel experiment in coin-up technology, but only time will tell”

To counteract this issue, Nishiyama decided to make a budget version of the game, using six buttons, one each for light, medium and heavy kicks and punches respectively.

This system has become the norm for arcade fighting games, but at the time Nishiyama recalled there was actually a lot of pushback from management. They did not really see the value in creating extra buttons on the arcade machine, and they were especially concerned it may be too complex for the player to understand.

They were eventually convinced to run with the idea after Nishiyama explained no matter what button a player pressed, they would be initiating an attack , so it wouldn’t detract from the action.

It’s a system Street Fighter never really deviated from again, and one that many other fighting games copied. It also increased sales of the game in America, where the budget arcade system fared far better than the luxury pressure pad cabinets.

The initial design of the sensitive buttons however, was central to the pitch, and it’s possible that without that selling point, we never would have got Street Fighter in the first place.

Part IV: Other Strange and Obscure Inspirations

Some of the inspirations for Street Fighter are going to be pretty obvious, for instance, the international fighting tournament where the game takes place was inspired by Enter The Dragon.

Infamously, the character of Mike is modelled after Mike Tyson. This led to a lot of confusion where Balrog in Street Fighter II was at one time called M.Bison, but had his name switched in order to avoid copyright issues. Here he’s just plain old Mike.

Some of the other ideas come from more obscure places. Ryu for instance, is named after the first Chinese symbol or character which is used to spell Takashi, Nishiyama’s first name, which can also be pronounced as Ryu. It’s actually a rare insertion of the developers own personality into one of his products, as in general he tends to make games that he thinks will please players first, and himself later. In fact the director once said he’s never actually made his ideal game.

It shows a blue-collar work ethic that has probably served Nishiyama extremely well throughout his career. It’s also why he rarely gives interviews as he prefers his work to speak for itself.

One other piece of trivia for long time fans, is that the hadouken was named after the powerful laser of a the ship which featured in Japanese anime Space Battleship Yamato. The laser is known as the Hadouho and it’s extremely powerful. This laser that can shoot into space was probably the inspiration for all this lore around the Dark Hadou which defined characters like Akuma and Gouken in later games and the Street Fighter anime.

Part IV: Home Console Versions And Unreleased Games

After achieving some success in the arcades, Street Fighter was ported to the PC Engine CD-Rom system in Japan, the TurboGrafx-CD in North America. It later saw release on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga and Atari ST in Europe.

The quality of these ports varies wildly and the world wouldn’t see a proper arcade port until 2006 when it was released for the Playstation Portable as part of the Capcom Classics Remixed collection. More recently, it was released as part of Street Fighter 30th Anniversary for Xbox One, Switch, PS4 and Windows.

Probably the strangest part of the game is a Korean bootleg retitled Street Master, that featured the addition of Street Fighter II characters like Chun-li. While it was nice to see a female addition to the roster, the game is almost unplayable and one of the strangest versions of Street Fighter I’ve seen.

There is one other extremely rare version of the game which never saw the light of day. A very obscure cartridge version of Street Fighter of which only one screenshot exists. It’s unclear where this demo is, or if it was even playable, but it remains a curious relic of the series. Ryu looks like the character from Kung Fu Master, and it appears either Sagat or Adon was going to be his nemesis right from the start.

Part VI: Nishiyama’s Departure from Capcom, SNK and the real Street Fighter 2

For a number of reasons, some of them personal and some to do with the development structure at Capcom, Nishiyama left the company after being head hunted by SNK.

He would go on to create Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, probably the main competitors with Street Fighter in the 2D fighting space. Like Street Fighter, these games were even more story driven, and they innovated on many of the concepts.

Nishiyama has been quoted as saying Fatal Fury was ultimately what his Street Fighter II would have been. This series of games would evolve into the incredibly successful King of Fighters series, which is still running to this day.

It’s one of the great ironies of gaming that upon release, Fatal Fury was derided for being a Street Fighter II knock off. Hardly anyone at the time knew that the game had been in development even before the release of Street Fighter II; the reason for the similarity in concepts was actually due to it being a spiritual successor to the original Street Fighter, a game that was probably forgotten at the time, given it wasn’t available on any of the modern consoles in the West.

This wasn’t the end of Nishiyama’s relationship with the Street Fighter series. A strange yet fitting twist in the story seemed to come about in 2008, when Nishiyama, now president of Dimps, a company known for such titles as the Sonic Advance series, were hired to make Street Fighter IV for capcom.

After the relative commercial failure of Street Fighter III, this Dimps led sequel would bring mainstream success back to the series. In some ways Nishiyama’s career had come full circle.

Although he didn’t directly work on Street Fighter IV, his business approach to making successful games at Dimps cannot be overstated. You only have to look at their resume to see how many franchises the developers have in some ways kept on life support. It’s hard not to see Nishiyama’s guiding hand behind their success, with his approach of putting quality products first.

Part VI: The Legacy Of The Original Street Fighter

Throughout this article, I’ve used some quotes from an interview Nishiyama gave to 1UP a number of years ago, which now seems to be defunct.

Along with the background info I’ve been able to glean out of the History of Street Fighter documents included with the Anniversary Collection, I’ve come to see that far from an overlooked curiosity from the past, which pales in comparison to it’s more well known successor, it is actually Street Fighter I which may be the more important game in terms of it’s contribution to the fighting game genre.

It’s only when you look at the hurdles Nishiyama had to overcome, and the decisions he made to create the game, that the actual impact it had can be seen.

For a long time I used to respect Street Fighter II for getting so much right first time round, everything from the character portraits to the world map to the light, medium heavy attack and the special move system. It’s story too seemed to be fully fledged right from the get go.

It’s only when you look carefully at its predecessor that you see the actual blue-print for this kind of game had already been brought to fruition, and so it was easier for Street Fighter II to polish the concept. Street Fighter crawled so Street Fighter II could walk.

Overlooking the original Street Fighter, is overlooking the origin of modern fighting games.

Epilogue: A Final Note On Design, Creativity And Success

I’ll end with a quote by Takashi Nishiyama, which I think shows the philosophy of his design, and why he was able to make such a powerful impact on the genre:

“I try to look at society from a wider, more objective view to figure out what might be popular in the market, rather than deciding based on my own preferences. I’ve always made decisions based on what I think will be popular amongst the mass market… so it’s very complicated. I think it’s the difference between art and design.”

To read this quote, many may balk at the idea of trying to make things for a mass audience. The wisdom which I think may be lost on some however, is that so many artists and designers create things that they themselves want their audience to want. They are making products they think their audience SHOULD enjoy, instead of appealing to what they DO enjoy. Their approach to art is prescriptive rather communicative. More and more it’s even antagonistic. The modern creative individual is encouraged to put more of their own personality into their work. To “say” things.

Most of the entertainment that has actually had an impact however, taps into deeper desires of the audience. Whether it’s the call to adventure of Mario, or the James Bond escapism of the original Metal Gear, or even the competitiveness of the arcades, the videogames that are truly impactfut so far at least, managed to appeal to something inherent to the wants and needs of players first, and if they can then say something about the world it is a bonus.

There’s also this rare quality which is fast disappearing, of letting work speak for itself, as Nishiyama notes:

“I am a great admirer of Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motors, who said “The product doesn’t lie.” Working in this industry, it’s tempting to show off and talk on a grand scale. But development is background work; we work behind the scenes. It’s my policy that I let the products speak for themselves while I remain in the background. That’s why I’ve avoided the media. But the fact that I’ve been able to survive in this difficult industry amongst many people who have come and gone — that’s something that I’m very proud of.”

With all that in mind, It may be a long time before we come across a new challenger in the fighting game genre.