Off-topic, but Makoto’s voice actor in 3rd Strike is named Makoto. Seriously.
Ok, I’m going to post up parts of my doc in digestable pieces. The first part may be a bit dull, but it quickly explains explains how I got into games and leads into the some of the circumstances that came about which led to Incredible Technologies/Strata devloping SFTM.
(Oh, and Yes, I played the Bison Trooper characters Blade, Arkane, Khyber, and F7)
Street Fighter the Movie Broke My Heart.
Alan Noon
01.23.07
Its 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.
A lot of time has passed. I have forgotten much of the experience. Many more parts are probably buried subconsciously; a protection by my inner psyche, for surely I would go mad if I confronted with the horror of what happened.
Ok, ok melodrama aside, what Im trying to say is that I cant remember everything that went down, and certainly not in chronological order. Ill just relate the bits and pieces I do remember that might be interesting to fighting game fans. Ill also be happy to field questions, if I have a halfway decent explanation.
BACKGROUND
How did I end up working on what was supposed to be the next big thing? I have always been a video game fanatic. I remember the first video game I ever saw and where I saw it. It was Pong. It was at a local restaurant. I was 5 years old, and I was mesmerized. Since that day, I have been obsessed with video gaming.
A STEP CLOSER
Flash forward and I am in college and I am still gaming. The school had a Street Fighter in the lounge, and I was completely hooked. (SF:CE, if you must know.) Soon after the Hyper Fighting showed up, I was ditching most of my classes to play. I should mention that Mortal Kombat arrived in the lounge around that same time, and I started playing a lot of that too. Truth be told though, in my mind Street Fighter was the king of the fighting games.
I had always been into art, had always been into videos games, and had always been interested in computers. I had known since I was seven years old when I made Pitfall Harry grab his first bar of gold that I wanted to make games. Now I saw the first step I had to take to make it happen. That semester I enrolled in the schools first computer art class offering. Towards the end of the course, the instructor informed us that a local video game company was looking for help. I was doing really well in the class, so I took the number and called them. Long story short, I got the job of my dreams. I quit school immediately. I was going to be making video games.
THE FOOT IN THE DOOR
The company that hired me was Incredible Technologies, manufacturers of a number of successful coin op arcade games. (They were also known by another name too, Strata. I dont recall the specifics of the division between I.T. and Strata were. Maybe I never knew.) I worked on a few other projects before Street Fighter the Movie came around. Being a fighting game nut, I was originally hired to work on New Fighter, which was the follow up product to a rather successful hit I.T. had in a coin op game known as Time Killers. (This is worth mentioning as Time Killers apparently played something of a role in the SFTM saga. More on that later.) What ended up happening to me however was that it was decided that New Fighter was going to run with a skeleton crew for while as I was put on to the football game which needed extra hands. My first day on the job, and I was cleaning up (poorly,) digitized football players for Hard Yardage, I.T.s NBA Jam style football game. I loved every minute of it.
THE NEXT TITLE
After a while, Hard Yardage eventually shipped, though perhaps not in the quantities we had hoped. One factor may have been that I.T. insisted on selling Hard Yardage as a dedicated machine only; no conversion kits. Coin Op distributors were not wild about that idea as there was a lot of wood in the market at the time, as Ive heard it said. (Meaning: there were tons of arcade cabinets out there in circulation already. Arcade Operators would much rather just buy a conversion kit to retrofit an old, lesser earning game instead of buying a whole new, expensive cabinet.) A large number of Hard Yardages either came back, or never left. We ourselves now had a lot of wood on our hands.
Time Killers, while perhaps not too fondly remembered by gamers, actually did exceptionally well for I.T. Fighting games were super hot, with no signs of slowing down. Operators and the Distributors wanted more fighting game product to sell. Full attention was put back on New Fighter.
New Fighter was pretty darn cool for a prototype. It featured eight or so bald headed, spandex wearing place holder characters that all looked exactly the same, save for palette swaps and special move sets to differentiate them. They all had a nature or element based theme, so we had the fire guy, the ice guy, the rock guy, and so on, as well as my personal favorite: the plant guy. Plant Guy had a sweet, Scorpion-esque move in which a vine grew from his arm and snared the enemy and pulled him in close for a free shot. Sadly, Plant Guy never made it to the final product, which you may or may not now know as Bloodstorm. (Fun fact: We needed to get rid of those dedicated Hard Yardages that were costing us rent. I am proud to say that it was my idea to create giant vinyl BloodStorm cabinet graphics we could stick over the sides of the Hard Yardages. We converted the boards, stuck on the stickers, and off they went. Problem solved!)
Interesting…please go on, anoon.
yes please do.
You must’ve gotten a kick out of the Simpson’s “Bonestorm” parody.
Great post…i look forward to hearing more about your experience at I.T.
I <3 this game. Tons. Directional fireballs are hardcore, TRY JUMPING THAT SHIT. And directoinal Shinkuu iS FIREWALL
… I don’t. Bastards like you and Michael Jackson ruined my childhood.
runs off in a floating pirate ship
…that went well.
Yes, Absolutely! That was too funny.
Ok, more stuff on the way. I take a quick detour into Bloodstorm and then describe some of the circumstances in the industry at the time.
AN ASIDE: A WORD ON BLOODSTORM
Like Hard Yardage, Bloodstorm was pretty darn fun and exciting to work on too, though I was pretty unhappy with the final result. You can probably guess why. Bad art and bad game play. At the time Bloodstorm released, it really didnt stand a chance against the latest Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, which were up to versions Super and II respectively. I distinctly remember the coin op show at which Bloodstorm made its debut. It was in Chicago, and our booth was right next to Capcoms. Though I was not part of the sales force, I routinely went to the coin op shows to not only demo our games to the distributors, but to see and test the latest from the competition. I tested a whole lot of free Super Street Fighter II that weekend. Anyway, perhaps I can talk about Bloodstorm in the future.
THE CHICAGO GAME DEV SCENE
The interesting thing about Chicago game dev in the early nineties is that the major players in the industry had offices around town. Atari, Midway, Sega, Konami, and Data East all had development and/or sales arms in the area. There were a number of smaller video game related companies around as well. One of them was known as originally known as either Gamestar or Romstar. Maybe both at varying points in time. My facts are suspect here, but I seem to recall that while they didnt develop coin op games themselves, Romstar had something to do with the selling various coin op products, particularly to the South American region. At any rate, Romstar was purchased by Capcom and became their Midwest office. This is semi-important to know for reasons that will shortly become apparent.
STREET FIGHTER VS. MORTAL KOMBAT
I previously mentioned that Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II were out on the market around the same time. The fact of the matter was, Mortal Kombat II appeared to be eclipsing Street Fighter in popularity. It was dominating the arcade. MKII machines were earning a thousand bucks a week or more in quarters, which was crazy amounts of dough. It appeared that gamers might be tiring of the same hand drawn sprites and 8 bit backgrounds of Street Fighter. I do not know whether or not the idea originated from Capcom Japan or one of the U.S. offices, but it seemed to make sense that Capcom should make a Street Fighter to appeal to the changing tastes of the American gamer.
THE MOVIE
Oh, and it just so happened that Capcom had signed on a bunch of pretty well known actors to bring their franchise to the big screen. It seemed like a home run! A brand new Street Fighter done in flashy new digitized graphics featuring the bona fide likenesses of major celebrities such as Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme, Kylie Minogue, Wes Studi, and master thespian Gregg Rainwater! (cough)
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 clich, but its 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 couldnt support the amount of colors required to do those fancy graphics justice. But apparently one of the members of upper management in Capcoms 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 Capcoms new Midwest offices, which Im sure didnt hurt our chances of landing the deal!
AN ASIDE: SPECIAL PROPS TO TIME KILLERS
I previously mentioned that Time Killers may have had a role in securing the SFTM deal for I.T. This is just word of mouth, but apparently when Time Killers made its debut at one of the coin op shows, the guys from Capcom were reported to be impressed with the technical execution and crowded around it, taking notes and trying to figure out how it was built. Ill personally pass no judgements on the game play of Time Killers here, but I must admit, it did feature a number of extremely impressive features for the time: the aforementioned dazzling array of on screen colors, multi level parallax scrolling backgrounds, dismemeberments, scanned in fine art used as in game assets, and without a doubt, the most amazing example of color cycling Ive ever seen: The time vortex.)
So those are the factors, as I am aware, that led to how Incredible Technologies was trusted with what was supposed to be the next great iteration of the Street Fighter franchise.
All right. I’ll take a break from posting and start up writing again so I can get ahead a bit. That should give opportunity for some questions to roll in, if anybody has any.
you were part of bloodstorm youre my hero
so many secrets in that game
Sagat is too good.
EYEBEAMS
Got a question, why does Sawada have a lightsaber? Crazy to know that you Anoon helped in making SFTM.
Because! Every good Street Fighter needs a lightsaber!
Very interesting information, here.
WHOA Anoon… You played as Blade? That makes my question a little easier.
Blade’s ending taken from All About Capcom, they used all caps so I’ll do the same -
“FOR YEARS BLADE HAS INFILTRATED BISON’S CORRUPT ORGANIZATION, REPORTING IN SECRET TO HIS BROTHER GUILE. NOW WITH BISON DESTROYED, BLADE AT LAST IS FREE OF HIS DEEP COVER ASSIGNMENT AND IS ABLE TO RESUME HIS PROFESSIONAL CAREER AS GUNLOC.”
Sorry, I can’t help but laugh whenever I read that.
As far as I know, in the American version of Slammasters it was stated that Gunloc is “rumoured to be related to a famous street fighter” and he does have a Sonic Attack. However, this is just in his profile in the American version and not the Japanese one, something that Capcom USA made up (not official).
So really, who’s idea was it to not only make Blade Gunloc, but make him Guile’s brother as a reference to a made up Capcom USA Profile for Gunloc in Slammasters? That’s just really one of the strangest endings in the game, if you happen to know anything about this please shed some light. If not, that’s cool. Thanks!
LOL, does it really say that!?! that does seem pretty ridiculous. I need to play SFTM again. Anyway, to be honest I am really not sure who specifically came up with that one. It could have been me or one of the other guys at I.T. For the most part, Capcom USA didn’t get involved when it came to specifics like that, so I doubt the SFTM tie in to Slammasters came from them.
One of the things that is cool about the SF universe is the character to character interpersonal relationships. It’s no surprise that we tried to tie Blade in with the rest of the crew. You have to admit, when you’re looking at the select screen of SFTM, he looks pretty out of place against the traditional SF gang!
Wow, lots of Sawada questions, that’s great! So, Sawada doesn’t actually have a lightsaber. In the days before motion blur, refraction effects, and emissive textures, we did what we could. 
It’s just supposed to be a visual manifestation of the power behind the attack.