I thought, when this movie was first coming out, that CoJ’s president was supposed to have a part in the movie. I assumed that Sawada was him for some reason.
- In while epic thread still thrives.
Any way to steal/post/borrow some artwork/pics of the Sheng Long character. Would be fun to see just for the hell of it.
Just played through the game for the first time in years.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMEE OOOOOOOVEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR.
It’s funny how SRK poster Aerialgroove reminded me of this today in a totally different conversation. This is how Gouken - Ryu and Ken’s master looked like in the SF2V manga. The SF2V manga was very different from the SF2V anime that it was based on, they shared some of the SF2V character designs but the story was very different/unrelated. Anyway check this out - here he has a slash going through one eye, not missing both eyes like Anoon’s Sheng Long design. Kind of a funny coincidence eh?
i wanna be a game designer like u any advice on what 2 study
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1a/Gouken5.jpg
This is usually how I’ve seen Gouken. Here’s another:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Vegagouken.png
He’s on the right hand side.
That was a damn good Shen long story, It made me want more.
Bacardi I wanna see the vid.
This legendary thread should be renamed so other people can get in on this
and stickied also on the forum, assuming its not fake (which i dont think it is of course, reading ppls reactions and reading the detailed info on this thread)
I don’t know why heads havent done this already.
I still have the GamePro issues breaking down SFTM back when they broke down the combo system in detail (when they used to be very good.) Good times, good times…ah I miss my childhood.
anoon, im sure the answer is no because you are probably really busy, but do you still keep up with fighting games and the fighting game scene, and have you ever played competively (been to evo) or anything like that? Did you ever have a personal interest in that kind of thing? The reason why I’m curious about is because that you could have entered events like this a a relative unknown since noone knows who the fuck you are, hehe
That Sheng Long bit was great! Do you have any artwork or pics or anything of him?
Love the aspect of him dodging attacks instead of blocking too :tup:
Since you mention the confusion of gouken/goutetsu/sheng long in the early days, i thought i’d mention this… the other day i was watching the latest DVD release of SF2 Movie (animated one with Chun-Li shower scene). There’s a bit where they have bio’s of Ken and Ryu on screen and you can clearly see that it says that their master was Goutetsu. However in all the other material on the disc (added by Udon i believe), they always refer to Gouken as Ryu/Ken’s master. I haven’t read the comics so i assume this to be the canon these days!?
No, Kenzo Tsujimoto and Kenya Sawada are two different people. Tsujimoto is in the movie however. There is a scene towards the beginning in which Guile gives a rally speech to his troops after the operation is supposedly shut down. There are a few shots of random A.N. Troopers listening as Jean Claude is talking. One of these Troopers is Tsujimoto. I’ll go home and check the DVD for the exact time tonight.
Send me a PM and I’ll try to get around to lending some advice. It’s too big a topic to cover here.
Yes, I believe that is the official design of Gouken. I should say: It was shortly before, or just after SFTM released that I personally saw the name Gouken being bandied about. It could have very well been that Capcom already had the storyline and name “Gotetsu” within their organization when we proposed putting Sheng Long in. These days I’m not sure if Capcom Japan saw our Sheng Long as a different character entirely, or the same character with the Americanized name.
My impression is that towards the end of the project, things got a little weird. I don’t know if they really wanted an American, MK-esque style Street Fighter for the US and trusted us with whatever we wanted to do, or if at some point they realized the quality just wasn’t going to be there and they just didn’t care what we happened to SFTM. I never see it mentioned in any of the books they put out, I tend to think perhaps it was the latter.
Umm, yes and no. I still claim to love fighting games, though I find myself playing less and less of them. I still love Street Fighter 2, (Alpha 3 is my favorite,) and Mortal Kombat 2. I really want to like Street Fighter 3, but the characters didn’t appeal to me enough to really get into it. I love 3D graphics, but I never felt the 3D fighters offered the same type of game play I was looking for. I check them all out, but I never play them for long. Virtual Fighter never appealed to me. Tekken was OK, as was the first Soul Calibur. I actually kind of liked that 3D King of Fighters on Xbox, until I quickly found out how shallow it was. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the second Def Jam game even though I’m totally over hip hop in general.
I’m still waiting for that gorgeous 3D fighter with the old school game play and feel to lure me back in!
I’ll be honest: I considered myself pretty good back in the Hyper Fighting/Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo/MK2 days, but I never really played competitively. I felt I never had the time or money to devote to going down to the arcade and reaching that next level. Once the arcades died, I’m afriad my skills dropped off big time. Now I read the Shoryuken forums and I don’t understand half of the terminology you guys use. I’m a scrub again.
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.
anoon: this is great thread; a very fun read! Thanks for sharing
Questions:
-
From a gaming production company’s perspective, how is the “success” of a game measured? I’ve never worked in the gaming industries, but I hear all the time that it comes from “the sales.” Does that mean the direct sales of consumers, or the wholesales? I’d be interested in learn more about this process.
-
How “successful” was this game and did how did it compare to the team’s expectations?
-
Is today’s method of measuring “success” the same as it was when you worked on SFTM?
Thanks again
Stories about game development are usually good reads, but this is great! I must admit to never really having played the game much, but I may well give it a go simply because there’s a connection now 
Thanks for coming forward (however much you thought it might be a bad idea)
–flux
This thread is monumental. Thank you so much anoon!
On that note, (this is going to be depressing but whatever) if you worked with the actors during/after the movie was made, did you get to work with raul julia before he died? D:
I’ll try to tackle this one if no one minds.
Basically games are a business and there is a lot of money involved - especially with the next gen games that are being made these days. Success is like 90% measured in sales. Sales meaning to the consumer. Most companies are smart these days and print enough to meet a low demand then print more if the demand is higher. Obviously every game is handled different - such as Gears of War demand versus Viva Pinanata or whatever. Rarely do you have the situation anymore of stacks and stacks of games sitting on store shelves and no one buying them. Although it happens aka Backyard Wrestling 2.
The other 10% is how well the game was received from critics/consumers. If a game is received well such as Ico but sells poorly then it might still be perceived as a hit. Ico is a great example because it allowed Ueda to make Shadow of the Colosssus. But at the end of the day if SotC didn’t sell well either then I doubt even he would be getting a third game.
Keep in mind that selling well isn’t measured by games like Halo. Its only measured against the budget of the game. So if a game costs only $300k to make then it doesn’t need to sell as many units for everyone to make their money back on. However if a game’s budget is like $30 million, then it needs to sell a lot more.
The videogame industry is just that, an industry. And it’s all measured in money.
Derek Daniels
Posting in a legendary thread!
I hope you can find the Sheng Long artwork~
This is a very cool read. Although I hated that game it still is interesting to hear the stories behind it. Anoon if you don’t mind answering this question I’d like to know whose idea it was to have all those secret characters that were color swaps of Blade.
Me too! I hope to get a helping start if possible. Thx.
That doesn’t surprise me; ever since SSF2 Capcom Japan was contemplating about SF3, trying out several kinds of technologies and ideas. They finally decided on CPS3 for it, 4 years later. Interesting though.
About Sheng Long, his name translates to “rising dragon” rather than “dragon punch.”
The first Gouken pic is a rough sketch from the Zero OVA/Alpha Movie. The second is from the manga SF2 Ryu, the work which led to Capcom’s decision of making him officially Ryu and Ken’s master once Super X/Super Turbo came out. In the SF2V manga the eye-scarred master is named Gouun, and the SF2 Animated Movie gives evidence that between SSF2 and Super X Capcom played with the idea of naming the master Goutetsu before taking the manga’s idea, but finally Goutetsu became the master’s master.
Just my opinion, but when Capcom Japan told your team, anoon, about Sheng Long appearing, they meant it would be nothing short of a miracle. They knew about the hoaxes and the confusion overseas. There wasn’t anything to correct you on. Sheng Long was an American creation through and through.
Thread Winner!! 
Wow, I didn’t realize that Capcom did, in fact, start to feel sorta threatened by digitized fighter games (back then) that they would go as far as considering making a game of such using Street Fighter characters. Yeah, it did seem more people were playing MK back in the day, but I just chalked it up to gamers playing that game for the Fatalities and finishing moves rather than being solely impressed with the digitized characters. I don’t think combo display counters were implemented in games back then, so what all guys did was basically show each other off by just doing those finishing moves (Well, it seemed like that, so I could be wrong). I think most people that crowded around that arcade game (while people were playing it) were mostly there to just view that kind of special F/X & stuff.
Very interesting stuff, my man. This thread has been a very, very fascinating & informative read for me. If you don’t mind, I have some other questions for you but will PM them to you instead.
And thanks again, anoon, for sharing this. :tup:
Stickied!?! Whoa, I’m honored. Thanks for all of the responses.
A few more answers, then I’ll post another couple of sections
I don’t recall how many we sold, but I believe the initial run did move. So maybe there were few thousand machines sold? I really don’t know how much the game cost to develop. I guess it largely depends how Capcom did the accounting. For example, if the price of the actors was billed purely to the film production, that would make the game cheaper. I really don’t know how much I.T. got paid to do the project. Thinking back to coin op budgets, SFTM may have broken even, if that was the sole line item. Again, I’m purely speculating.
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.
Yep. $$$. Derek (Omni) answered much as I would have.
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.
Maybe I should edit that section of text you quoted a little. I come off as a know it all.
So, I don’t know if “threatened” is the right word… please keep in mind: I really don’t know Capcom’s true motivations or the mechinations at that time. I’m just relating the experience as I percieved it.
In any business, when new technology arrives, companies are best served to evaluate and potentially adopt it, lest they be left behind. Digitizing was the hot video game technology of the day. Capcom already had the movie in production, so with this new technology came the opportunity to really bring their product a step closer to believability. So, was the fact that MKII was earning buckets of cash the sole motivation for Capcom to do the SFTM? I doubt it. Did they take notice and was it a factor? I’d wager Yes.
I suppose my perception that MK was a motivating factor stems from the fact that Capcom hired us americans to do it, and they largely let us implement the game play the way “we” wanted. I plan on getting more into the whole fighting engine and game play of SFTM after I get all of this up front stuff posted.
Well, I’ll have to politely disagree with you there. I really feel that Mortal Kombat II did have a great deal of depth. It was different than SF2, but it had it’s own unique systems and game play that largely worked. I still love MK2 to this day. The fatalities may have drawn people in, but I believe that once there, they stayed for the game play.
We did briefly meet Mr. Julia, but sadly, he was very ill at the time, so we did not get an opportunity to digitize him. The actor you see in the game is actually his stand in/stunt double.