That’s awesome.
And yes, DPing through fireballs is standard in ST.
anoon - i just want to thank you SO MUCH for making this thread. This is by far the most interesting thing ive ever read on srk. Thank you again sir.
Anoon, I also just wanted to offer my thanks for taking the time to write all this stuff.
It’s a great read, and I hope you can keep adding more to this thread.
im with him
agreed, definitely an interesting read. like it or not, sf the movie is part of our culture
SAWADA
Another digitizing session that went amazingly well was that with Kenya Sawada. Yes, Sawada is his name in real life, as well as in the game and film. (In order to try and clear up any confusion, Kenya will refer to the real world actor, where Sawada will refer to the character in the game and movie.)
So where did Sawada come from? The whole Sawada situation is fairly interesting and kind of mysterious to me in some ways. Capcom really seemed to be looking to promote Kenya where ever possible. I never got the specifics, but some how I was under the impression that he was being positioned to be some sort of Capcom action hero, as if he would go on to be the face of Capcom and perhaps eventually star in his own films or something. I am purely speculating here, but perhaps Capcom had intended in starting a motion picture division? What better way to know the business than fund your own film first and hire real Hollywood people to learn from? Perhaps inserting Kenya into the film of Street Fighter the Movie as himself was part of some plan like that? I have a vague recollection of seeing one of the early script treatments featuring Sawada to a much larger degree. Anyway, this is all pure conjecture on my part. His relationship with Capcom was definitely different from the other actors though. He seemed to have more of a direct interaction with the Capcom staff.
The Sawada character was another instance where we deviated from the look of the film. In beginning of the movie, he appears in a khaki A.N. uniform, while later, he appears in the A.N. field outfit of camo pants and blue shirt. We went more with the latter, though we ditched the shirt. The blue would have given us trouble, but we could have easily had a new shirt of a different color made up that we could palette shift later, I suppose. Kenya was in great shape though, and since we were deviating from the movie costumes all over the place anyway, we made Sawada shirtless. Besides: Mortal Kombat 2 had a bunch of buff characters and they were selling tons of games and earning money; we wanted buff characters too. Maybe wed make some dough as well.
The Sawada digitizing session went really well as he had some form of martial arts background. While Kenya did know some English, we largely relied on the Capcom translators to help us direct him in Japanese. FUN FACT: In the film, Sawadas voice was overdubbed by some body else. Ill never forget seeing the final cut and laughing hysterically when Sawada spoke for the first time!
As for Sawadas in game implementation, his move set was somewhat based on a Fei Long/Guile hybrid type of arrangement; which can be seen in the similarity of his many kick based specials. He was an A.N. soldier in the film, so it stood to reason that he might have similar military training to Guile, hence some of the flash kick type moves. In one of the very first scripts, Fei Long was included, and I believe he was to be played by Kenya, so that lent some flavor as well. One final word: No, he does not have a lightsaber!!! Based on the hardware limitations of the day, we couldnt do motion blur, glows, or any of that fancy stuff we have access to today. While Sawada does have slashing type moves, the art was supposed to be a more ethereal representation of the force behind the attack, (much like Ken and Ryus hadoken,) rather than the character actually pulling out a light saber type device. It didnt help that American game developers seemed to have a difference of opinion from their Japanese counterparts regarding special effects at the time. It was my observation that Japanese developers would flicker special effect graphics on and off every other frame to give the impression of transparency, where American developers seemed to prefer solid special effects that did not flicker. I had argued for flickering, though that was overruled, and we went with a Mortal Kombat style implementation of solid special effects.
Actually, we did two digitizing sessions with Kenya: One session as the Sawada character from the film, one session as Fei Long. Fei Long did appear in one of the original drafts of the films scripts, and as we were still looking to add all kinds of extra characters not in the film, we had Kenya perform a Fei Long capture session on another day. The costume was easy to put together: traditional black pants and black shoes, no shirt, and hair pushed forward. We captured the Fei Long style move set in another smooth sailing session, and we burned the data to disc. Unfortunately, back in Chicago, time was our enemy yet again, and the Fei Long data never got cleaned up, as far as I know.
This thread is absolutely awesome, Keep it up!
^
Yes more please.
Amazing thread.
Thanks a lot for your time.
I appreciate you posting this stuff. I may be jumping the gun on some of these questions, but things i’d like to know so far:
How big was the team and how long was production ? During production how much time was spent on what?
Were you also the Art director? As the co-designer and artist were there any communication problems within the team?
What constitutes as a ‘weak link’? Is this a team member, minor design flaw? major design flaw? Background choice? art direction in general or something specific? programming in general or something specific?
Was the idea to base it on the movie secondary then? How much creative license were you given? Did it change over time? Would that mean the movie studio was onboard to begin with? Did the Movie studio and/ or Capcom Japan put restrictions and give guidelines for you to follow? How strict were they? What were they (including what may seem obvious)? Or was it loose and played by ear?
I’m thinking in terms of something like having to use backgrounds based/inspired on the movie,
Did you still feel that way at the end of preproduction?
Speaking of preproduction, how long was it, and how did it work?
So far you’ve talked neutrally/positive on the mocap / animation/ etc…
Do you consider that the game’s stronger points? What do you consider (if not) as the games strongest points?
I have more questions,but I think I’ll hold off for now :wonder:
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write all this up.
I still find it funny that the game was more faithful to the source material than the movie it was based on! 
Thanks for the info behind the game’s development!
Great questions! Are you in the industry or part of the press that covers it? I’ll do my best to answer.
You’re really testing my memory now. Honestly, I’d have to go back and look at he credits to see how many people were involved.
As far as production time goes, Everything seemed to happen so fast: There were talks with Capcom, some sort of pitch, we figured out what we’d need in terms of technology and art pipeline, then next thing I knew we were in Australia. We stayed there for a month, then back in Chicago, it was hardcore cranking till the end. I’m really wishing I kept some sort of journal or log, because specific times and dates escape me at this point.
I was not the Art Director for that project, no. However, I was/am primarily on the art side of production, so a lot of what I relate is going to be centered on that side of things. As far as communication problems go, on any project, there always seems to be some sort of hiccup when one department talks to another. Artists, Programmers and Designers all speak different languages, so there’s bound to be some issues there.
On any given project there could be any number of factors that contribute to the game’s demise or lack of success. Certainly the issues you mention above are all valid concerns.
At the time it seemed like there was talk of SF3, SF3, SF3, then it was SFTM, SFTM, SFTM. I wasn’t privy to the early discussions, so I can’t say for sure what was going on in the higher ranking meetings. I can only relate how I percieved things at the time. I will say though: there was never a decision or any direction to faithfully stick to the film Street Fighter The Movie; we included what we though would give the game the best chance of success. (Akuma, for example.)
Quite a lot. In terms of art, we were able to choose which backgrounds to use, which costumes to shoot and so forth. In terms of game play the engine and systems were completely devised and written by our programming staff.
Not that I recall. One specific incident I remember though was Chun Li’s fireball. Capcom Japan insisted on a specific piece of art for it, which was a large, flaming, chinese dragon.
The movie studio really didn’t seem to concern itself with the video game. Capcom was footing the bill for both the film and game, so they were in charge. We never had to ok any of the game content with the studio.
I think I answered most of these, but to recap: It is my recollection that we were really given free reign for the most part. I can’t remember any real big discussions or butting of the heads regarding game content or features between Capcom and I.T. I think this was largely due to a couple of factors:
A.) They did want an american developed game, for the american market.
B.) They were unfamiliar with digitized graphics and the process involved
Yes. By the time we wrapped the game up, I was pretty unhappy with the result. Here I was, one of the biggest Street Fighter fans ever, given a golden opportunity to make the best Street Fighter game ever, and at the end, I couldn’t hardly stand to play it.
Again, you’re testing my memory! I couldn’t tell you specifically, but as I said above, things seemed to move pretty fast. If I had to hazard a guess, given the length of projects in those days, I’d say maybe we had 2-3 months before we were off in Australia. That was largely occupied by R&D focused on digitizing, storyboarding moves, designing new games features, etc.
Excellent questions. I really need to go back and reevaluate the game again. It’s been so long since I’ve played it. Now, keep in mind that I’m an artist by trade, and therefore probably biased, but I guess I would say that yes, the art was the strongest part of the game.
Was the animation great? probably not. I would say that things animated fluidly, though the poses that made up each animation were weak. I think the Capcom USA guys did a better job of making stronger animation by cutting up and editing the capture data to better match SSF2T
I think in general, our graphics were vibrant and the quality of our capture was good. Some of our backgrounds were really nicely done too.
I wasn’t a fan of the gameplay, so I have to give the art the upper hand.
According to a couple of the FAQs on GameFAQs, there’s an audits menu that lists a whole bunch of unlockable stuff along with keeping track of how many times those things have been accessed. Unfortunately it seems like nobody knows what half of that stuff means.
So, the items with notes in parentheses are the ones that have been discovered. The rest are still a mystery. Could you please fill in the blanks? It doesn’t have to be right now. I’m sure you have to bust out some very dusty notes to figure out most of those. I don’t mind waiting until you’re done with the entire story that you want to tell.
Posting in legendary thread. This thread is awesome. The game is rubbish, but the thread is great. I say it’s the second most interesting thread on SRK (the SF story thread, which had unfairly been moved years ago to the Fanfiction Library when it is anything but fanfiction, and is the biggest thread on SRK, is still the most interesting). I’m copy & pasting anoon’s posts to a text file. This shit needs to be preserved.
While I was never enamoured with the whole digitized graphics, and indeed loathed SFTM’s look, what really turned me off was the control. Compared to SF2, which was perfect control incarnate, SFTM was sluggish molasses. I’ve tried playing it a couple times and given up because I can’t pull off moves properly. I suppose CoJ never gave Hi Tech access to their control algorithms or something, but I guess I’ll wait to hear what anoon says. I think having SF-level control would have gone a long way to making the game more acceptable (if not actually “good”) to fans.
Like Sabin, I too still have Gamepro’s mags (back when Gamepro actually didn’t used to suck) that break down the game. Definitely had some interesting ideas in there. I just think that they might have been implemented badly (e.g. different throw escapes for every character that were totally arbitrary - that’s MK fatality level unnecessary memorization).
LOL at “When Sheng Long appears, it will be like an appearance from God”. That’s right up there with Capcom hijacking the number “Three” as a name for a videogame! 
One other question, who’s idea was it to give you an instant “Game Over” if time runs out and both players have the same amount of life? And this is just the first round.
Thank you, so much, for all of this.
Hey anoon, thanks for coming forward and starting this thread, it’s awesome.
A lot of people have mentioned favorably gameplay elements from SFTM that were later “borrowed” by other games. Could you go into detail about some of those, like the combo system and how it works?
Hey to be honest I never even played this game because it was associated with the live action movie that I didn’t care for. But I got a PS1 copy off of Ebay thanks to this thread for only five dollars. I’ll play it today for the first time. Thanks for all of the info Anoon, it should increase my enjoyment value of the game when I play it tonight!
sano:
Note that the PSX/Saturn versions are completely different to the arcade version. The arcade version is in its own unique classed of fucked up, while the home versions are merely inferior ports of ST.