If you are concerned about your own struggles with imposter syndrome, please remember that even the big guys aren’t always confident.
Let’s talk about Street Fighter’s identity issues.
A long time ago in an arcade long forgotten, there was Street Fighter 1. The year was 1987, the cabinet was initially based on the concept of pressure-sensitive buttons, and the game… was not that great. Technically everything about Street Fighter was there: Ryu, special moves, boxers marginally based on Mike Tyson; but something was missing. Some particular, undefinable trait was absent from the original Street Fighter formula (it was probably Zangief), so, while Street Fighter was not remembered as a complete bomb, it isn’t remembered as the origin of the genre either. And then someone tried to make a sequel, and we were graced with… Final Fight. What? You were expecting Street Fighter’s nigh-holy descendant? No, much like Devil May Cry accidently being born of Resident Evil’s attempts to iterate, Final Fight was the next mutation of Street Fighter’s gameplay. And, despite the fact that the two franchises should have swapped names right then and there, we would still have to wait a little for Street Fighter 2.
And the secret truth of Street Fighter 2? It is now abundantly clear that no one at Capcom had any idea as to why it was successful.
Street Fighter 2 was popular when I was a kid, and I know that time seemed to flow relatively differently when I was a child. I am aware of this issue, but I’m still pretty confident in saying that between the release of Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3, approximately 12,000 years passed. But don’t worry, children of tomorrow, we had routine Street Fighter 2 content during that time. There was Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition (play as the bosses, even if some are broken!), Street Fighter 2: Turbo (maybe Dhalsim is teleporting on purpose now!), Super Street Fighter 2 (now with four new butts!), and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (one more angry butt!). The same basic gameplay carried the title forward, though, so if you were a Blanka main (because you were awesome), all you ever got out of these upgrades was like one new move, and the ability to make Fei Long feel bad for existing. Which is great… For Capcom, at least, because they could still earn your quarters through releasing the same game over and over again. There was no risk of Street Fighter 2 accidentally becoming Final Fight: Streetwise if you never even tried to make a new Street Fighter sequel. No need to distill the essential “what works” of Street Fighter 2 if you just keep releasing Street Fighter 2: Now with Super Moves. Capcom is happy to see the quarters, you’re happy to play a game that is familiar, and E. Honda is happy just to have a steady paycheck. Everybody’s happy!
But, in the midst of Street Fighter mania, someone had the bright idea to exploit the most popular videogame in the arcades not for a sequel, but a movie. A movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, and Royal Trumpeter #3 of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A movie that, as a result of drawing from a game that had the barest of bones of a plot to begin with, could be anything. Or it could just be Van Damme flip kicking for two hours. Who cares!? Street Fighter: The Movie was not constrained by its source material like some franchises, so it had the potential to be the greatest “videogame movie” of all time.
And that “greatest videogame movie of all time” would inevitably be… Mortal Kombat.
Street Fighter was a bit of a flop.
Apparently the production of Street Fighter was a legendary disaster, so it’s really little surprise that the whole thing turned out a bit off. What’s more, the direction seemed to go well out of its way to include every Street Fighter that had appeared in Street Fighter 2 (give or take the one that was actually supposed to be a movie star), which mean that a lot of characters were adapted in unfortunate ways. Vega is a cage fighter, and Sagat is an arms dealer? Okay, it’s a little GI Joe, but it could work. But Balrog is a camera man in Chun-Li’s employ? That is less defensible. Dhalsim becoming a scientist is a vague stereotype upgrade (at least he isn’t wearing skulls like a necklace anymore), but Zangief as a mindless minion works dramatically less so. And Ryu and Ken go from franchise heroes to… karate hobos. Granted, that’s always been kind of Ryu’s thing (dude probably has an awful credit score), but he’s more of a grifter than the world’s greatest fighter in Street Fighter: The Movie. And, given one of Street Fighter 2’s paramount attributes was allowing the player to choose a “favorite character” out of a very varied (and international!) cast, the fact that the movie reduced most of those luminaries to be sidekicks to one of three “real stars” was a roundhouse to the lil’ Bison.
And then came the videogame tie-in…
You may be thinking that, given Street Fighter: The Movie existed only because it was based on one of the most popular videogames of the time, it did not need another, additional videogame exclusively based on the movie itself. But you’d be wrong, apparently, because Capcom commissioned Street Fighter: The Movie for arcades. And please note that this Street Fighter game was not actually developed by Capcom, but Incredible Technologies, the maniacs behind Time Killers, BloodStorm, and Peggle: The Game Inexplicably Not about Pegging. Why do such a thing? Well, at the time, Mortal Kombat was starting to eat Street Fighter’s lunch, so why not make a Street Fighter title with digitized actors, extra violence, and have it all thrown together by some nerds in Chicago? It worked for Midway and Mortal Kombat, so why not the game that popularized the genre in the first place, too?
Well, it might not work because it sucked, for one thing.
Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Arcade Experience is not the Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat title that was so clearly intended here. This is Street Fighter x Pit Fighter. It’s sloppy. It features (almost) all the familiar Street Fighters and their familiar moves, but in a world that juggles just a little too easy. It feels weightless. It feels… wrong. And the many ways it deliberately apes Mortal Kombat feel particularly slapdash as well. There is an original character that seems to be born of a teenager’s notebook doodles (Blade! He has blades! He’s secretly Guile’s brother!), and he’s got three different color swapped buddies that really stretch the definition of “different”. There’s a stage that is an obvious cross between MK’s The Pit and Shao Kahn’s arena of Mortal Kombat 2. Sometimes digitized human spectators explode. Why? Don’t worry about it. And, while this game does seem to put more of an emphasis on uppercuts, it doesn’t feel enough like Mortal Kombat to warrant the many ways it feels like a lesser Street Fighter 2.
So, naturally, when Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game was ported to the home consoles, Capcom tossed the arcade version in the garbage.
At a time when home consoles were finally reaching that coveted echelon of “arcade perfect”, the concept of anything about Street Fighter: The Movie being arcade perfect was wholly dropped. Now appropriate for a movie game, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Home Game featured a dedicated “story mode” that would not be seen again in the franchise until Street Fighter 5. You can guide Guile through different locations and scenarios, and fight your way up to beating Bison. It’s… not very good, but it feels more like a justified videogame of a movie than its arcade counterpoint. And speaking of being a videogame, this version drops the physics of the arcade version, and returns to gameplay that is virtually indistinguishable from Street Fighter 2 Turbo. Give or take the impact of real digitized actors and actresses versus the stretching and shrinking of animated sprites (yes, Virginia, Ryu’s fist is normally an object of variable size), this is Street Fighter 2, the game you all know and love.
Well… I mean… mostly…
Dhalsim didn’t make the cut. It was probably too hard to figure out a way to make his stretching appear real (short of strapping Roshan Seth to a rack). In his place, there is Sawada, an original character from the movie that also appeared in the arcade game (though with different moves). Blade and his arcade buddies are missing, so sorry if you enjoyed their edgy (ha!) presence. And if you’re playing on the Playstation 1 version (a game that was literally a launch title for the system), well… you’re going to have a bad time. The Playstation wasn’t built for 2-D fighters, and you really need to migrate over to the Saturn to get the true Street Fighter: The Movie: Not A Gift Basket experience. And, oh yeah, if you can play it on the Saturn, there are real Capcom games that are a lot of fun on the system, so maybe just go ahead and ignore the whole thing. Darkstalkers is pretty fun…
So we’ve got two different versions of Street Fighter 2: both based on the original smash hit in one way or another, and both are totally skippable. Why? Well, that’s likely something someone at Capcom circa 1995 would like to know. Hell, maybe they still would like to know. Why is Street Fighter 2 successful? It’s not just the characters, because they’re all (mostly) here, and that didn’t do the trick. The lack of super violence? No. The special moves? Probably not. Whatever made Street Fighter 2 into the juggernaut it became could not be replicated for two different movie games, and two duds were dropped out into the world, never to be seen again (save by bored bloggers bossed around by bots).
Though there is a bright side here. Another movie, this time the animated Street Fighter feature, inspired its own tie-in title. Street Fighter Alpha/Zero started as little more than an excuse for a new, beefier Bison, but it quickly graduated through its own revisions into a worthy successor to the Street Fighter throne. This eventually led to not only the inevitable Street Fighter 3, but also the entire Versus franchise. What separated the Alpha series from its The Movie brethren? More issues than anyone could ever count. But could Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game(s) have been as good and memorable as the Alpha series? Sure! If only someone at Capcom had been able to figure out what made Street Fighter 2 so dang good.
The Street Fighter franchise: it has defined the genre to this very day, yet no one in charge of it had any damn idea why. Bunch of imposters…
FGC #557 Street Fighter: The Movie
- System: A wholly unique experience for the arcades, and then the more traditional version for Sega Saturn and Playstation (1).
Number of players: The arcade version has a hidden tag team mode (once again aping Mortal Kombat’s endurance matches), but all versions are still just two players.- Favorite Fighter: Blanka for the home versions (“Charlie” looks so ridiculous!), Ken for the arcade versions. Honestly, in aping Mortal Kombat, none of the fighters feel all that distinct in the arcade, so I might as well be playing as Blade anyway…
- The Specialest Moves: The home version also introduced “EX” versions of regular special moves for the first time in the franchise. If you want super armor, you have a lousy Playstation game to thank.
- What’s in a name: Like in the movies, the jumbled Vega/M. Bison/Balrog triangle is stuck in American mode, even for Japanese audiences. Though, oddly enough, Akuma retains his original Gouki name in his native land. Maybe that’s because he didn’t actually appear in the movie due to Jean-Claude’s inability to win without losing a round?
- Did you know? Street Fighter 5 included a data entry for Blade, aka Gunloc of Saturday Night Slam Masters. This means Street Fighter: The Movie: The Arcade Experience is somehow a canon game in some way.
- Would I play again: I’m not even going to watch the movie again, left alone play the tie-in titles. Making this game may have been the most important part of someone’s life, but for me, it was an unpleasant Tuesday.
What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Mappy Land for the Nintendo Entertainment System! Let’s visit the house of mouse for some trampoline times! Please look forward to it!
Maybe Mortal Kombat was successful simply because it had a little support…
But it seems like the cradle of the baby N64 Empire decided to include an arcade pacifier. Back in 1994, Nintendo struck up a deal with WMS Industries, the parent company of Midway, and started development of arcade cabinets based on Nintendo 64 architecture. Excuse me, at the time, it was known as ULTRA 64. 
which is probably why you’re more likely to pick one of the roster’s literal monsters. Nobody wanted to see this engine’s M. Bison, they went straight for a hulking ogre with a club. In a way, it seems obvious how Killer Instinct was calculated to be the king of the arcade.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t utterly terrible, but a healthy chunk of what made Killer Instinct into an arcade juggernaut was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it was yet another secret advertisement for the Ultra 64, though, as apparently the SNES wasn’t going to be able to capture the “arcade experience” for much longer…
It’s pretty obvious what happened: Killer Instinct was supposed to prove the worth of the N64 and Nintendo’s own dominance in the fighting genre… but, despite Killer Instinct doing everything right, the winds of popularity changed directions, and KI was left out in the cold. While KI’s contemporaries went on to see sequels even during the fighting game-lean Playstation 2 years, Killer Instinct sat inert for decades, only returning in 2013 when Microsoft needed a new way to showcase dinosaurs fighting skeletons on its latest gaming hardware. This version of Killer Instinct saw support for a solid five years, and given the overall success of the project, a Killer Instinct “4” would not be the most unusual announcement.
System: Arcade for the big boy version, and then Super Nintendo for the itty bitty version. There was also an even more widdle itty bitty version on the Gameboy, too. Oh, and I suppose we should count the Xbone promotional port of the arcade version. That’s probably your best bet.
The reboot makes T.J. Combo more “good” and less “greedy”, but still predominantly maintains the same “disgraced boxer” status. This is in sharp contrast to characters like Cinder, who got upgraded from “criminal” to “decorated special forces operative”. I wonder what is different about T.J. Combo from the other fighters that seems to keep him narratively down?
The fact that I can hold this game in my hands is a testament to the amazing degree to which Mortal Kombat was popular… and how absolutely no one understood that popularity.
But, arguably, none of that should matter. There is one thing people notice about Time Killers, and that’s the almost unheard of level of blood and gore being tossed around any given battle. Every fighter is equipped with at least one martial weapon (or martial appendage, in the case of that one bug lady), and when a dude with a mohawk is swinging around a chainsaw, the inevitable happens pretty quickly. Legs can be damaged, arms can be severed, and, assuming you can pull off a special move that involves smashing all the buttons at once, a dizzied character can be utterly decapitated mid-match. Suffice to say, even if the freshly headless participant had a mostly full life bar, the severer still gets a win point over the severee. But even if no one loses their head during a battle, there are almost always still severed, flopping limbs littering the battlefield. Heck, even before the fight begins, there’s often a bloodied corpse or guillotined head hanging in the background. Time Killers is all about the blood, and is arguably the game concerned parents believed Mortal Kombat to be. This is the title that is going to turn Little Timmy into Timothy “The Meat Mangler” Littles.
So, suffice to say, people weren’t exactly clamoring for a home release of Time Killers. In 1992, we had plenty of fighting game options, and it seemed like there was a new version or sequel every other month. 
Did Time Killers make the same splash on Genesis as Mortal Kombat? Of course not! But it was rescued from the dustbin of history because someone thought it might. And why did they imagine such lofty goals? Because there’s a significant portion of the population that thinks Mortal Kombat was successful only because of its gruesomeness. And Time Killers had gore to spare, so, logically, those silly gamers would go for it. Mortal Kombat has blood = success, Time Killers has more blood = more success. It’s basic math!
Favorite Character: Time Killers was actually at my local arcade back in the day, and Wee Goggle Bob was convinced Mantazz was the best character, because she had a “head” button that actually did something. As an adult, I know that is fairly useless, but I still like Mantazz, as I appreciate how she was clearly auditioning for her iconic role in 
They tried. They damn well tried.
Eternal Champions seemed to take a page from Street Fighter’s book rather than Mortal Kombat. Eternal Champions employed Ernie Chan, a Filipino-American comics artist, who worked with the Buscema brothers back in the ‘70’s. Before working with Sega, Chan was known for being an artist at DC Comics (Ghosts, House of Mystery, Detective Comics) and Marvel (Conan the Barbarian, Doctor Strange). Considering Chan was responsible for a healthy number of comic book covers for a full two years at DC Comics, he knew a thing or two about dynamic characters punching each other as hard as possible (the 1970s was before comic book characters decided to just stand around and philosophize at each other for six consecutive trades). It seems only natural that he would be responsible for designing some interesting punch mans, and, let me tell you, we got some remarkable fighters here.
None of the fighters in Eternal Champions are exactly setting the world on fire, but there is no way you’d mistake Larcen the 1920’s PI/cat burgler for Blade, the futuristic bounty hunter. And, whether it’s an accident of the “complicated” concept of time travel being involved, or because someone genuinely wanted to create a new Eternal Champions universe, but these fighters all have in-depth, fascinating backstories to accompany their stimulating visual designs. As a prerequisite for the plot, we immediately must learn how each fighter died (which allows for some always fun dramatic irony), why they were targeted for death (the premise of entire half hours of Law & Order), and why, had they lived, they would have made the world a better place. Additionally, this setup encourages the creation of cultures old and new (of course someone has to explain how the “future” works, but even Ancient Atlantis has some ‘splainin’ to do about its fish people), and, since this is a fighting game, it’s important to explain the whys of some of these special moves. Yes, ninja use ninja stars, but why exactly does Larcen have a grappling hook? There’s a reason for that!
But there is one place where Eternal Champions differed from Street Fighter: it had fatalities. Or, to be more precise, the game had “stage fatalities” in the form of “Overkills”: make sure your opponent lands on a particular spot when their health is low, and the background will do your work for you. If you’re in prehistoric times, you’re about to see someone devoured by a dinosaur. Meanwhile, if you’re hanging in the early 20th Century, get ready for a drive-by. The 60’s naturally contain napalm, and the far-flung future of 2345 AD is wall-to-wall robots. It’s entirely possible you could complete Eternal Champions without once seeing an Overkill, though, so it seems like the whole feature was an afterthought. Mortal Kombat was likely an influence, but a fighter being zapped into oblivion by a neon sign (can that actually happen?) wasn’t exactly the point of Eternal Champions. It’s all about the character variety, we don’t need gorefests to sell our Sega cartridges.
But that Dark Champion does make an impact on the fatalities of EC:CotD. The Dark Champion can be summoned for a match ending “cinekill”, which will banish your opponent to a pre-recorded FMV hell where they will endure a death based on their greatest fear. Some of these videos are goofy (at least one character is crushed with a “I’m not touching you” finger motion), but the majority are either significantly gory (the cyborg has his limbs torn off in a rather unpleasant fashion) or pure nightmare fuel (I’m not the only one that has a fear of melting into some manner of fleshy liquid, am I?). And if you think the increased gore is relegated to cutscenes, don’t worry, there are also now “Vendettas” that allow you to use a special move toward the end of the match that will be a little more special than usual. They, again, run a realism gamut (which is more likely to make an impact: a character turning into a giant bug or one just whipping out a shotgun for a headshot?), but the end result of most Vendettas is a literal bloody pulp tossed around the arena. And the stage fatalities really earned their “Overkill” moniker, as some are excessive to the point of parody. “The Pit” of EC:CotD is not one, not two, but three pits in one! And, don’t worry, you get to watch as a 16-bit human body churns through three different buzzsaws. Street Fighter has different models for every character’s skeleton thanks to Blanka’s shocking attacks, but EC:CotD goes the extra mile by modeling individual organs that are primed to leak out of those skeletons. Yummy!
Mortal Kombat hit the Genesis in 1993, Eternal Champions saw its sequel released in 1995. In those intervening years, Mortal Kombat continued to be a juggernaut, particularly on the Sega Genesis. Street Fighter may have proven to be a lasting victor, but the sales numbers all touted Mortal Kombat as the champion of the system. Eternal Champions wanted a piece of that pie so badly. Sega did everything it could to promote EC, from country-wide, EGM-sponsored tournaments to a 7-11 slurpee promotion, but it couldn’t touch the genuine appeal of the game with the angry skeleton and the kung-fu dude. Eternal Champions never had a hold of the arcade appeal, tried to pump up the blood to compensate, and still got nowhere. An excellently crafted fighting game, and it’s still relegated to the discount bin of history.
Did you know? In further support of the Eternal Champions Expanded Universe, there were two spin-off titles released. Chicago Syndicate was a Game Gear title that was fairly