Street Fighter 1: An oral history

In February 2021, Street Fighter 2, the best game ever made, turns 30. We decided to start celebrating early.

For the past year, Polygon has been putting together one of its biggest projects to date: a series of deeply researched, recklessly extravagant oral histories looking back at Street Fighter’s past. Back in 2014, we dug into the history of Street Fighter 2, and now we’re back to dig into everything surrounding it.

Like a Hurricane

We’ll be rolling these stories out over the next seven months — starting with this look at the original Street Fighter, and continuing later this year with features on Street Fighter EX, Street Fighter 3, and more.

As part of this project, we’re working with publisher Read-Only Memory, which is crowdfunding a Street Fighter history book based on these stories. The book will collect this series, our SF2 oral history from 2014, and extensive bonus content, including a foreword from SF2 planner Akira Nishitani and a theme song from SF2 composer Yoko Shimomura. Put together, it will tell the story of the first era of Street Fighter.

The book, Like a Hurricane, is now on Kickstarter.

On May 12, 1987, Capcom gathered arcade distributors from across the U.S. at a Philadelphia gym. The company had rented out the Cambria Boxing Club, known for its appearance in Rocky, and staged an exhibition with local boxers, kickboxers, and a ring girl to entertain the crowd of rowdy onlookers.

Earlier that day, Capcom showed its action game Bionic Commando at the airport Marriott, but that wasn’t why everyone was in town.

At Cambria, Capcom vice president of sales and marketing Bill Cravens worked the room. A popular figure known for his towering presence and reputation for showmanship, the tuxedo-clad Cravens was gearing up for his big moment. After watching 12 rounds of fights, as reported by industry trade magazine RePlay, Cravens walked over to a game hidden beneath “brown butcher paper,” tore off the paper, and laid bare why everyone was in a gym.

Underneath sat Street Fighter, a new competitive fighting game with buttons that looked like punching bags and a boxer bearing a slight resemblance to Mike Tyson. No Rocky Balboa, but Cravens lived in Philadelphia, so he took certain liberties with the venue choice.

For Capcom, Street Fighter was an experiment. It wasn’t just a game but an initiative to sell an elaborate, expensive arcade cabinet. Up to that point, Capcom had made its name on software that arcade operators could swap into existing cabinets, and Street Fighter was supposed to be the big flashy example that would convince those operators to pay twice as much for the full thing.

As the crowd of distributors watched, they saw a game that fit the sales pitch, with large characters, creative mechanics, and custom controls. In 1987, before it picked up the baggage of 30 years of sequels that made it look clumsy in comparison, Street Fighter was cutting edge.

From the start, Capcom positioned the Street Fighter series to be a breakthrough that would move the company in a new direction. A few years later, the series did exactly that, just not in the way Capcom intended.

Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon | Photo courtesy of RePlay Magazine

A game of ideas

Thirty-plus years after its release, Street Fighter is a template, a high-level blueprint of what fighting games would become. The game’s legacy has become less about how well it holds up, and more about its mechanics. From the international cast of characters, to the joystick motions that triggered special moves, to Ryu and Ken’s trademark attacks, the game established the formula for competitive fighting games right out of the gate.

Behind the scenes, it started with someone bored in a meeting.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I actually remember it very clearly, even now. One day at Capcom, we had a meeting between the development staff and the sales team, and this particular meeting happened to run very long — I think it was about two hours. Personally, as someone on the development side, I found it very hard to stay interested during these meetings, so I tended to daydream and think about games. And I remember not really paying attention and jotting down some ideas on paper. Then there was just this one moment where the idea for Street Fighter popped into my head and I drew it out on a piece of paper during the meeting. I was sitting next to [Capcom producer Yoshiki] Okamoto and I asked him what he thought about it, and he said it looked very interesting.

I guess concretely speaking, the idea was inspired by Spartan X [Kung-Fu Master in the U.S.], which I worked on at Irem. I was thinking about the boss fights in that game, and thought it could be interesting to build a game around those. I think you could say Spartan X was the basis of the whole idea for Street Fighter.

So yeah, the notes I wrote during that meeting were all very rough, but I used those to put together a design document to convince the higher-ups at Capcom to greenlight the game. And I ended up showing that document to Matsumoto, and he’s the one who ended up refining the ideas after that. […] Everything after that was basically all his doing. I oversaw things but you can say it was really Matsumoto’s game.

Hiroshi Matsumoto
(Street Fighter planner, Capcom Japan)

After Nishiyama came up with the basic concept, I thought about what kinds of characters we should have, what kinds of moves they should have, what kinds of fighting styles they should have. […] At the time, I was very interested in martial arts and — just as a hobby — I had studied and read up on them extensively. So I was excited.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I think Street Fighter was a bit of a unique game at the time because it had story and character elements to it that weren’t very common in other popular games, like shooters or racing games. And what was interesting about Street Fighter was we had characters with different fighting styles in it. We had boxing, kickboxing, bojutsu, shorinji kempo, et cetera. If you’re trying to make a competitive fighting game, if you have just two boxers facing up against each other, that might be just very simple, right? And not terribly remarkable. But if you pit a boxer, for example, against a kickboxer or someone who knows bojutsu or someone who knows shorinji kempo, you get all these very interesting combinations. So Matsumoto and I ended up coming up with these ideas together, to give the game deeper story and character elements. And I think it became a trend at the time to incorporate these kinds of elements into games. A lot of the characters ended up in multimedia projects like movies and novels, which was great.

The other thing that I really liked about Street Fighter was how we set up the joystick motions and button presses to generate special moves that you couldn’t have done otherwise. I think it was through these ideas that the competitive fighting genre was born.

Development challenges

While Street Fighter established a framework that went on to generate billions of dollars in revenue, it was also a game built on limitations. Due to awkward character movement, a limited number of playable characters, and special moves that required extreme precision to perform, fights didn’t feel like the gracefully choreographed battles they would become in later installments. As Nishiyama and Matsumoto recall, many of the biggest challenges they faced came down to the resources available at the time.

Hiroshi Matsumoto
(Street Fighter planner, Capcom Japan)

The most difficult aspect of making that game, as far as I’m concerned, was the fact that the main programmer wasn’t originally a game programmer. I don’t think he’d come to Capcom as an official employee, but had been dispatched from another company. And he was a systems engineer, not a game programmer, so he had no idea how to make games. So I think the toughest hurdle came from trying to communicate with him and trying to teach him how to make games, because no matter how we tried to explain it, he just didn’t seem to understand even the most basic concepts.

I had learned a few things while working on Legendary Wings, so it got to the point where I had to do some of his work myself in order to speed things up because it was just faster for me to do it than for me to teach him how to do it.

Today we use programming and tools to animate graphics, but back then, we had to use a table to look up every frame of animation for every character. We used an old Hewlett-Packard computer for that, and it was very tedious work, delineating each frame manually by hand. If you wanted an animation to go from point A to point B, you had to manually enter all that data in. And revisions meant doing the same thing all over again.

It wasn’t my job, officially, to do that, but we had no choice. It would have been much faster to just do it all myself.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I think the most regrettable experience of the game was the fact that, you know, we had all these ideas for coming up with different playable characters that we wanted to put into the game, but due to budget concerns, scheduling concerns, and whatnot, eventually that got whittled down to just having Ryu and Ken in the game. And I would have loved to have more playable characters, but unfortunately we were only able to put in just the two of them.

Hiroshi Matsumoto
(Street Fighter planner, Capcom Japan)

Because we only had so much time on our hands — you know, time is not infinite, right? — I couldn’t do everything that I wanted to do. I remember wanting to put a bunch of different characters into the game, but Okamoto would come to me and say, “Hey, we don’t have time to put these in, so we have to cut them.” I thought that was pretty unfortunate. […]

Okamoto had actually taken interest in the Street Fighter project even though he wasn’t directly involved in it. […] He had been interested enough in Street Fighter that he had been involved in some of the discussions regarding the pressure sensor that we used in the arcade cabinet [which players would hit to generate weak, medium, or strong attacks]. I remember one day he wanted to test out how that would work, and we ended up making a prototype of that sensor using a rubber band and a button. And we both ended up testing how the pressure would work by banging it a bunch of times. So we both ended up with scratches on our fists.

Illustrations: Ken Hata/Atari | Courtesy of The Strong Museum of Play, Rochester, New York

Capcom’s experiment

As it turned out, the prototype wasn’t the only setup that hurt players’ hands.

When Street Fighter arrived in arcades, it came in a crescent-shaped “deluxe upright” cabinet with a joystick and two large pneumatic, pressure-sensitive buttons on each side — one for punches and one for kicks. Capcom was attempting to move into the high-end arcade cabinet business, where it could sell a bigger machine with a custom interface for more money, and the gimmick of pressure-sensitive buttons set the game apart from the hundreds of games using standard control setups.

RePlay Magazine called Capcom’s contraption “a pricey but extremely inventive item combining interactive video competition with the physical demands of a mole whacker.”

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

Back in the day, I think the biggest arcade cabinet manufacturers were Sega and Namco. Capcom did most of its business selling printed circuit boards that you could plug in to other machines. But Sega and Namco specialized in selling large cabinets, and they made a lot of money doing that. Once Capcom found out, it wanted a piece of the pie, so it wanted to sell its own cabinets.

The thing is, though, Capcom didn’t know what it was doing — it didn’t specialize in mechatronics or know how to build those sorts of cabinets. So Capcom thought, maybe we could make a simpler cabinet that we could sell.

That’s why we came up with the pneumatic buttons, and the idea tied directly into how we designed Street Fighter. The idea was that, ideally, the sensor would be able to detect how strong or how weak you pressed it, and that would translate into the kinds of moves you’d perform in the game, because a simple arcade stick couldn’t accurately replicate a human’s complex movements, right? We wanted to kind of offset that shortcoming.

It basically came down to two particular objectives, two missions here. The first was to come up with some kind of an arcade cabinet that the sales department could sell to its customers, and the other was coming up with a way to improve the game and offset the shortcomings of an arcade stick.

But it was very difficult to develop a pressure-sensitive sensor, and that was a technological issue that Capcom never quite ended up overcoming. So we ended up working with Atari, and we worked together to develop the sensor, since they’re the ones who had the knowhow to make that happen.

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

I was the liaison between Atari and our engineering group that came over, so I did some translation for the engineers. And back then, Atari built the highest-quality cabinets, so we went to them to build this cabinet for us. […] You know, it took some time, but both Capcom engineers and Atari figured it out. I do remember it was kind of like a quarter moon-shaped cabinet. Yeah, it was a fantastic cabinet.

Zenji Ishii
(editor-in-chief, Gamest magazine)

I remember seeing it for the first time and seeing how big the cabinet was, and that it had the pressure-sensitive buttons, and I remember thinking how different and impressive it was from other arcade games at the time.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

The problem was, during location tests, we realized that it was very tiring to hit the sensor over and over. It was basically like exercising. The whole point of monetizing this business was to get people to become repeat customers, where they would put in 100 yen coins over and over again so we could make money. And when you’re getting tired from playing the game, that’s not going to happen.

Todd Cravens
(son of Bill Cravens, Street Fighter vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

You had to beat the hell out of it. I remember playing it for the first time and being absolutely exhausted. Everyone was kind of like, “Oh my goodness. It’s gonna be hard to get the second and third quarter on this.” […] They were doing a big unveiling of this at a gym in Philadelphia for the U.S. distributors, and they had boxers there who [played the game], and even those guys were tired afterwards.

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

It just was too radical.

Joe Morici
(senior vice president, Capcom USA)

I remember when I first saw it — it had those big rubber [pads] that you punch with your fists. That had to come off the market because everybody was getting injured.

Jeff Walker
(Street Fighter 2 vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

What we were hearing was everyone was getting bloody hands, it wasn’t working too well, and yadda yadda yadda.

Tomotaka “TZW” Suzuki
(Street Fighter 2 series combo video creator)

I hurt my hand a few times. There were times when I had to use my elbow.

Zenji Ishii
(editor-in-chief, Gamest magazine)

There’s a way you have to press the buttons. You shouldn’t slam down on them from high. You have to use your palms to press them gently.

Todd Cravens
(son of Bill Cravens, Street Fighter vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

I think one of the other concerns they had was just the hold-up of it, right? You know, you just keep punching something over and over again; how often are you going to have to replace these parts?

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

I think we were worried about getting sued as well.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

We ended up changing the control panel so it would have six buttons instead of the pressure-sensitive sensor. It wasn’t really the sort of success Capcom was looking for.

Todd Cravens
(son of Bill Cravens, Street Fighter vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

They were kind of looking around like, “OK, we think we have a good game here, but the controls are going to have to be modified back more to a more standard type of deal, otherwise no one’s gonna play this game for more than five minutes.”

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

We also ran into a big issue with the six-button layout on the control panel, because most games back then had two buttons and the eight-way directional arcade stick, right? But we wanted to go with six buttons, and we got a lot of pushback from the sales department because they were concerned that people wouldn’t be able to figure out how to play six-button games. But we managed to put in the six buttons in the end, and we ended up getting a lot of positive consumer feedback to that. So we were able to shut the sales department up. […]

I was very focused on trying to carefully navigate company politics, working with the sales department to get the game out the way we wanted it to be.

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

We decided to forgo this idea of pneumatic buttons and switched over to the six buttons, and I think we were the first with six buttons. And that’s when Street Fighter began to take off, you know?

Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon | Sketches courtesy of Ryan Cravens

A mixed success

More than 30 years after the fact, we don’t know exactly how well Street Fighter sold. Capcom hasn’t released official numbers, trade magazines from the ’80s only show operator survey results, and no one we spoke to for this story had specific data. Perhaps more notable: Many of those people remember the numbers differently from one another, and interpret them differently as well.

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

Nishiyama was a great guy and this is what he always told me. He said, “Hey Aldo, the part of R&D that I engineer, they do not try to hit a home run, you know? I’m happy with a double.” Whereas the other guy, I think his name was Okamoto. He wanted to hit a home run every time. […] And of course, Nishiyama’s Street Fighter, you know, hit the home run.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

From my perspective, I think that the most difficult part of making the game was that we initially came up with a game that was built to sell arcade cabinets, right? And I think that we did fail in that regard. […]

Thinking about the numbers, though […] I think it was actually a pretty decent hit, so I guess it was a success. Probably more so in the U.S. than in Japan.

Hiroshi Matsumoto
(Street Fighter planner, Capcom Japan)

I remember there was this industry newsletter called Game Machine, and around the end of the year, I think president [Kenzo] Tsujimoto got a copy and saw Street Fighter‘s ranking and was happy with it. It seemed like the game had sold a lot of units.

[Ed. note: The deluxe upright version of Street Fighter peaked at #3 on Game Machine’s Upright / Cockpit Videos list in October 1987. A cheaper cocktail table version of the game went to #1 on the Table Videos list in January 1988. Both left their respective charts in mid-1988. These rankings came from opinion polls surveying arcade operators about the earnings of games on location in Japan.

In the U.S., RePlay Magazine ran similar operator opinion survey charts. In December 1987, the game peaked at #10 in RePlay’s Upright Videos charts and then gradually fell down the list until it left the top 25 in mid-1989. In the U.S., these rankings included both the original deluxe upright cabinet and a standard cabinet produced later.]

Ryan Cravens
(son of Bill Cravens, Street Fighter vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

It was popular, but obviously it wasn’t Street Fighter 2.

Todd Cravens
(son of Bill Cravens, Street Fighter vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

It was not huge. […] I don’t want to take a stab because I don’t really know, but it was not really a commercial success, I don’t think.

Jeff Walker
(Street Fighter 2 vice president of sales and marketing, Capcom USA)

They removed the punch pad, they put buttons on it, but they only sold — I want to guess 2,500 to 3,000 units, period.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I think we sold around 1,000 cabinets with the pneumatic buttons. […] For the version with the six-button controls, I don’t have the exact numbers. It might have been 50,000 units. But it was definitely in the tens of thousands.

Paul Wiederaenders
(Street Fighter 2 Midwest regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

Well, I mean both [Walker’s and Nishiyama’s] numbers could be correct, although I think the 2,500 is a little low. The original Street Fighter, when it came out in a dedicated game, I’m pretty sure the sales of that were well into 10 or 15,000. But the problem was, in those days there was a lot of pirating of boards out of Korea. And so, if you take that into account, there could be 50,000 boards, conceivably, because nobody knew how many pirated boards were being produced and sent into the United States and into Europe and into Australia.

Aldo Donnaloia
(Street Fighter Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

They did not sell too many of the quarter-moon cabinets due to people hurting their wrists. I am estimating a couple of hundred units of this type. Once they went to a normal cabinet with six push buttons per joystick, Capcom’s orders started to go up. I am guessing nearly 10,000 units sold.

Brian Duke
(Street Fighter 2 Western regional sales manager, Capcom USA)

Everyone was talking about the reason why it did not reach the level of success Capcom expected, and the controls were the main problem I heard. […] It wasn’t until later that customers and players started saying that the six-button [version] worked and earned much better than the units with original pads — and if we had only chosen to market it that way from the beginning, Street Fighter probably would have been the No. 1 game of the year. […]

There was a lot of interest in a sequel.

The exodus

Before getting to a sequel, Nishiyama threw a wrench in Capcom’s plans.

Shortly after Street Fighter’s release, a headhunter approached Nishiyama and convinced him to leave Capcom and join nearby studio SNK. Nishiyama took Matsumoto and the majority of his team with him, abandoning the Street Fighter IP. The move carried baggage, both because of the scale of the exodus and because the two companies had a history.

In the years that followed, word of a rivalry built up around the two companies, with the two developing similar games and occasionally taunting one another via in-game references.

While researching this story, we spoke to more than 10 former Capcom and SNK employees about the dynamic between the two companies in that era. They all say that development staff on both sides got along well; many of them went to the same schools and arcades, and hung out after work. In at least one case, a developer at SNK married someone who worked at Capcom.

As some of them point out, though, that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues at the top.

[Ed. note: Capcom declined an interview request with CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto for this story. We were unable to locate SNK founder Eikichi Kawasaki.]

Noritaka Funamizu
(Street Fighter 2 series producer, Capcom Japan)

I remember why SNK and Capcom were rivals. It’s because the presidents didn’t get along with each other, Kawasaki and Tsujimoto.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

Yeah, I think there was a rivalry in the ’80s. Capcom’s Tsujimoto and SNK’s Kawasaki originally were friendly with each other, but apparently something happened and they ended up having a falling out. What happened to cause that, I’m not sure myself. I’ve heard a lot of different things from different people, but yeah, something happened.

Harumi Fujita
(composer, SNK Japan)

There was a lot of gossip around the office. Kawasaki, actually, his original profession was as a boxer. He’s got this, you know, very tough, intimidating look to him. I remember hearing that he would often complain and bad-mouth Tsujimoto and Capcom back in those days.

Noritaka Funamizu
(Street Fighter 2 series producer, Capcom Japan)

I think the bad blood existed even before I joined the company [in 1985]. I remember thinking the game Ikari Warriors may have had something to do with it … hmm … there was a ninja game … actually, I think Harumi Fujita might have been the reason why. I think maybe the two didn’t get along because Capcom headhunted her. The companies were trying to steal employees from one another. That might be the reason why things weren’t so friendly at the beginning.

Harumi Fujita
(composer, Capcom Japan)

Yeah, I think Funamizu is right. It wasn’t just me. It was me and two people who worked on international sales, for the U.S. market. Capcom hired them away from SNK, and the president of SNK at the time got upset about that and actually sued Capcom. The official story — I guess it’s OK to talk about this nowadays — was that we joined Capcom after leaving SNK, but the reality is, we had made our decisions before officially resigning. So yeah, because of the headhunting issue, Capcom and SNK got into a legal battle.

[Ed. note: According to Fujita, her hiring came about after she bumped into a friend on a train — the friend happened to work at Capcom and mentioned the company was hiring. Fujita says she doesn’t know the details of the legal claim.]

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I remember hearing something about that. There was a rumor floating around about a lawsuit because Capcom headhunted Harumi Ihara, as she was known at the time, away from SNK.

Harumi Fujita
(composer, Capcom Japan)

I didn’t go to court myself. I was asked a lot of questions about how, exactly, Capcom hired me. SNK and Capcom’s legal departments apparently reached a settlement about it at some point, and they decided to keep the details private. So I don’t actually know the specifics of what happened.

Noritaka Funamizu
(Street Fighter 2 series producer, Capcom Japan)

So SNK taking Nishiyama might have been revenge for Capcom taking Fujita, right?

Harumi Fujita
(composer, Capcom Japan)

Yeah, it felt like payback. I mean, some of Capcom’s main people had just gone to SNK, so that was a pretty big incident.

Akira Yasuda
(Street Fighter 2 co-planner, Capcom Japan)

I think SNK headhunting Nishiyama played a big part in why the two companies were rivals.

Darryl Williams
(technical manager, Romstar)

You know, it wasn’t a big rivalry thing, but obviously it was egg on your face if somebody — you know, Japan’s really big on reputation and respect — it was egg on your face if somebody stole one of your staff. […]

From my understanding, everybody knew who everybody was, the players knew who the players were, so it would have taken someone being aggressive on one side to get an employee from the other side. You know, the employee didn’t just get up and go. Someone would have had to chase him down and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, long story short. And I think at that time, the offer was, [Nishiyama] gets his own division.

[Ed. note: Fujita’s and Nishiyama’s groups weren’t the only staff to jump between Capcom and SNK in the ’80s. In one case between those two, SNK hired Capcom USA president Paul Jacobs to run its U.S. office. Jacobs says he left because Capcom wanted him to work exclusively on NES sales and he was “a coin-op man at heart,” and that he was aware of certain hires made in Japan like Nishiyama, but he wasn’t aware of a rivalry: “If that was happening in Japan, it didn’t affect our U.S. operations at SNK.” Nishiyama also says there was no legal action following his departure.]

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

I think this is just something that we often see in the video game industry. I don’t know if anyone was trying to get revenge on anyone else. To go back even earlier, I worked at Irem with Tsujimoto. And apparently some things happened at Irem and Tsujimoto ended up quitting and forming Capcom instead. And Tsujimoto headhunted me from Irem, right? Then afterwards, Kawasaki headhunted me from Capcom to go to SNK. So I think in this industry, not just in Japan but in America as well, I think this kind of thing is just inevitable. You know, people have various reasons for leaving companies and going elsewhere. I don’t think a lot of these things are necessarily motivated by revenge. I think that sounds like a joke Funamizu would make. He wouldn’t really know about this in detail.

Zenji Ishii
(editor-in-chief, Gamest magazine)

I remember conducting an interview with Nishiyama, Okamoto, [Ghosts ‘n Goblins creator Tokuro] Fujiwara, and the president of Capcom at the time, actually just a little bit before the release of Street Fighter 1. […] I remember observing how different Nishiyama, Fujiwara, and Okamoto were, and I could kind of tell that there was this rivalry between the three of them because they all had different approaches to creating games. I was able to feel that just from the interview itself. I don’t know if they’d admit that, but I could feel it. So when I heard that Nishiyama had left to go to SNK, I felt like maybe it seemed like a natural next step or inevitable, if anything.

Akira Yasuda
(Street Fighter 2 co-planner, Capcom Japan)

Nishiyama was the oldest planner in Capcom at the time, but Nishiyama’s team hadn’t been able to produce a big hit. Street Fighter did OK; it sold a small amount.

Okamoto liked Nishiyama as a person, but he didn’t like his games, and he would order me and others to fix them. I remember one time when Okamoto asked me in front of everybody to pick apart Nishiyama’s game [Avengers] and talk about, you know, what was wrong with it. Nishiyama’s games weren’t really selling well but Okamoto’s games were. So, yeah. As far as I saw it, Nishiyama had pretty much lost his standing in the company, so it didn’t feel like his team going to SNK was a big surprise.

Takashi Nishiyama
(Street Fighter director, Capcom Japan)

This is honestly very, very hard to talk about, but to explain why I ended up leaving Capcom, it’s because I didn’t get along with my boss at the time and I had hit a point where I was wondering if I could continue to stay at the company despite such a situation. I was very close with Tsujimoto, the president, and I’d had a relationship with him ever since I worked at Irem. I was close enough with Tsujimoto to the point where he actually spoke at my wedding. So I had a good relationship with him and I didn’t hate the company. But it was my particular boss at the time who I was unsure if I could get along with.

And it just so happened that at the time, SNK ended up asking me to join them. So I got the offer and I ended up going there. But there were people that I had worked closely with at Capcom at the time, including Matsumoto. So I ended up basically taking a bunch of them with me.

There was a lot of friction between SNK and Capcom at the time, with my quitting and taking employees with me, and then after that, the Neo-Geo came out, which caused a lot of problems in the industry at the time. I’m not even sure now if I should be talking about this openly. It’s been a while, so maybe it’s fine. […]

At the time, I remember Tsujimoto saying, “I’m never going to forgive you for quitting.”

But I mean now, obviously, we’ve moved past that. Dimps [Nishiyama’s current company] developed Street Fighter 4, and I think we have a very good relationship with Capcom. I also believe Tsujimoto probably knows why I ended up leaving the company, and I think he understands the reasoning behind it. So we get along quite well now.

Branching paths

After Nishiyama settled in at SNK, he created Fatal Fury — a fighting game that he says turned out much like how a Street Fighter sequel would have in his hands, had he stayed at Capcom.

His team continued to push character and story elements, and introduced new ideas like jumping between stage foregrounds and backgrounds.

Meanwhile, Capcom made a Street Fighter sequel with a new development team led by Yoshiki Okamoto and improved on nearly every aspect of the original game — from how it felt to play, to what it looked like, to the variety of playable characters. It went on to become one of the most successful games of all time.

Both Street Fighter 2 and Fatal Fury hit arcades in 1991, igniting a genre that continues to thrive 30 years later.

Like a Hurricane

Job titles in this story reflect past roles relevant to the topics discussed.

Japanese interview interpretation: Alex Aniel

Post-interview retranslation: Alex Highsmith

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