Retronauts - 555: Street Fighter IV

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Kick! Punch! It's all in the minds of Diamond Feit, Shivam Bhatt, and John Learned as they Focus on Capcom's franchise-reviving Street Fighter IV. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, Indestructible, Indestructible, Indestructible. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts. Episode 555, if my notes serve me correctly. And despite all those fives, we are talking about a four. Lucky number four. Who's lucky? I'm lucky. My name is Diamond Fight, and you're trapped in here with me, and one of us is going to walk out, and the other one is getting chaotic. I'm sorry. But thankfully, you're not physically here with me. You're here emotionally. You're here spiritually. But I'm not alone, because we're talking about Street Fighter 4. And you can't really play Street Fighter

alone. Even if you fight alone, you're not alone because it's big. Street Fighter's big. It's bigger than all of us. It's so big. We have had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven retronauts to date all about Street Fighters. Started with the first one.

We've gone through two. We went through three. We went to Alpha. We did one on Final Fight, just because Final Fight. It's Final Fight. All right. Speaking of Final Fight, I'll shut up. up. Let's introduce my guests, starting with in Ohio, please. Hi, ahoy. Nice to see everybody again. My name is John Lernid. You will remember me from the Street Fighter 3 episode. That was like six hours long, but it was the best six hours.

Yes, we would have gotten off and four, but we just kept carrying. We kept parrot. We couldn't stop. Yeah, it couldn't stop. And our third remaining guest, who I, is California? I actually don't even know. Yeah, California, California. Okay. Hi, my name is Stephen Butt. You might remember me from like a dozen different retronauts. I just show up on these things all the time. But I'm also on like half of the Street Fighter ones. It turned out Street Fighter is one of my favorite games of all time. And so every time there's a street fighter,

Jeremy and his friends give me a call to sit and say, hey, you like Street Fighter. And I'm like, I do like Street Fighter. And then we talk about Street Fighter and it's great. Yeah, it's funny because like when I was still doing more freelance writing when U.S. Gamer was a thing, like, if I had an internet rep, which I don't, and please don't have an internet rep for yourself. But, like, people sort of, like, knew me as a Dark Souls guy, but, like, now that I don't freelance anymore, people know me as, like, a Street Fighter guy.

And I don't really know where that shift happened. I don't know what video games people are supposed to me with the most. I hope it's NeoGeo, but, you know, I don't just play NeoGeo games. I also play Street Fighter. That's why I'm here today, because we're hosting Street Fighter. Yeah, like, I was on two. I was on two beyond. I was on three. But yeah, no, like, they know me for, like, see, I did an episode on Siv and Magic by myself. I did every Sucodan game, half the fan. Like, yeah, Parrish knows

me. And so he invites me on to talk about things. If you ever want to talk about cards, a street fighter, he knows where to go. Trust me, Schiff, when I have a fighting game topic, I certainly at least ask you if it's one that you know or not. So, yeah, dude, I'm always here for it. I love For so much. Oh, God, I'm so excited for this one. Yeah. So let's start by reminding everybody that Street Fighter 3, or the original Street Fighter 3, came out in 1997. And its last major revision, the Third Strike, the Beautiful Third Strike, the Godly Third Strike, 1999. Street Fighter 4 premiered in arcades in 2008. That is nine years since Third Strike and a solid 11 since the

actual debut of Street Fighter 3, that is by far the biggest gap. Indeed, from 3 to 4 is almost as big as 1 to 3. Like, that's the size of the gap we're talking about. Yeah, that's almost like two console generations or something, isn't it? It's, I mean, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, what, four, I mean, three came out for Dreamcast. It was such a big game. I don't think really any other ports, like not PlayStation 1. I guess PS2 had a Street Fighter 3, right? Not PlayStation 1, certainly not, not Saturn. But when you had 2008, then yeah, you've already moved on to PS3 and Xbox and, you know, I don't know how many arcade divisions are in there, but definitely a new generation for sure, absolutely completely different era for video games.

Because we can talk about it briefly. I think it might deserve its own episode, honestly, but the gap between three and four, the sort of early aughts, if you will, were a very dark. time for fighting games in general at least 2D. 2D fighting games went through a I want to call it a Hellscape. An interregnum? Yeah, it was some bad times.

If we want to summarize, like... So can I give a kind of like a zone of what the arcades look like at that time? Sure. Basically, so remember the original golden age of like 2D fighters and everything in the mid to late 90s with Street Fighter 3 with Marvel

with all these, like you know, really famous big, like all the Mortal Combats primal rage and all these other weird just gigantic fighting games over 2D and then suddenly everybody discovered the third dimension and 2D was all passe right

and people didn't want to do the art the company didn't want to invest in it everybody said man this whole virtual fighter thing looks way cooler than Street Fighter and they're wrong but it's okay all opinions are held and we had things show up like Bushito Blade and Battle Arena

Toshindan and Soul Calibur or rather Soul Edge but the arcades themselves had been going under a transition at that point. Like before, in the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of stand-up single cabinets, beat them up, shooters, fighting games, whatnot. And then in like the end,

in like 98-99, suddenly there was a revolution in the arcade itself. A dance revolution, you might say. And with that, with the birth of the Bimani series and like all the big rooms in like all these just giant arcade suddenly being given over

huge amounts of space to playing things like guitar freaks and DDR and beat mania and you know um par par par paradise and all these other things the scene itself just completely shifted like fighting games had started to been had been kind of moving home and as we had been talking about during the street fighter three episode a lot of fighting games and the arcades had become so hard and so unapproachable for the average person that a lot of people just stuck to playing at home and it wasn't profitable to go and play fighting games the arcade anymore because you would just go and you would get your ass kicked by whoever the grinder of the week was right and so um we ended up with this long dark age and of course

Capcom being unable to count just kept like milking the streetfighter franchise but like a lot of the two D games and stuff just kind of faded and died and it felt almost as if capcom themselves had just kind of abandoned street fighter like they abandoned megaman or abandoned any of these other kind of older franchises. Well, yeah, and that's essentially what happened. So I think a lot of people kind of forget that virtual fighter only came out like a year or two after Street Fighter 2. Like virtual, the first virtual fighter wasn't that far removed from 2D fighting. But what was what was really happening here was, you know, as the arcade operators like the gold rush of 2D fighting, I mean, that's definitely what it was in those first couple of years. Every company, every major video game

designer was like just cranking out 2D fighting games just to try to get down. Remember time killers? Time killers, martial champions. I mean, everybody's got their favorite also ran. Clayfighter. But, you know, as 3D fighting games became more and more prevalent in arcades, as the technology sort of caught up with arcade operators and like, you know, Namcoe is starting to make Tekken and Soledge and there was a couple of virtual fighters at

that point, the home consoles were starting to become, we're starting to be made with a 3D focused. So, like, they were starting to become parity between what you would get in an arcade and what you would get at home. And since the 3D stuff was sort of the new hotness for the home console market, people, like you said, they weren't going to arcades unless they were specifically looking for competition. And that's just not, not what the casual person was doing. And Capcom absolutely gave up on it. So, like, you know, we've spoken about this before, Street Fighter 3, New Generation was a pretty big flop. And it was on very expensive arcade hard where that no arcade operator was buying

because people just weren't playing 2D fighting games anymore. Third Strike just wasn't a, you know, it's a great game. It's the only game that matters. But it's not something that people were going to arcades to really play, especially in the U.S.

It's an art house film, man. It's an art house film. Street Fighter 3 was a game that true connoisseurs loved that people who were true believers were super, super into. However, it is not an approachable and fun game to play.

So the fighting game crowd, the hardcore, kind of call this, they colloquially call this the dark age of fighting games. And they're not wrong. I mean, it kind of just died. But it's not, that's people take umbrage with this because like, yes, Capcom specifically had given up on Street Fighter. Like Seth Killian, in his own words, said Capcom gave up on the Street Fighter business after Third Strike, even though they, they put out, and Ono was involved.

in this we're going to get back to it but they put out capcom fighting evolution that was not a good thing yeah that that flop pretty hard but like capcom was out of the game sorry you got a visceral reaction it's a collective groan from the crowd there but like you know the average passerby that knows of fighting games they know of capcom fighting games it's either they know of mortal combat or they know of street of street fighter right but like in fighting game circles um major things were still happening in that gap between basically Third Strike and Street Fighter 4. So Tekken was absolutely coming into its own at that point. So Tekken 3 had come out and really changed the way the game was played.

Tekken 5 is basically the blueprint for how modern Tekken is played. And that came out in this gap. Marvel v. Capcom 2 came out in 2000. Right. So did CVS 2, Capcom versus S&K2. That came out in 2001. but major things were happening in fighting games outside of the Capcom sphere. So, yes, it was sort of a dark age for people that were sort of loosely connected

or like passively interested in fighting games, but the hardcore crowd still had things to feast on, but it still wasn't just, there wasn't a big game for everyone to sort of rally around. And I do need to correct myself. I said that like 2D games kind of died. However, that's not true because Guilty Gear X. Guilty Gear X and Guilty Gear X too came out in that kind of span

and like those games the Arc Systems games kind of started really That's where they really started to establish themselves. Yeah. I think if we sum it up we could say that you know Capcom basically took a lot of time off and really went through a lot

of changes. We also didn't say this out loud but we should. This is also the era where S&K went bankrupt and the NeoGeo died and KOF sort of hibernated and then came back a little bit later, but a lot of things, so it was more like, you know,

if we talk about the Dark Age, it's more like the leaders, the leaders of the 90s, the ones who, you know, got probably the most attention as 2D fighter makers go, they both had their issues. And other companies were still doing stuff. Of course, there are plenty of Indies who are making 2D fighting games

during this time, but... Yeah, it's like the actual Dark Ages in real life, which is like, yeah, the Roman Empire broke and died. However, France and Germany and other kingdoms were still around doing their thing, but it's that the big shining pillar on the hill was no longer there. Like Capcom, I mean, people get a hate on Capcom all they want, but Street Fighter was the pony that was dragging the wagon, right?

And when that horse died, suddenly, yeah, there were still people out there making things, but it was not the drive and the pull that Street Fighter had. So when, like, 2008 rolls around and actually, can we jump ahead a smidge? to Street Fighter 4 for a second? That's what we're talking about, yes. Yes. What I mean is, sorry, what I'm trying to say is when I worked at Sony PlayStation, one of the first gigs I had when I was like left the game's industry,

I mean, the game press industry and went to the game maker side, I got to go see Street Fighter 4 in its infancy in the alpha version. I remember talking like Shane Bettenhaus and stuff and going to the party that they launched it at. And let me tell you, as a diehard lifelong street fighter, fan being able to see like Ken do the shore you can and ride you do the Hedukin and the like a whole new thing is like street fighters back and I was just like oh my god it was so long and I was so so desperate for this game series to come back like I don't want to say that I've built my identity around street fighter because I built my identity around d and magic however street

fighter sure is really close to the thing that I've built my identity around and it was hard to have this era where there was no streets to fight on It sucked. It sucked a lot. And then the light shined upon me, and my favorite Streetfighter of all time showed up. Yeah, I would say the announcement show off for Street Fighter 4 was just an incredible. Yeah, I would say the announcement showed up for Street Fighter 4 was just an incredible. like, we're back moment on the internet. You know, it got coverage in every website, whether it was video games or not. Everyone was like, oh, my goodness,

look at what Street Fighter has become. Look at this. I'll tell you right now, this morning I was watching the music video so I could sing the proper introduction when we started this podcast. I was watching that video on my TV in the living room. And my daughter, who doesn't really know Street Fighter that much,

she's seen it, she knows it exists. She was watching the video, which was the introduction. to Street Fighter 4, and she was just like, Koke, which is like cool in Japanese. Like, she was blown away by this thing, which is like a video that's older than her, and it's certainly not, you know, cutting edge graphics, but

she's like, this is really cool, you know? So this is a really nice debut trailer that caught a lot of attention, sparked a lot of interest, and even before anyone touched the game, the internet was a buzz with, whoa, Street Fighter 4. Street Fighter 4. I remember when

rumors were starting to bubble to the surface that they were going to make a fourth street fighter game and it was going to be polygonal and not 2D sprites it was, you know, they're finally getting away from that stuff. Like there was a lot of trepidation there because we had had three EX games and they're not very good in my opinion.

People, I mean, people like them and that's okay. I am going to keep my mouth shut. This is not about EX. Okay, you're right though. They do suck, but I do enjoy them. You know, they've got their quirks. You know, and they certainly have their fans.

But it's just like, you know, oh my God, they've already done this once with 3D and like a 2D Street Fighter plane with 3D character models and stuff. It's, this is a bad idea. And then the first footage started to come out. And then, yes, those hype trailers with all the inky art and stuff like that. And people were like, yes, this is exactly what we've been waiting for. This is the one thing. Okay, so here's the thing, right?

Okay, when that hype trailer first comes out, the first thing I noticed, Obviously, they have those really cool kind of Sumier style, thick black borders all over the place that looked almost very much like, what's the Amaterasu game, the one with the Okami? It had that same kind of like really brush strokey style. And I was like, what is going on? This is wild. And Ryu looked ugly as hell. Okay. By the way, I know his name is pronounced Riu.

I'm just also played Street Fighter for 30 years, so except. But yeah, like he looks ugly as hell. And everybody's like, what is this? Why does he look like a sack of meat that's been beat up? And, well, he is. However, when you consider that the last time we saw these people was in the most beautiful Streetfooter game of all time, suddenly you're looking at Banana Can and Ryu, and they're just, like, horrific looking.

But the game itself, though, was fluid and fast. And what that announced trailer did was, like, it looked and said, look, we know that you guys all didn't play Street Fighter 3 because the characters were weird and foreign. and you didn't see anything familiar to hook on to and it didn't feel like old street fighter well here's Ryu and Ken and Chunley and Blanca and friends these are your street fighters

from the old days we have brought them back we made them fresh and they look super sick come back to us please yeah so we should especially state that at this point so Street Fighter 4 from the moment we saw it we can all tell that it's being made with 3D graphics but when we found out what the actual

gameplay looked like everything is locked to a 2D plane So it is still very much in the spirit of traditional street fighters, but pixel art, pixel art is gone. We're now working, Capcom is now working in 3D, 3D models, and I would say, yeah, as you describe it, the characters have a specific look, and it is cartoonish, but it is not like, it's not cell shaded. They don't, they don't look like, you know, this is not a Guilty Gear situation. They look like, you know, 3D models. American cartoons.

Yeah. I know a lot of people reacted to, like, you and Ken's sort of big eyes. They thought they had like bug eyes or whatever, but it's, you know, they're expressing. You know, they're being expressive. It's, it's deliberate. Well, there's a comedic element to it that they put into those games that I think it's subtle. And a lot of people don't bring this up. But that was already sort of in Street Fighter 2, the original Street Fighter 2.

When Blanca takes a hit in a certain way, his eyes bug out and stuff like that. It looks very funny. So they kind of leaned into that a little bit. And I think that was a good choice because it does give all the characters a lot of personality. I mean, in Street Fighter 2, if you punch some, if you hit someone with a heavy attack, they will throw up. Yeah, they bark, right? Yeah. I don't think, I don't think three has puke in it, does it?

No. Spends, but yeah, no vomit, unfortunately. I think we can count our blessings that they didn't render that in 3D. Yeah, we don't need 3D sick. I've experienced 3D sick today. I don't need to see it. But, yeah, though, that game was just like, I mean, that announcement was so hype because it was not only an indication, first off, that Capcom is bringing back their flagship, but it was also almost planting a flag on the hill to say, hey, 2D fighters aren't dead, and fighting games aren't dead, we're going to come back from this, and we're going to bring it back brand new and full-bore, and it's going to be amazing. It took Capcom a long time to learn that, though.

And there were some sort of baby steps along the way, which I think are worth pointing out briefly. So a very strange inflection point for a lot of fighting game stuff that is that we take for granted now was when Street Fighter 2 Turbo was re-released on XBLA, which that one release sort of cascaded into a lot of different things. One is that... The Sirlin Edition? No, pre-Cirlin edition.

So not the HD Remix. They had put out, Capcom had basically just ported hyperfighting with very poor net code, very, very poor net code. But this was at a time where like Xbox Live was still relatively new. I mean, it was the 360, so it wasn't that new. But it sold surprisingly well. I mean, Capcom was kind of shocked how well it moved, which gave Ono, a person that we're going to talk about in a little bit, an impetus to be. like, all right, people remember these games. There's a nostalgia factor

here that people are getting are latching onto and we need to start capitalizing on this, which kind of spun out into eventually Street Fighter 4. But also this is where we got GGPO. So for those that don't know, GGPO

is a, it's net code for rollback, it's rollback net code. It's basically the thing that started what we now consider rollback net code, which is when the fighting games are played online or anything is played online. It's basically the game is essentially mini-recording everything that happens. And if there's a blip or a jump or a drop in frames because the internet takes a dive

for a second, it basically rolls back to a frame or two of what you just did, but it does it in as seamless a manner as possible. And what I mean by all this is that the Cannon brothers, Tony and Tom Cannon, who are co-founders of Evo. These are old school Street Fighter 2 turbo players. Like way OG at Super Turbo guys. They played hyperfighting

on XBLA and they're like, this is crap. This game, this is a great game that's being treated poorly. And so they're both programmers. They're both working for Riot games right now and making Project L. And they're like, we need to, we are going to take it upon ourselves to

make good internet fighting. And that's what they did. They, they went to work on their own and they made GGPO, which is something that essentially revolutionized how fighting games are played online. And so it's sort of, in a lot of ways, it's divergent paths. So the release of this game and its success financially gave Calcom the incentive to make more Street Fighter, which is what we're talking about today. But it also basically gave the fans the opportunity to steward those old games themselves because of what was GGPO became 2DF. Another ST player named Damn Die made his own sort of offshoot of GGPO.

And this eventually led us to what we have now with Fightcade, which is like the standard for playing third strike in a lot of these older games online. You can buy these games from Capcom. You can buy the 30th anniversary edition of Street Fighter from Capcom. And you should. You should give them your money. but like if you want to play third strike online you play it on fightcade and this is something that the fans had basically taken it upon themselves to safeguard so the importance of this really

really shitty re-release of street fighter to hyperfighting it can't be understated and this is I know a very bizarre thing to bring up but like without this game without this re-release we wouldn't be having this conversation You know, Yeah, because Ono was able to take that data saying like look people are buying our trash anyways and he went to Kiji Inafune

who was the head of Capcom at the time former you know creator of Mega Man or whatever and said look if these people will buy this I guarantee you if we make a real game they will let us they'll buy it too and it took a long time to convince Inifune because you know like street the last street fighter did not sell well nobody would buy

X-3. You know, it's like our Capcom fighting jam. But getting Street Fighter 4, seeing the fan reaction, seeing the fact that the people were doing this organically anyways, was kind of enough to let Ono get his way in. But we should probably talk about who Yoshner and Ono is, right? Yeah, yeah, we have to talk about Yoshiroono, who is the producer at Capcom, producer of this game, and would stick with Street Fighter for many years following this. I think he's now left the company, but this is kind of, I would say, his magnum opus. A rise onto the world stage.

Like, this is his coming of age moment, if you will. Like, this is where he gets, he gets his own internet rep, if you will. So I have an on a story for a second. Please. Please. Sorry, I've got a story for everything. So Capcom, when Street Fighter 4 was in the deep throng of everything and going really well, they had like their world championships and, like, they had one of them here in the Bay Area.

And I lived like 10 minutes away from the, hotel it was being held at or like not the world championships it was like a big showcase for north american street fighter players or something like that and i went to go see it and oh no was there and the heads of capcom were there and other things you know like all these big people were there and playing it was a huge celebration i got this really cool poster and i ran into ono and at that time i could still speak some level of japanese i hadn't quite you know atrophied my language skills there yet and i was like oh no son you know uh hashino thought they could can i please take a picture with you oh my God, I'm a huge fan, et cetera.

And the huge saying next to some Japanese dude, I'm like, excuse me, sir, could you please take this picture of us? And I gave him my camera, and the guy is, like, smiling, and he's like, sure thing. And he took a picture of me and Ono holding the Blanca, and it was awesome. And I got him to sign my poster, and I took my phone back and said, thank you very much.

And then Ono turns to me, he's like, so you just asked the president of Capcom to take our picture. And I was like, oh, well, nice to meet you. Sure, you can. Bye. Oh no is one of the coolest dudes Just like if I was going to have a face for a game If I was like a game producer and I was going to be like

One of our dev team needs to be the face Ono is the model I would want He is gregarious, he is kind He is incredibly like open and happy and celebrating And loves loves the product he was working on And he made one of the best brand like managers slash just extensions that a game could ask for I think Street Fighter 4 is great on its own merits, but having somebody like Ono be out there all the time and just being the face of this game was all upside.

I mean, he was such a cool dude that it let him coast into making a series of terrible games. Yeah, Ono's become a sort of controversial figure, but like that's way post Street Fighter 4. Like the goodwill that this guy generated is insurmountable. Yeah, because, I mean, think about it. Like, he made SFX Tekin, which was a terrible game, and people still loved Ono. He made Street Fighter 5, which is a game that happened. And people still love Ono. Capcom friggin fired him and people still love Ono.

You know, he's just that, he's got that just lovability about him. And, like, I can't speak to any of the other games he has created, but with Street Fighter 4, he found lightning in a bottle, and it was just incredible. Well, he is definitely a very vocal Street Fighter fan. Like, I think in an interview at some point, he said, yeah, I joined, I joined Capcom because I wanted to work on Street Fighter. And he was on the sound team for third strike. So he was in, he was in the business. He was in on those games just basically before the crash, if you want to think of it that way. But he did.

Well, he programmed the sound for Alpha as well. Okay, yeah. He was the, either the producer or the director of Capcom Fighting Jam. So that was like, that was a bone they basically threw him because that game is basically. basically just assets tossed together in a mixing bowl and like put through a meat grinder and then there it is. It's a video game. But yeah, Ono, he's always been a big streetfighter fan and had, I guess, for many years tried to get a Street Fighter 4 off the ground. But again, it took a left field random re-release and for people to buy it. And other things were happening

too. So like the nostalgia machine was starting to sort of kick into high gear for Street Fighter around this time because, like, we had the hyper-fighting re-release. The Daigo Perry was a thing that had happened on the internet. So, even when with 37 was, was starting to get steam on this brand new thing that people have maybe heard of called YouTube. So it wasn't just people passing around the tapes anymore. So it was the lay street fighter rememberer, basically, saying, oh, I really loved these games when I was a kid or when I was 15 or whatever.

I would sure like to see some of that stuff again. And they were in the, oh, no, specifically, was in the right place at the right time, be like, we can do this. We have the resources now. We can make this happen. Yeah, especially since you're exactly right. In 2008, 2007 or so, when this kind of fever is building,

we have a number of things. One is that YouTube, which has started in 2005, is now finally kind of broken through the mainstream, and people can see and relive these old stories. second, the internet itself broadband is now widely accepted and widely kind of available around people are starting to get more used to the idea

of net code and playing fighting games or playing video games on the internet more so than they were. Like, I mean, outside of PC games, now consoles are able to do that. Yeah, it wasn't just like PC weirdos. Yeah, I mean, I say that lovingly. That's with a PC weirdo.

It's not just like guys playing Quake or StarCraft. It's like guys playing modern warfare. It's guys playing. Halo. But exactly, like, you know, things like Halo had come out and given people an impetus to understand what Xbox Live is like. But also, you were exactly right. The net code had started to get better. The internet had started to stabilize people, started to understand things like latency. And like, you know, we knew like vaguely what that meant, but in a, in a game where you have to be framed perfect like Street Fighter, having even a little bit of lag can screw the game

up so badly, which is why that rollback code exists. Rollback basically means if the game drops a frame, it forcibly goes back a step or two. It will roll back to that previous frame. Yeah. And it'll allow you to have continuity in the game. And Street Fighter 4 was at that junction where they could take advantage of all these new

technologies, take advantage of all these consoles that are coming out. And you had this vibrant kind of like culture is starting to rebuild again. People are digging up their old games. The 3D games are really picking up as well. Things like Evo is out there. And, you know, people are just got a lot

of just genuine organic excitement. Yeah, and also, I guess if we're talking about technology, she also probably mentioned this is the era in which social media is growing and expanding, you know, upwards and onwards, you know, Facebook's getting big, Twitter is growing into its own, so that also is

another way of which people are sharing information, sharing their wants and needs, and they're like, again, you want to talk about, you know, an impact, oh, my God, you know, how many people tweeted Street Fighter 4? Like, how many people just tweeted Street Fighter 4? That's the tweet, you know what I mean?

But if we're talking about people, we should probably also mention the fact that Capcom was not alone in this project because they worked, they co-developed it with another company, led by a very familiar face, Takashi Nishiyama. That's right, the original Street Fighter guy. He is the, I believe, the founder of Dimps, digital multi-platforms, Dimps. They are the co-developer of Street Fighter 4. So I think it's very telling that, yes, Ono was absolutely a, was a cap of employee. He was obviously very vocal, but Capcom didn't do it on their own.

They worked with another company together, and that other company had a long history of fighting games. I mean, and if you look at Nishiyama, going all the way back, but even post-Nishiemi leaving Capcom, dimps had already worked on other projects up to this point. So everything, I think, on paper, looked good to the higher-ups, and they went with it

and I think what we got speaks for itself it's this is a good game yeah dims is an interesting company because like they're they basically formed as a as a work for hire kind of company and I don't think that this was

super well known at the time when Street Fighter 4 came out but this tends to happen a lot in the video game industry is like a large company contracts smaller companies to co-develop games or just develop them for them and then the publisher just slapped their name on it and says, you know, this is a new Call of Duty.

That's why there's like four or five Call of Duty studios, basically. They're owned by the same people, but like it's not just the same Call of Duty people every year making Call of Duty, right? So DIMS is a company that they're a farm company, essentially, a farm developer. So they've done a bunch of different stuff for a bunch of different franchises that you have heard of and to varying degrees of success, but you're absolutely right that it's interesting that the guy that created streetfighter is the guy that created dimps. And they have a fighting game pedigree outside of that stuff, too, because

they published a few of their own arcade fighting games, like the Rumblefish games and stuff. So it's not like they had just not made fighting games after Nishiyama had left Capcom, too. So they had a pretty good brain trust of fighting game devs working for them. So they were, I mean, not only, I guess, like, ceremonially a good choice because Nishiyama was there, you know, it made a lot of sense that these guys were going to help make a fighting game because they had a lot of, a lot of internal knowledge on that stuff. on my Twitter and live journal

when Street Fighter 4 came out and it turns out I was actually at the reveal press conference like I said earlier and that was the day that they announced Super True Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix which is the most unwieldy

acronym of all time and then immediately following that which was already the most hype thing I'd ever seen they did the reveal trailer for SF4 at which point I just lost my goddamn mind and I can sit here and see my old live journal

where I'm just like oh my God and you know It's just, it's, it's, uh, that might be one of my highlights of being in the games industry. It was the best day ever. But yes. So, DIMS is an incredibly cool company that had done so many, like, I don't know, work for hire a game, but all of them kind of don't suck. You know, like, they were all very, like, solid games.

Like, they did the Sonic Advance games on the Game Boy Band, they were really good. They did a lot of, like, anime tie-in games. But they had the pedigree and the ability to make. a Street Fighter game. And it's wild because, like, one of the biggest games they made before Street Fighter 4 was Nodame Cantabule, which was like this weird manga-based music game, which is just like what? How the hell do you get from there to this?

But Street Fighter 4, though, like, Dimson had pedigree, and that was, I think, one the first times I really noticed, like, they're making a Street Fighter, but it's not by Street Fighter. I don't understand. And, I mean, it's not like, like Street Fighter and Capcom were synonymous to me at the time. and the idea of having it out of house was really weird, even though like, you know, Serlin did it out of house, right? And...

Well, the EX games were made by Orica, too. Yeah, well, those don't count. Those weren't real Street Fighter games. Yeah. I agree. Like, I'm talking about, like, the Canon Street Fighter games, right? Sure, sure. That is how we got to hear.

Can we talk about the game now? Well, I... One of real quick last things, too. Like, you know, we've kind of circled around HD Remix a little bit. And, like, they... So the run-up to Street Fighter 4 is that they weren't exactly keeping it a secret that they were making a Street Fighter 4 game. And I wish I had more stuff to specifically cite about this.

But, like, as basically a promotional run-up to a new Street Fighter game, they were going to do, or they had done a top-to-bottom remake of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which was head up by another, when I say, S-E-M-me in Super Turbo, an ST tournament player turned game developer named David Sirlin, who is also a sort of controversial guy. But he's a very, very good ST player. And he was working with a company. He also makes really good board games. He does make – yes, he does. And card games.

He's a very – he's a mathematician. That's not a joke. Like, he says this other guy. I'm a mathematician. I'm just laughing because, like, that's so appropriate. Like, the idea of someone with being a really good street fighter player is also really good at math. That just makes it so sensitive. So he worked with a company.

I think he co-owned it called Backbone. If you go back to the PS3-360-era Backbone, did a lot of, did a lot of like Capcom property stuff for XBLA and PlayStation Network. Oh, sure. They did the Dark Stuckers Resurrection thing. That was Backbone. And I think that did Threat Strike HD.

I think it's Backbone as well. They, no, that was Iron Galaxy. Oh, sorry. Mistake. They did Puzzle Fighter 2 notably. Okay. Yeah. So Serlin was, and he made a lot of very interesting decisions about changing, basically totally rebalancing HD or ST. And he got in, he was very good about bringing in as many American ST pros as he could find to be like, all right, let's change the game. Like, what's your, like, I'm going to find the best Shunley player that I can. I'm going to find the best for you player that I can and say, what are the things that you would change about this game? And he implemented them. And the other thing that he did was, contract Udon to basically make key art to do all of the animations over again, which turned

out to be a very, very controversial choice. But it was the first time I saw that in a fireball, Riyu's fists are in the Hadookin. And I was just like, it looked so weird. And I was like, I don't get. Then I realized I went back and looked at the old one. I'm like, it's always been there. It's always been there. But it was in HG like that.

Yeah. And but that was also a pretty big success at the time. So even though, like, the hardcore weirdos, and again, I say that affectionately, all the really gung-ho people about Street Fighter were like, this game sucks and we're never going to play it, like the lay fighting game fan that was just like, oh, my God, again, another Street Fighter re-release. And it had very, very good net code for the time. That was a pretty big success, too. So, like, they were really ramping up to making a big splash when Street Fighter 4 would eventually come out. Okay, so one of the things that Surlin did, so I spent a lot of time playing H-T remix because even though, because one of the things that they did that was really cool. A, you could switch between the original graphics and the remade graphics instantaneously, the press of a button, flip back and forth, and it would be perfect.

B, they included the original ST as well as the rebalanced version so that you could have the original game in there as well, and I played a lot of it. But one of the more important things is that Serlin at the time did a whole, maybe one of the coolest, things I've seen. Outside of Magic Gathering, I don't think I've seen a developer do this kind of in-depth like moment-by-moment planning and explaining... Oh, the Capcom Unity stuff? Yeah. Just like the blogging

of explaining what he's doing. Like, if I can just read to you really quickly what his changes for Ryu, which were fascinating to me. And this will be really brief, I promise you. So on his blog, he wrote Ryu, the central character and street fighter, both

in Sorin game mechanics of Fireball and Dragon Punch. In ST, he's not especially powerful. Nobody ranks in the top tier. And yet in the hand of an expert, he's able to win tournaments. He's a well-balanced character already. I asked tournament player John Choi to give me a complete list of Raihu changes he wanted for SFHC remix. Choi is, I think, the number one Rairobi player in the world, and in the U.S., and he contemplated this for weeks and finally came up with this complete list.

Step 1. Add a fake fireball. Step 2. No other changes. This is not what I expected, but I immediately liked it. But he already has all the tools he needs to win. until he doesn't need much of a change. His original reasoning for the fake fireball was to give him an answer to Dalcim's drills.

Dawson can drill Ryu on reaction when he sees a fireball, but a fake would trick Dawson into committing, and then Rai would recover from the fake and be able to Dragon Punch. And then he goes into and writes a lengthy essay explaining the exact nature of frames and of data and why you would put in a fake fireball into this game and what it represents for the character. And he did this for every single character in the game.

And he did that character by character. And it was fascinating. And we're talking like hundreds of thousands of written words on the development of each individual character. It's bonkers. And it's important to say like not all of his changes were good and they weren't all like perfectly balanced and certainly messed up a lot of the balancing of the game. But his insight into why and how was phenomenal. Like just reading it and seeing his why you did like, so how many time do we play a game and they're like, why would you do this? And he's like, well, let me tell you exactly why I did this.

here's the frame data, here's the information, here's how it works with every other character. It's genius. It's worth going back and reading now, even if you don't play it, and even if you don't like it, just because the information there that presented, the way he presented is so well eloquently set up

that it's just like it's a clinic in street fighter design. Now, he did some weird-ass choices, though. Like, Chun Lee's spinning bird kick, instead of like the hard one just going across the screen, it's got this weird arc, and it just like, he did all these changes that just,

kind of sucked and the game was fine but not fun but what it was was intensely popular because it was really really an interesting way of reaching out to the community that was nascent and was coming out there like like you said he got udon the guys who make the street fighter comic book to redo the artwork and i have at home a framed picture of Ryu from the character select screen that one of the udon artists drew for me at a comic con um but he also went out to OC remix and had them do the remade music for the game to do cool remixes of the original tracks

which is fantastic. It's hell of cool. And his remake of Puzzle Fighter was fantastic too. His remake of H.G. Remix was not great but his remake of Puzzle Fighter was super fun. But even if this didn't hit the way he wanted it to, it was still

such a hugely popular endeavor and it was so cool and there was so much buzz around it and it had net code that worked. And it It was fun. Yeah. It reviewed very, very well in a lot of websites. It sold great.

It was new Street Fighter for the Normos, basically. Like, it had the nostalgia there because it was still ST. It was still the game people sort of remembered. But it was definitely super changed for people that were, like, very interested in, like, all right, it's something new for me to learn. And I haven't had that in almost a decade. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, before.

Before moving on, before we put in this bad, because I'll never talk with this game again on a podcast, probably. And I just have to share that in my mind, still living in the back of my brain somewhere is the big-eyed anime girl added to the background of Chinle's China stage. Sorry. It is very conspicuous that there's suddenly a giant anime girl, you know, next to the guy with a chicken. It's just like, what's going on here? Oh, man. I think a lot of people. people poop on that game a lot and probably rightfully so. But it did a lot and it did a lot of innovation. Oh yeah. A lot of time. A lot of time

in that game. Absolutely. That's why I remember the anime girl. She's there. She's still there in me now. She can hurt me. She can. But one of the reasons that I brought it up, I guess no, I didn't even bring it up. One of the reasons you brought it up. The thing that's important here is that Sirlin

had also come up with the idea of Street Fighter 4 as a game called Street Fighter 4 Flashback, which would have like, you know, 2.5D kind of like gameplay and a single player mode, et cetera, and he came up with this whole idea that Capcom kind of then used

to help build out what Street Fighter 4 would become and the easy control scheme that he came up with became the control scheme for Tatsunoka versus Capcom so he was like way more influential in Street Fighter than a lot of people give him credit for. And if you haven't seen the video that David Sirlin has done to teach you about inputs on a fight stick. It is one of the greatest fighting game tutorial videos of all time where he teaches, like,

there was a whole videotape that was put out for Super Turbo where, like, he basically sits there and teaches you how to make, like, how to do combos or how to do piano. Like, there's this whole thing, a little Street Fighter, where it records the input of the button when you push it in and when you let go. Negative edge. Yeah, negative edge. So teaching how to roll your hands over it to. be able to get the most inputs after you do

the function in order to get the move out and all these other just like incredibly bread and butter skills of Street Fighter. That video is still it's like on YouTube, it's worth your time to look up. So, let's go over some of the nuts and bolts here, because Street Fighter 4 isn't that different than, control-wise, we're basically on the same page as traditional Street Fighter, although some things that were implemented in 3 are now standard. So if you're coming to the game from 2, I think you have to relearn some things, but it's not that exotic, in my opinion. So, for example, throws are both low attacks, and if you push the button the same time, you can counter your opponent trying to throw you.

Taunts are now both heavy attacks, but unlike in Street Fighter 3, the taunts are basically, with few exceptions, all the taunts are just for show. They don't give you any kind of boots. A few of them can actually hit the opponent, but most of them cannot. Right. They're just legitimate taunts. Right. the big change, the big addition, the big new hotness, if you will, is what's called the focus attack, which by pressing both mediums at the same time. And when you push the focus

attack, you do a special animation, and depending on how long you press buttons, you can attack right away, or you can wait, and you can wait, and you can build up power, and you can release an unblockable attack if you wait. However, while you're charging, you actually have a little bit of what I believe the kids call super armor. So it's like if you're charging, you can take one hit and not flinch. So you could then counter

with your focus attack. So it's a, it's a decidedly new addition, but it's also something that I think is learnable and understandable, unlike say, paring, which is which is like, what? I don't know. Please share your focus attack.

Oh my God. So focus attack is the fundamental core of Street Fighter 4, right? Like, mastering the focus attack is how you master the game. Without it, it's a very good imitation of Street Fighter 2. With it, it becomes an incredible and elegant device. So let's talk about the focus attack for a second. Focus stack, like you said, has three levels. The default level, you just hit it, and you can effectively,

if you hit them with a focus attack, it'll crumple the opponent, which basically makes them kind of fall down on their knees and gives them a few frames of stun. if you charge it briefly, it'll crumble them, but you'll start flashing white, and then you'll start flashing yellow for level three. And, like you said, it gives you super armor. So it's

effectively like a parry that's got a little bit wider timing. It's easier to do than a parry, because all you have to do is hit the two buttons at the same time. It fills your combo gauge slightly, and if you get hit, it starts filling your other gauges as well. And when you're, like, for instance, if your opponent is stunned, doing a level three focus attack does a ton of damage to them. So that's a good way to kind of like

handle like kind of cleaning up the match when you're doing it. It does deal with damage scaling really well. But the trick that made focused attacks so good is that you can cancel specials into a focus, right? Like you can do an X focus. Basically, if you do a shore you can

and like if you got Ryan and you do the shore you can, you've got three hits in that sure you can kind of, right? Like he does the first gut punch and then kind of jumps upwards. And if you do a, a focus attack after that first gut punch, it'll cancel the rest of the sure you can, which will allow you to, if you don't want the rest of the move, if you don't want to put yourself

in a vulnerable position, you can get back, recover quickly, and bounce back, or you can move into there and from there and start comboing into further things. The second thing you can do, which is the key move in Street Fighter 4, is dash canceling. Or as we call it in, like, after a few years, it became known as Focus attack dash canceling or FADC's. Learning the FADC is basically how you learn to play this game. And it's weird because they're like, we don't want to have paris at all,

but if you learn the mechanics of an FADC, it's parrying, right? Like, you do the focus attack by hitting the two mini given punches, and then in the middle of your normal focus attack, you tap forward or tap backwards on your stick, and your player will dash. So focus attack means that if you do that chore,

you can, for instance, like we're saying, you can cancel your chart, you can into a focus attack, dash cancel the forecast attack by dashing forward and then keep doing either another show you can or a super move or something else. So you could like build strings and build combos it makes your attack safer so that you can't get like

because if you do that it'll bounce you out of the way out of range of their recovery attacks and when you watch high level street fighter foreplay it's all about manipulating and mastering when to do the FADC's and how to use your combos. Right. So the like you essentially burn some super meter by dash canceling out of a focus attack.

So this is where this is also an inflection point for Capcom because basically most every street fighter game and a lot of modern fighting games post Street Fighter 4 are essentially based on combo extension. That is the big, like every system that's implemented in almost every new fighting game, especially TD fighting games, is built around extending combos. you burn some resource to extend a combo. And that's what dash canceling does in Street Fighter 4 is that you jump in with a heavy kick, you do a low, medium kick, you do a show where you can, you dash cancel a lot of it,

and then you can land a super or something on it or whatever. So the flip side of that is that the critics will kind of point at this as saying that, it makes the games way easier for higher level players because they don't have to commit to anything that's going to make them unsafe. So as long as they've got meter, meter to burn, you can throw out unsafe dragon punches and fireballs in poor locations and stuff like that because if you've got a little bit of meter to burn

to dash cancel out of it, you're always going to be safe, which, yeah, I mean, the core high or the higher level core gameplay of Street Fighter 4 is built around using meter effectively, like every fighting game, but like using dash canceling effectively, especially, it does make for an interesting chess match because, like, there are fewer unsafe situations than there are in even the alpha games, which had air blocking, even in Third Strike in the Street Fighter 3 games that had parrying. Like, you don't have to commit to a dumb

mistake as long as you've got, as long as you got something in the bank, you know what I mean? So it's a really interesting and it's a very elegant system because, like, it's clear that they wanted to make something a little bit easier for people that, like, looked at third strike and were like, you know what, that just seems too hard, too complicated. I got to remember and learn too much on the fly. Like, the focus attacks give you an opportunity to absorb some hits to build meter by absorbing a hit. But if you really want to, you know, get into the nuts and bolts of it, if you really want to play with, with the engine underneath the hood, you can do a lot of wacky stuff with dash cancelling, and that's really what the game became over time.

Yes. Well, if we're talking with meters, we should also mention the fact that Street Fighter 4 actually introduces a second meter. So you've got the super meter, which is, it works like you expect in other games. As you attack, it fills up. You can spend some of it on X moves. I like that the gauge on screen is sort of portioned out, like X portions, so you can tell how much you're using. If you use a super combo, of course, you use all the meter. However, there's a second meter there

called the Revenge Meter and this one fills up as you take damage and once it's at least half full you can respond with an ultra combo which is just as strong if not stronger depending on the character I think as a super combo the caveat being at the end

of each round your revenge meter empties. Supermeter grows over time you can fill it up and keep it for the next round revenge meter use or lose it very interesting edition in my opinion yeah yeah so this was um lots of games have had super moves and um this all started with fatal or art of fighting i think was was the first game that i found that had a super special move right and that it became a staple in fighting games going forward um street fighter four has basically two sorts of

supers there's a if you have a full meter so you've got four blocks of x you can you can cash in your chips and do a super move. But when the revenge meter fills up, you have an ultra. And that's what a lot of people kind of complain about comeback mechanics, too, because this was the first Street Fighter game to kind of give you that much stuff to play with. So, like, in ST, you had a Super meter. And it was one of those things that were you use it or lose it too because it didn't

carry over from around around. But landing Super is an ST because... Good miserable, man. Street Fighter 2 was not built. for super moves and the inclusion that's a different topic but like look dude all I have to say is guile super move and super turbo

was down back hold for two seconds then hit down forward then down back then up forward and I'm like are you kidding me this is dumb unnecessary yeah But like, you know, the further game, you know, the further games, Third Strike, the Alpha games,

they had supers in them too, but that's where old-timey Capcom fans are like, oh, you're just giving crappy players an opportunity to steal around, even though I'm running them over, because they'll just wake up with a super. But you know what Capcom said? Capcom said, what we're doing is getting

crappy players to play our game. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. We want new people playing these games, which is why we need this. The reason Street Fighter died in the first place is because it became an insular hub of Super concentrated high power players who were deeply, deeply focused and dedicated

to the game. Great. We love the ultra fans. We need those. However, the pyramid doesn't work if there's nobody at the base. If you don't have people ascending that ladder to become the ultra pure, we're just going to have an aging body of players who are just grumpy in the corner and hate everything and don't want to do anything. We need

new fresh blood. And what Street Fighter 4's greatest innovation was is related exactly to this. A, it brings back the characters that even the common man knows. B, it brings the gameplay and makes it approachable in a way that no other Street Fighter had been to that date. Like Street Fighter 2, for all that I love it, was not an approachable game because you still kind of had to flail and figure it out.

Street Fighter 4 changed the input windows to make them much easier. It gave you a much, like a lot of catch-up mechanics, both in the super flashy screen-grabbing ultra moves that, like, you know, you see somebody just getting smashed against the screen, breaking the fourth wall, dragging down. It's so amazingly cool. Like when Seth does his ultra sucks you in and then just shoot you out and just like you feel the meat of like the face of the character just dragging down. But also by giving you a bunch of really easy simplified ways to get out of problems, you give people a reason to want to keep playing, want to get better at the game and not to feel so bad when they get dream crushed by somebody who just parried their super, right? Like that looks really cool when you're talking digoteer.

But when you're just a kid and you go and use your quarter and get play Street Fighter 3 and somebody just ruin late to you out of the game, it's going to suck. Yeah. Only Street Fighter 4 gave you kind of a chance. Like the skill, the thing about Magic the Gathering that it makes that game so compelling to so many people is the fact that you have the ability to catch up. And like the other player, even if they're just miles better than you, a home, like, you know, a Hall of Famer or whatever, they could get land screwed or they could not have the resources and you could find a way to win. And that is the thing that keeps new players playing, the ability to know that at any even time, they might have a chance to win. Street Fighter 4 takes that same philosophy and says, hey, you know what?

What if we gave these kids a way to play and a way to win and a way to feel like they can also have a chance to get better? Well, we're talking about like the difference between luck and dumb luck. Okay. So like, if you're talking about magic, somebody can get, I played magic many years ago. I'm sure I'm going to put my foot in my mouth here. but like I you know if someone gets land screwed they don't like draw enough cards early on then then doesn't matter how good they are like they got screwed that's just that's bad luck right

whereas like a neophyte street fighter player can wiggle the stick at the right time hit a button an ultra comes out and they win but really that's dumb luck and it's honestly the fault of the better player for putting themselves into that situation so really the good players eventually found interesting things to do with Ultras anyway. And that happened very early on. So this was a weird argument that people had and always had as when the, you know, the old-timey guys had every game. Every game has somebody said, you're dumbing it down.

It was like, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's obnoxious. But, dude, you were not born Daigo, Umarra, okay? So maybe chill and sit down and let other people grow into being Daegu-U-Mahara. We keep coming back to Ryu in this game. And I think that that's a good, a good. basis of comparison because, like, you know, good players figured out that they could dash

cancel out of a, out of a show where you can, and that that would count as basically a launcher. We're popping a guy into the air. What do we do after we pop in the air? Oh, I've got this ultra. I'm going to ultra them. So, like, people figured out how to use this stuff and the complaints about that sort of faded away as time went on. Yeah, because it's, they're just saying I like to say, which applies here, which is the cure for talking about magic is playing. magic. The cure for talking about Street Fighter is playing Street Fighter. So a lot of people had a lot of just BS to say until they actually really got into the game. And then they realized, oh, this has got, this has got a lot of depth to it. Yeah. Okay, so like the kids can

get in and play. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing for a Justin Wong to sit there and like master, right? Like specifically Justin Wong. Yeah. That guy, he really had, that guy had a real renaissance when this game came out. All of a sudden, like, not to get too far ahead ourselves, but like every schmuck on the internet knew the Daigo Perry and everyone knew Justin's name because his, he was the other guy. Sal Julian called him out by name of the video.

Like, there's Justin playing his famous turtle style and there's Daigo getting angry. Like people knew these two dudes names and like that had to have been a lot of pressure on those two guys. Oh, yeah. All of a sudden there's a brand new street fighter game. There's a lot of people playing it. Evo is turning into a much bigger thing like, are Justin and Daigo going to be

there? Are they going to play each other again? Is it going to be a real showdown? You got to give them a lot of credit. They really kind of, they capitalized on that moment, and they made the most out of it. Yeah, and here's the thing. Like, I think Daigo and Justin both really cemented their legacy as being two of the best players to ever play the game, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, Daigo was, I mean, Daigo is my favorite player of all time.

I mean, the four gods of Japanese fighting were just mastered of the Street Fighter 4 era. But Daigo, like, he managed to take this, like, shot of, like, where he was just kind of a jobber in, like, the olden days. and turn himself into the legend of Daigo, right? And, like, Justin Wong rehabilitated himself entirely. And it helps that they were also just mad good at this game. Daigo won Evo. He won the first Evo that Three Fighter Four was in. So, like, he cemented his legacy to agree with what you just said.

Yeah. Guys, man, I love Daego so much. Sorry, we totally, like, ran over whatever direction you wanted us to go into here, Dyer. It's all right. It's all right. I'm very happy that you brought the coverage of you back to Magic. as this is right. You know what?

Look, the thing is, though, I do that because of the fact the Magic the Gathering and Street Fighter have a lot of similarities in terms of the way game design works. And Street Fighter 4 does so many things right. Oh, God. It's such a, like, people just poo-poo on it

because it comes after Street Fighter 3, which is like super elegant, super hardcore, super hard to get into. And Street Fighter 4 is this popular, the populist game. It's a game for kids. It's colorful. It's got cartoony.

It's big. It's easy. Anybody can play and catch up. Yeah, but you know what? It was also hugely popular. People were, like, filling stadiums to watch people play Street Fighter in Evo and other big tournaments. I remember when, like, Gamer Bee was doing his mega, like, run through the top of Evo. Oh, my God.

And Twitch had, like, you know, 100,000 people watching the Evo finals. And people who I didn't even know were Street Fighter fans were just on, like, Twitter just screaming about, like, how he was this guy? Why is he using Adon? What is going on here? Yeah, where did this dude come from, like, Hong Kong? What? One of the greatest run to ever. That guy went back to his home country, a hero.

Sorry. Anyway, Street Fighter 4, right? It's a good game. Yeah, Street Fighter 4 also just really proved that Street Fighter is a world game. Right? Like, this is, because we had the Internet code, because we had now the presence of Internet, like, competition, we had tournament scenes all over the place. Suddenly people in, like, places like, you know, Arabia and Pakistan and Hong Kong and all these other smaller places.

that would have gotten forgotten before, there's suddenly huge fighting game stands shown up out of nowhere, Belize or like El Salvador, just like all these really good, solid players that would have completely been like maybe the hottest guy in their local arcade in the Philippines

like 10 years ago were suddenly able to go out there, show themselves, and become just giants of the game. It's impossible to overstate how important the net code, like working net code was for this game. It really is because, yeah, to your point, it's getting people around the world playing, but it is, it's very, it wasn't rollback net code because that wasn't a normal thing even at that

point, but it was very stable, um, what we call delay-based net code that like, no one really had played fighting games at that level working as well as it did over the internet. I mean, full stop. That's, it's just, it's the thing that worked. And it worked well enough that, that, you you could be a schmuck or you could be a pro and it would still work good enough that you can get a lot of stable matches. So you didn't have to go to locals. You didn't have to troll the internet or SRK forums to hope that you had people sort of local to you that you could play with. You didn't have to hope that somebody imported a Street Fighter 4 arcade board from Japan because those were super uncommon in the U.S. at that time. It gave everybody the opportunity to play

And that not only helped its sales, I'm sure, but it helped, I can't overstate this. It definitely helped the real renaissance of fighting games, because at that point, if you didn't have stable net code in your fighting game and it's on a home console, it just wasn't that big of a deal. Like, KOF came back with 12, a gorgeous game, shitty, terrible net code. 13, a much more gorgeous game, super fun to play, super complex game. I love it to death, really crappy net code, not very good. It was a heartbreak that you had, you just had the opportunity to play anybody, and it just worked. That's something that we didn't have in fighting games at that point. And that really set the standard going forward for a lot of stuff.

Well, I'd like to talk about exactly who is fighting in Street Fighter 4. Because it's very important to address this fight. So when it launched in arcades in 2008, it launched with 16 default characters. Right after the bat, 12 of those 16 characters came from Street Fighter 2. 12, all the original 12 from Street Fighter 2. So you can tell, like, from the drawing board, Capcom's like,

yes, we need new characters, no, you cannot replace the entire cast. We want the Street Fighter 2 people to come back. So, do you, Ken, Gail, Blanca, Honda, Chunli, Dalsam, Zungif, boxing, ballrog, claw Vega,

Sagat, and Dictator Bison. All 12 are playable by default in Arcade Street Fighter 4. And I have a feeling that that was non-negotiable point. Oh, I think the Capcom Brass went to him and said, we are bringing back our most marketable characters and that is just the end of the story. Do whatever you want, but those 12 have to be there. Yes, absolutely. And we'll just say it right now. Akuma is there, but he's a hidden character. But he's still, he's also there in the arcade version. But we do have a few new faces. We want some up with the new faces. So first off the top, right at the top, El Fuerte, Luchelible wrestler, I think very eye-catching. I think that's great. he's hell of fun to play Rufus

We got Rufus Who I feel like Given the era of the time How everyone was talking about Breast Physics Rufus is essentially a giant boob He is a massive boob Okay

It's the funniest thing in the world I'm wondering where you're going to go with that They use boob physics to make his He's the American character And he's a big Like blonde weirdo With his shaved Like nowadays you'd call it an undercut

Almost but it just looks like This weird hairdo Gross beard And he's just like corpulent, right? Like, I don't know what Japan is trying to tell us about ourselves, but they're definitely making a point there. And they used all the same crazy hyperbounty boob physics that were all the rage at the time

to make his waistline jingle. Right. He's basically round. He's barely human-shaped. He's like a beach ball made of jello. Yeah. There was a trend in Japanese fighting game design around this time to make a fast fat guy for a lack of a better term.

Remember Bob in Tekken? Yeah, Bob in Tekken is the other example of this. I think they did it in Virtual Fighter 2. And it's obnoxious. And like the thing with Rufus is that they purposely made him obnoxious. Like his interactions in the game, he's just a motor mouth jerk. So yeah, I think the Tekken crowd were kind of using it as like, you know, it's the Samo Hong school of Kung Fu, whereas the street fighter people are like, this is just a

terrible American. He's he's the worst of us. Let's see. We got C. Viper, who I would describe as an assassin businesswoman. She's showing up in her suit. She's got cool shades on. She's got some elemental powers. And I feel like Able is a French response to Alex a little bit because he's a grappler. He's got some, you know, he's a judo guy. And he definitely plays a lot better than Alex. I think I think you're exactly right. I think Abel is definitely their attempt to be like, look, we can do Alex. We just got to do it better. And it was really, I mean, he was a lot of fun

to play, actually. He had a lot of the same kind of combo chains that Fay Long had in the olden days. And it was really, I mean, I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed playing as ABLE once I figured out how to do his strings. Yeah, and Able kind of continues the trend of like the Street Fighter series protagonist is not Riu anymore.

Because in the story modes, Abel is basically the protagonist of the game. Right. But the face of the game that was C. Viper. Right. Because she was, and Ono, I think, was pretty open about this too. Crimson Viper was basically built in focus groups. Like, they would give a lot of people, like, here are all the character designs. What should this woman look like? And so she was like designed by committee. And she's a very difficult character to play, in my opinion. But she's cool, too. She definitely plays different than the other characters. I think Abel is just the most,

It's from my money, from a gameplay perspective, just the most interesting new character. But it's good that they landed on four of them and then stayed put. They didn't overdo it. Four is good. I have to laugh. So that means the voice of the people spoke and the people said, we want hot women in suit wearing glasses. That's what the people want. I mean, you're totally right.

10,000 bayonettas can't be wrong, right? Yeah. Bayanid is 2,000. I mean, banonets to wear a suit, but she's got the glasses on for sure. I'm sorry, did you want to have El Fuerte talk before we move on to the big boss? Yeah, so the thing about Fuerte, he was one of the first characters I tried out when I started playing Street Fighter 4, and I picked him up because I was like, okay, look, I want to know what Mr. Mexican chef, Lucha Libre wrestler guy is going on. And dude is, he's, I feel like he created a new archetype for Street Fighter characters that was then later followed by, who's the Arab guy in Street Fighter 5? Oh, Rashid?

Yeah, Rashid. But yeah, like El Ferte is a super fast, super bounty, flies all over the screen. He's got kind of an Ibuki feel, but it's much easier to control than Ibuki is. And like, his moves all chained really cool, and they looked really sweet. Like when he goes and grab someone and starts spinning around their head to throw them with his command grab, and he was just really fun. He was really fun, really cheeky, and definitely fit the type of character that in 1980s Capcom would have come up with. Right?

Like, he felt like a Lost Street Fighter 2 character. that the game just couldn't handle it. It was super fun to play with them. Because like two of these characters are very, they're serious in tone in terms of like what the story or whatever of Street Fighter 4 wanted to portray. And then Rufus and Fuerte were way more comedic.

They were much more lighthearted characters. And that's something that I really appreciate now, you know, like in retrospect. Like that they, this is definitely not a game it took itself too seriously. And I think that that's pretty awesome. The dudes moved were called cassidia bombed and guacamole throws. Come on. Fabulous. Fantastic.

But Rufus, though, Rufus was wild because he was so overpowered initially. He was so strong and so fast and belied his weird look design that it proved the point that a spiky

player, a player who just wants to win, is going to pick the best character regardless of whether it's cool or not. Rufus looked like a total dwitzel and still was just absurdly powerful like his galactic tornado is just ridiculously overpowerful the and the way that people

his move looked stupid as hell he looked stupid as hell he had his like jumpsuit open to his crotch with the you know it was just it was revolting and yet the character is bananas good yeah he's he's got some

young and yang dive kick shenanigan stuff um but you're yeah the um he was a fun character to play it's just again he's just fucking obnoxious so like you're right the meta of the first year of this game was Sagat and Rufus like those were those were the two

characters you saw in tournaments for the most part and like Alex Valle would show up and play Riu because that's just what he does Daigo would play Raiu in if there was a Smash Brothers tournament he would play Raiu right like right that's just that's his thing he did play Rashid in Street Fighter 5 but

But yeah, the first... It felt weird. It felt weird watching Viya play not running. It was something off about that. The Earth just shifted back on its axis when he picked Ryu again. But, like, yeah, the first year or two of this game, before the revisions came out, it was all Sagat and Rufus. And, like, Justin played Rufus.

Everybody played Rufus. It, yeah, like, and he's just so... It made me so mad because I hate Rufus, but he was just so powerful and he was so obnoxious and he was all over the damn place. See, Viper was weird. She never took off. Nobody really liked her, and her moves were just kind of strange. And they were like, they acted in a way that was not standard street fighter.

So people didn't really understand what you're supposed to do with this person. Yeah, she's got some really off-kilter combo stuff that I, it's. So another thing about this game, and this is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit, is that, how do I put this? One frame links were the thing in these games. And by that, I mean, like, when, when you play Street Fighter and you combo like a low, medium kick into a fireball, that's a canceled combo. Like, you cancel the animation of the low medium kick into the fireball, right? You sort of roll your hands and do it. But links in fighting games were like, where you hit somebody with a medium punch and then you time the medium punch again where it's a hit and then it's another hit, but it combos.

And this is a very, very difficult thing to time because it's only oftentimes the case in this game. It's like one frame of animation that you can't screw up. So a lot of the higher level combo stuff, and there are piles of Daigo videos that I encourage people to watch and never attempt, that they, it's just like 15, 20, 30 hits of one frame links that with the way the damage scaling works in this game, you're not really netting that much damage out of it, but it's super cool to watch. Crimson Viper, I think, was sort of built to take advantage of this stuff.

So, like, her flaming kick, her rushing electric punches and stuff like that, like she can launch people into the air. She can keep them into the air. That's cool. Other characters can do that. But it's how she basically links normal moves into these weird things is how she was played at high level. And I think a lot of people didn't really wrap their head around that early on.

And so she sort of got left in the dust. She did show up again in Marvel 3, but I think it's worth saying this right now. Like, these four new characters were not exactly runaway successes as far as, like, character popularity is concerned. I would be kind of surprised and maybe a little delighted to see one or two of these come back in Street Fighter 6 as DLC. But like, they're never coming back. Everybody wanted to win. That's why they played Rufus, but nobody wanted to play Rufus. Yeah, nobody had an attachment to Rufus in the way that, like, I have an attachment to Raii, right?

Exactly. Nobody loves Rufus. Everybody, the people who played him played him because he was the best, not because he was the coolest. Right? Like, I keep coming back to magic. But this whole idea, there's these styles of players, and there's these things called psychographics. Like, there's the Timmy player who wants to be the most showy offiest, do the biggest coolest explosions, make the biggest booms and put out the biggest booms and put out the biggest. things. There's the Johnny player who wants

to do all the crazy combos and weird like 12 step like shenanigans in order to get you double dizzy or whatever. And then there's the Spike player who wants to win. Spike will take whatever it takes, whatever creature it is, whatever garbage-ass looking dude is. And they'll be like, this is the best guy.

Okay, I'm a master man. I'm going to win with it. They're not going to be like, I'm going to come out of here with my pet random, you know, Aidan or whatever, my pocket Blanca and I'm going to go win Evo. These guys are like, no. What is everybody in the meta playing? what beats them, that's what I'm going to do. And that's what, that's kind of why, like, Street Fighter 5's intro and Street Fighter 4's

intro kind of had the same thing, where it's like, in Street Fighter 5, everybody was playing Charlie, in Street Fighter 4, everybody was playing Rufus, not because they liked Charlie or Rufus, but because they were just the best. They wanted to win. They wanted that money. There was this kind of famous in fighting game lore video of, and it came out around the beginning, the start of Street Fighter 4, Sanford Kelly. walking down the street with a bunch of other players

and somebody's videotaping him. And he's basically on the verge of a temper tantrum. She's like, you want to win? Just pick a top tier. You want to win? Just pick a top tier. Pick a top tier. And that like he was essentially talking about just pick Rufus. Just pick Rufus. If that's what you want to, if you want to win a tournament, you pick the best character.

And that's just, that was not I hated that. I really because like one of the things about, I mean, the thing is if you're not playing a top tier, a lot of Street Fighter 4 was very balanced and very cool. And all the characters had really interesting things. But if you want to win, you pick the doof.

Yeah. And that's the doofus. That's, it's, you know, it's an axiom that's true in fighting game, you know, tournament fighting games all over. Like, if you really want to win, if you want the money, you play, you use Luke. It's like, when you look at a Marvel capcom game, a Marvel, like, card game, for instance. And you're like, I love playing Wolverine. And you're like, yay, Wolverine. But if you want to win, you're like, I'm going to be playing as Agent Shield, you know, kitchen cabinet number four.

Yeah, right. It's like, okay, well, why? Because they win with the combo that, and you're like, this is not flavorful or fun. Yeah, but it wins. Yeah, but like, again, the lay fighting game person had no concept of this. So, like, when the game was new and everyone was playing online and oh my God, I'm getting run over by this crappy Rufus character. Why is this happening? I remember playing Street Fighter 2 when I was a kid and Riyu was like the most balanced character on the list. He could be okay. Why am I losing? Like, people just didn't have that. A lot of people. people didn't have that concept yet. He is, well, what do we say? He's a, he's a very ripped silver man, alien. It looked like Terminator 2. Buy a weapon. He's got a ying yang in his abdomen. His name is Seth, literally named for self-Killian.

We know this. It is named for Seth Killian. And he does a lot of moves that are barred from other characters in the game. Like he has stretchy Dawson Arms. He has a pile driver. He has Sonic Booms. I know when I first saw him in 2008, I was like, well, they brought by Giggis, huh? From World Heroes? That's a

poll. Okay. I thought the same thing. Good pick. Thank you. I thought he looked like the Terminator. But Seth Killian, for what it's worth, by the way, one of the most influential people in Street Fighter history. He used to be the community manager at Capcom during this era and was like huge and one of the biggest hype machines ever. I got to meet him once. We became friends. He sent me a whole bunch of

rare Japanese, like Street Fighter comic books and stuff. It still's really, really cool. He is a super, super nice guy. He's the voice that you hear telling us about the Daigo Perry. The guy is one of like the just legends of Street Fighter. And getting the boss to be named at him was just rad. I felt that that was a very worthy like honor to give to one of like just the dude who helped us get so much coolness at Street Fighter. So Seth is a cool character in that like other Street Fighter characters in the past tried this concept.

like they basically pull moves from from other existing street fighter characters like necro in the street fighter three games is basically blanca and dulcim you know put together but seth is that but more and if you're careful if you're if you look closely like he there are some subtle street fighter three isms with seth like his focus attack is um essentially urien's tackle um so it's it's cool that he's kind of like a walking amalgamate of Street Fighter history. He's got head stomps. He's got a dragon punch. He's got a sonic boom. He's got long stretchy limbs. He's got all this kind of stuff. He was playable in the home versions. And he eventually was a tournament character, too. There were Seth's specialists out there. But he's kind

of bland looking. So, you know, they... His super was awesome, though. His supers were awesome. Yeah, but like he's another character that was like ripe for redesign when the time came they eventually put him in Street Fighter 5 as well and they gender swapped him in Street Fighter 5. They redesigned they redesigned the hell out of them. Wow, yeah.

You know, good for her. Yeah, there you go. Seth though in Street Fighter 4 was just, it felt very much kind of like every fighting game at that time had had a boss character who was just I am the amalgamation. It's like Shan Long from Mortal Kombat. Was that his name?

Shang Song, Shang Song. He could, like, kind of transform himself, but it just felt like very much you expect to have this cell character, like, from Dragon Ball, who's like, I have the powers of everybody. And it was fun, though. Playing a Seth was really, really fun. Like, I love doing his triple show youkins in a row. I love doing his pile driver looks super sick. It's just, like, look, it's not a top tier character, but it was a really, really fun character to play. also I should say one of the cool things the Street Fighter 4 did that a lot of people kind of like don't remember but is one of the most smart innovations ever is one of the hardest things to do in playing Street Fighter is doing the short you can motion right forward down down forward you have to wiggle your stick in kind of a weird way that's not really intuitive what Street Fighter 4 let you do is if you just hit double diagonal down forward it would do the input immediately yeah there were input shortcuts yeah so there were a handful of input shortcuts that

which made doing things like Seth's Triple Shore you can doable, which was rad. It was so cool because it made you feel like you could play like a pro. I mean, that's what Street Fighter is trying to do now with the modern control scheme in Street Fighter 6. And people are like, oh, it's super simplified. I'm like, yeah, but you know what? Some 12-year-old kid is going to sit there and play this and feel like a God,

and that kid is going to be a Street Fighter fan for life. I think it's worth it. Well, you said the word Shang Long, so we need to talk about the other other secret. character. Yes. And it turns out, uh, and reminder, in Japan, Akima's called Golki. So, Street Fighter 4 introduces Gulken, his older brother. And he's basically, you know, the fan fiction Shang long, Liu Ken master character made real. He is somewhere Dan Chu is just like, yes, I made it. Golken is a ripped as hell, old man who has fireballs and dragon punches. And he,

He's just, he's a beast. I just have a question for a friend. Can grandpa be daddy? I'm not sure if that's legal. I don't know, but... He is a bear's bear right there. Just, dude. Monster.

Okay, I'm going to say this right now. I'm sorry, go ahead. You first. You can have the serious talk and I'll have the fun talk. All right. So the street, this is something we're definitely going to come back to in this conversation too. The Street Fighter comics that come out to help hype the games

in Japan influence these games over time. Gokin is the first example we're going to see of this in this conversation, because Gokin was in the Street Fighter Riu manga from like 92. Wow. And that's the, yeah, so like the concept of Riu and Ken having this master that was murdered, in the comics, he was murdered by, by Bison Vega, all those guys. But he didn't look that far removed from what they landed on with this Gokane. either. So he was this big husky, bearded guy with the prayer beads and stuff.

He's cool because he has essentially the same, he's got a fireball, he's got a dragon punch, he's got a hurricane kick, but they are not the typical Shoto way. He's got multi-angled fireballs like Uriand did. Yeah, Uriand Oro did in Street Fighter 3. His hurricane kick is essentially his dragon punch because it just goes straight up. The dragon punch that he has, is his ultra, and it's crazy high damaging. So it's basically Ryu's SA2 from the Street Fighter 3 games. He is a good sort of left field.

He's a good twist on what the Shodo is. Not a huge tournament player, but I remember reading Kotaku. I vividly remember this. And they had already announced Akuma as a hidden character. And I was at work. I had a data processing job. Oh, no, I was working in undergraduate admissions at a college.

I was traveling around recruiting students. And I was in a panera, killing time, reading this on my work laptop. And I was like, oh, my God, in the middle of this very quiet panera. And all these people are looking at me like, the fuck is wrong with that guy. That's the Gokin difference. I did not see this coming at all. Nobody did. That's one funny story.

Okay, so here's the thing. Gokin is, first off, when I saw it, when they announced it, when I saw that, I just started screaming as well. I was like, holy crap, they actually made it happen. Because we have to tell the story for the kids who don't know who, the original streetfighter 2, Ryu's win quote, was, you must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance. And everybody's like, what the hell is Shen Long? Who the hell is Shen Long? That must be his master or something.

Well, no, the translation was supposed to be, you must defeat my sure you can to stand a chance. But for some reason, they decided to translate the Japanese into Chinese. And so, like, because Shorukin just means, like, you know, rising dragon punch, and Shandong is like dragon fist, something like that. And so in 1992, EGM comes out with the April Fool's issue. And there's an early, like, Photoshop equivalency of this dude who looks like a bearded, bald Ryu doing, like, Akuma Teleports or whatever. And that kind of vibe, plus that manga adaptation from Kanzaki in 92, like you said, those two things combined together to make the Gokin, like, thing. There was a

time when they were actually planning on calling him Shenlong, just because it would have been the in-jokiest of all in-jokes. But, like, I don't know why they changed Goki to Okuma. I think it was probably just because Goki's hard to say in English. But he's so cool.

And when you play as him, he's got all these, like you said, first off, all of his standard show-do moves are very different. But he's got these really cool ones where he can dash forward into your thing and then use that to a combo off of or do all these cool counter hits and everything. He feels much more like an ancient master who's like an Aikido master waiting for you

to come to him to just wreck his face. He's a hell of fun to play though. And his look is so cool. And I was really, I don't know, I was super excited to play as him. He's really fast. He's really fun. He doesn't play the way you expect him to do. He played much more like a controlling character than like a, a great guy.

aggressive one and his normals will go in all over weird places and dude is just hard to play he's really hard to learn but every move you do with him just looks rad and because of that people are just like I'm going to play this guy like he does Hanukin with one hand

that's just right there onto itself is just like everybody else you've ever seen even Akuma uses both hands to do adukin. Gokin's just like I shoot one out there it felt like watching like Dragon Ball Z when you see like the best guy come out and just be like, oh, oh, you're just better than everything.

Oh, my God. Everything I know how to do, you could just do one-handed with the other hand tied behind your back. And it's just, it's rad. It's so rad. Like, I don't want to repeat myself, but man, this guy was fun to play. So that's all the characters who are in the original arcade version. So the game comes home, the original arcade version. So the game comes home, the following

year 2009 and the home port all the all the CPU characters can be unlocked in the home version they add six new characters but all of them are returning faces so if you buy the game at home you got fay long you get cammy and a bunch of alpha characters sakara rose dan and gen so that brings the total at home 25 so people who bought street a street fighter four in 2009 get 25 characters which is pretty impressive for a you know to start the game off and overwhelmingly familiar faces and since we said it i'm going to say it again please and observe absolutely no street fighter three characters they were doing this on purpose zero street fighter three characters are in street fighter four vanilla none nerds yeah disrespect they wanted to walk away from that as fast they could they even set this game before street fighter three happened yeah exactly this is it's weird that street fighter has a common with Fast and Furious, but for some reason, Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5 both take place before Street Fighter 3 because they wanted to use certain characters again. This is Capcom's version of, like, Akira Toriyama walking back to the Dragon Ball GT thing and saying, that never happened, right? But the thing that's wild is, like, when the home version came out and then, you know, Rose and everybody comes out, Rose is the immediate standout character from this whole lot.

Like, Cammy was really popular and stuff. Fay Long is just my favorite, so I played him all. a lot. Dan is Dan, Genn is Genn, but Rose was so crazy. Her fireballs are so good. Her super had the biggest hit box in the history of mankind. Like that stupid, I mean, we called it the

sham wow, which was a cleaning device that was available at the time. It was like this kind of microfiber towel that, you know, you could have infomercials on TV all the time. But whenever Rose would throw her like scarf out, it basically looked like the shamwow guy. And so we would all be like, shamwow! And it would just

it doesn't matter what you were doing. You hit a button she's going to catch you with that damn thing and it was just game-breakingly powerful. She immediately jumps to like the top tier. I cannot stress how fun it is that Rose who is a walking, talking Jojo's Bazaar Adventure, you know, reference

and she's got, especially the scarf and to you as an American, you're like, oh, it's a sham, wow. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. I love it. But yeah, no, these characters were great and they were really cool additions. They looked really cool. and one of the things that the home version did

was let us get really cool costumes and I was for a long time super against DLC type of things I remember horse armor I was like but you know what it turns out I would much rather buy costumes and characters and buying costumes is rad and there were a lot of really cool

Ryan and Ken costumes but even without buying new ones you could unlock a million different colors you could unlock taunts you could unlock different like name tags there were all these really cool just little Easter eggs you could just go hunt for.

It was a really well-made home game. Yeah, this is one of the last games I can think of that really dug into unlockable stuff, right? Like, this was like unlockable content, not downloadable content, was something that the video game industry was sort of distancing themselves of at this point. But, yeah, Street Fighter 4 camped out on this. Like all the titles you can get, like Shivam said, which were a lot of them were really just funny in jokes to the streetfighter lore and capcom as a company in general um yeah i and you had to unlock some of these characters the home characters too so like you had to play them in the in the arcade

version now unlock them like you just don't see that anymore like you buy it you you buy street fighter six you just have the cast it's all just right there like it's interesting that that that's one of those things that sort of faded away but like this was also at a time where dLC this was the wild west of DLC. Oh, yeah, sure was. Companies were not sure what to make of downloadable content. Like, what should we charge for this stuff? How big should the content be?

3D fighting games were in a good spot because you could sell a costume for a character, which was basically just, you know, what we consider skins now. But in the 2D years and in the sprite years, they'd have to make a whole new sprite set if you wanted a different looking Chun Li, right? like in either the alpha games or one of the crossover games, you can have track suit chun and Street Fighter 2 Chun in the same game. Yes. But they basically had to redraw that entire character twice.

Like with selling costumes, they don't have to do that kind of stuff. So they can make an easy two, three bucks off of you buying like a shirtless for you that looks beat the fuck up. So the characters, downloadable characters are a different story though, because, like, they, no one was operating at that point on the League of Legends model of, like, you just pay $5 for a character or you pay a set amount for a cent amount of characters kind of thing. And that sort of leads us maybe into our next topic here. Yes, exactly. So this game comes, you know, Arcade 2008 has 16, 17 characters, you know, hidden characters. It comes home.

You got 25 characters. It's, you know, there's a rollout of costumes, waves of costumes, themed costumes, all of the stuff. to make a few bucks here and there but eventually the call comes like okay well what about more characters and instead of exploring a DLC option or perhaps because they didn't

plan on this at all I mean you have to think of their word at their word they said they never expected to make more characters but in 2010 we get Super Street Fighter 4 and here's a quote from Yoshirono in terms of Street Fighter 4 this is definitive

Super Street Fighter 4 should be the distinctive end. Narrator, it wasn't. Anyway, but... The Street Fighter had never been able to count, right? We know this. The word foreshadowing should be blinking on the screen right now. But Super Street Fighter 4, 2010, so what changes? First of all, characters now have multiple ultra combos, and they have to pick one, kind of like the Street Fighter 3 model, you know?

so you can pick and you have a game of chestnut with your opponent, what's your ultra, what's your ultra. I'm picking this one, you're picking that one. And they went ahead and added 10 new characters, which is impressive. But again, most of these faces are familiar, quick rundown. DJ and T. Hawk fill in the rest.

So with DJ T. Hawk coming in, this means every single character of Street Fighter 2 is now on Street Fighter 4. Also, they made T. Hawk amazing. I love Street Fighter 4. Tehawk. He was one of my main. It was super fun to play. He was really fast and agile, and his grabels had really good hitboxes so you could actually do something with him.

I don't know. They made him way better. They really rehabilitated the character. We get three new alpha characters, Adon, Cody, Cody, and Guy. Cody in a jail suit. Yeah, we've got a variety of alpha now. We got final fights in here. We do finally get three Street Fighter three characters.

We get Dudley. We get Abuki. We get Makoto. They're all on board. And we get two. new faces. And to be honest, it's funny. One of these guys, almost completely forgotten, one of them, the internet is so exploded of this character. I forgot that she wasn't in the original Street Fighter 4, but she makes her debut in Super. Jury, not Julie, with the L, jury with

the R, she appears in Super Street Fighter 4. And I got to be honest, I didn't know this in 2010, but I know it now. Judy is basically Joling Kujo from Stone Ocean. I did not, you know, it's pretty obvious in hindsight, but at the time, I did not pick on this. But yeah, she's got the hair she's got the crop top it's it's all there a very a walking stereotype that is much more uh she would she would definitely the pop out character from four if we were going to give it to one she's like the ultimate like you're going to see her forever character from four capcom where's their influences on on their sleeve man they they're not shy about that stuff i will say this when i saw the trailers for hakan

coming out and i saw this dude and you see this guy with this big thick curls in his hair and this big gigantic looking dude and he comes out and he pours oil all over himself in the funniest moves and then like his grapple he grabs you and spins across the screen and squeezes you out like

like a ketchup bottle or a hot dog or something. It is the funniest animation in the world and he was hell of fun to play. He was really I mean he's a terrible character. Let's be honest, he's terrible he's slow, he's not really good but his animations and style were so silly and

fun that I kept doing, kept going back to that well because he's just so doofy. Yeah, it's impossible not to like a con in my opinion. Yeah, he just a great guy. I agree with you, Shivam. He's just, he's, again, the bifurcation of like, we've got a sort of serious character and then we've got a very unsurious character. And I think that's good street fighter policy right there. Yes.

If I can put my Street Fighter 3 hat on here for a second, I cannot believe that Dudley made into this game. I cannot believe that. Like, Ibuki and Makoto are very popular characters. They always had been in Third Strike's heyday, even now, lots of people like playing these two characters, right? But, like, Dudley? Dudley's awesome. Nothing against him. It's just of the Street Fighter three cast that they pulled, he just always seemed like a very strange choice to me. I don't know. Dudley was always really strong and really powerful and really popular. He's a great character. I'm just thinking in terms of like of popularity i just i i i think that we'd see that we'd see the twins before we saw dudley i mean we eventually got that the thing of the dudley he got he was not the topest

top tier but he showed up a lot and his play side was you know i don't know i think he's way more popular than he think he is because he's just like fun to play and he's like stylish and he throws out roads and it's really memorable like they they put a um there's there's a move that was in second impact that they pulled out of him for third strike that they put back into this game which people still don't use in this game it's that that dive bomb um i think it's called it's not rising thunder it's something like that he's got a downward charge move that's in this game it's it's a it's a neat inclusion so i like that dudley's here i'm always i've always just been a little surprised that they chose him among the three

He was cool. I thought this was a really good random cast of characters. I mean, Cody was kind of dumb. He'd throw rocks and he had this tornado thing. But, like, I think the thing that showed up here was, like, Adon became, like, instant, like, in the hands of Gamerby became one of the most, top-tier characters there is, because he's just really fast, he's really maneuverable,

he can do crazy, crazy things, and nobody had any idea how to fight against because nobody would ever play Aidan on. And then suddenly, the Hong Kong contingent comes out of nowhere and just schools the universe of street fighter with this seemingly unstoppable weird leaps and, like, arcs and things that you have no idea where he's going to land. And it was such, go back, go back and watch the 2011, 2012, uh, Ava's, and he's just like, it's just art, man. It's the clinic that Gamer B puts on is one of the most legendary top eight runs I've ever seen.

Yeah, he, it's, it's not that Adon is particularly good. It's just that Gamer B is a very good player. And he's settled on sort of a mid-tier character and brought him to the top. And that's, that's the thing that, like, if you know a fighting game, those are the things that you want to see in a tournament. You don't want to see top tiers all the time. You want some random Alex to show up and win Cooperation Cup, right? That's essentially what Gamerby was doing with a middle of the road aton. And they actually made him better as the games went on, too.

They fixed a lot of his problems. And that's, I just, it's a good story. Gamer B's from Taiwan. He's a super, Hong Kong. Yeah, he's a super, super nice guy. But it's one of those feel good tournament stories that like this guy from a scene that no one really ever took seriously with a character that no one definitely.

take seriously is maybe going all the way to the top in a major and he won home a hero it's it's it's a great story it's i i go back on youtube and i watch the tournament still just because you see you see like the faces of these genius low tier you see like toquitoes of looking like nothing i'm doing is working i don't get it yeah it's happening it's like somebody bringing the off meta character is just so good it is so like the hype the hype was so good oh oh Hmm, it's a good time. That's like peak years of Street Fighter 4, too. That was like when the game was the most popular.

It was right when, like, everybody in the universe cared about Avo. Everybody cared about Street Fighter 4. Everybody was watching. And it was just amazing. The fatigue hadn't set in, and that's, again, foreshadowing. So before you go to the next version, which is important, I just want to point out that this game, Super Street Fighter 4, actually turned out to be a 3DS launch title in 2011. called Super Street Fighter 4 3D edition and it had two important

innovations that I want to talk about. Number one, because it's 3DS and 3D graphics, they made a first person mode so you can play Street Fighter 4 first person, which is as weird as it sounds, but they did that. I remember that. Yeah.

It was so weird. And the other significant change, or not change, but the other addition you would say, is that because the 3DS has the touchscreen, you could map commands to the touchscreen. So, if you wanted to put, you know, a fireball or a dragon punch or, you know, the Shingoku

on a touchscreen, you can just press, you just move your thumb over there, slap a button, and do an ultra-combo in an instant. And this was, I think, controversial to some people, but I think overall it kind of went away because this edition was only available on 3DS, but I think it did start a conversation about accessibility, about do complex inputs need? need to be there for super moves or can we just let people push the button and do them? Like, is that possible? This is not the

first game to do this. I know I had a version of, I want to say, K-OF-99 on Dreamcast that allowed you to map moves to buttons, so you could do like super throws with the push of button. But Street Fighter 4, 3D edition, made it very simple and also it was programmable.

So you could basically put whatever you want. You could taunt on there. You could put your favorite moves on there. You could put a heavy kick on there if you just wanted a heavy kick on there if you wanted to do it. But it was all very customizable, and I thought it was a great idea. I don't know how many other games are doing that these days. I guess... Well, Street Fighter

6 is definitely doing that with modern controls. Like, this is the precursor to modern controls. I think that's beautiful. Unfortunately, because it's on 3DS, this became a sort of a Galapagos edition, so everything else we talk about today never appears on the 3D...

So the 3Ds edition never has any updates or DLC anything. I really think that this... Unfortunately, Capcom's like, this is their way of wrapping their heads around programming for the 3DS. This is a game that we have. It runs on a 3D engine. Let's see if we can port it and then we'll figure everything else out from there. Yeah, I mean, it's...

It was not a good port. It's part of the 3DS story, which we did a whole episode about... Yeah, the 3DS launched in 2011, and it's like, all the 3DS launch titles were a little strange. All the 3Ds launch titles cost a lot of money, and very few of them had a long life, you know, playability-wise. That is, they came out. I mean, also, we should say, by the time it launches on 3DS, there's already new version of Street Fighter 4 in arcades, Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition.

It was already out by the end of 2010. And we've already got quote from Seth Killian, 2011. Arcade Edition will be the end of Street Fighter 4. What comes next? We'll see, but we aren't planning any more Street Fighter 4s. Foreshadowing, foreshadowing, foreshadowing. Narrator, they did. Look, Capcom finds a number they like and they stick with it, okay?

Yeah. But Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition was rad. It was introduced to like a bunch of new balance updates and changes to the game. Yes. The thing is, Street Fighter 4, you're right. Like these days, they would have either just been content packs you could download or they would have been like, you know, DLC for the game. Instead, these guys were still working off the early 90s expansion model for like PC games

where it's like, I buy the game and then I buy the expansion. edition and I can just play it over it, but because this was on a home console and you couldn't just install over your PS3, they had to release new additions entirely. So, like, to an extent, the later models of, like, oh, just buy the new season pack and get the characters when they show up is better in every way. But also, I like them having to just force themselves to release one complete edition eventually. Not that Capcom ever did that. They just kept to make them buy more street fighters. Also, before I get too far ahead, if anybody happens to have out there

the Street Fighter 4 launch version that came out with the little Raiu statue that came out with the PS3 I bought the Xbox 361 because I had a 360 and I got the stupid C-Viper statue I would love to get that Raius statue if anybody has it let me know you can find your name Shivam are you turning this podcast into Craigslist

what are you doing? Hell yeah I am On my cold dead hands you will never get that out of my house I have one So you're saying I need to come and shrink you got it Well, you know, that road goes through me, pal. I know one way to settle this on the streets. Yeah.

Two new characters come out in Super Street Fighter for Arcade Edition. Yon and Yang. They play very differently. They finally have split the team. They follow up in the Street Fighter Third Strike thing. And it turns out they're still Busto. They're still really, really ridiculous. They added the secret character of Evil Ryu,

which was super cool to see again with like the purple fireballs and the Satsunohado and everything and then Oni because what if we made Akuma evil? Wait, what if we made him eviler? Yeah, and little bit of fire.

I got a lot to say about these things. First of all, I don't want to keep swearing but like he, Yon is Yon and I hate Yon. Yon is the worst. He's goddamn worst. But like, again, he was,

he was the top tier of this game for a long time. Yon was just, he was busted. He was so good. The Gennijin was still just too good. Turns out not made for this system. Still makes it broken. Unless it's an alpha game

where everybody has a Gennigin, basically. Like, giving it to one character is surprised still unfair. But Evil Ryu and Oni are, again, references to Street Fighter comics. So Evil Ryu has a hole in his chest. Because at the end of the Street Fighter 3 manga, Akuma puts his fist straight through Ryu during the Satsu Nohato or the Shungo Kasatsu, and he pulls his fist out and Ryu still lives, even though he's got a giant hole in his chest. So Evil Ryu is a reference to that.

Because the crux of that book, of that story arc was like, the Evil Ryu concept actually spun out of the Street Fighter Alpha comics, too. But, like, he was trying to sort of, like, come to terms with, I could wind up being Akuma and killing my opponents, or I could wind up being Gokin, my master, and being calm and, you know, elevating the style or whatever. So, evil Ryu is basically that. Oni is essentially Akuma's appearance at the end of that book, too, because, like, his body was, like, so bursting with energy that it was falling apart on him. And that's kind of what Oni is in these games. I had no idea. It's very cool. This Street Fighter 3 manga, by the way, is awesome.

It is probably the best Street Fighter manga I have read, at least, and no offense to the Udon guys, but they've never even come close. But what about the guys who did the Street Fighter 2 comic books? Oh, the original ones. Oh, you mean the Malibu ones? Come on, bro. Malibu comics. They killed Ken in the second issue. It's so bad.

But, like, Daigo landed on Evil Ryu. and that's who he played through the rest, yeah, through the rest of this game's lifespan. And so, like, when I'm talking about those kooky 30 hit one frame link combos, it's with Evil Ryu. Look that stuff up. Yeah, it was, it was really crazy because, like,

even if you were you in this game, play, like, on the surface, you were like, oh, he plays a lot like, like, right, it's just fine, whatever. No, this dude's got just, they changed up the way his normals work and the way they link together in such a way that just, made him into this unstoppable monster.

It was just really, really cool. And his normals, his normals are mostly Akuma's normals from Third Strike. I'll shut up about Third Strike now. Well, you'll shut about Third Strike when I shut up about Magic, right? All right. I don't want anyone to shut up, but watch it's a podcast, please. Yeah, but the thing is, like, Oni and Evil Review were just really cool additions. They were really fun, and, I mean, some people at that point were getting a little tired, like, okay, I get it.

It's like the 15th, right, fine. Of course, then we get the final, final, final, final Street Fighter 4. of Ultra Street Fighter 4 in 2014, which is now building off of this five-year-old engine and bringing out, like, this DL... Well, they've made Ultra Street Fighter 4, and they finally wised up, and they made it into DLC that you could just download

for the Super Street Fighter 4 that you had at home. Oh, the Arcade Edition also was, was it released as DLC, so it wasn't... Yeah, that's how I got it, yeah. Right. Yeah, it was released a DSC. You could eventually go and buy it individually if you wanted to do. Super was the only one that was released brand new,

and, like, if you wanted this stuff, have to upgrade. But it's like, once that was out there, it's like, okay, we understand. You figure out hard drives now. Yeah. We understand now, if we make new characters, we will sell them to you. We won't, we won't ask you to buy a brand new game every time. Of course, everything they made would be in retail eventually.

But they did, starting with the arcade edition, they did at least acknowledge the fact that, okay, if we're going to make more characters, we should at least throw a bone to the people who already bought the game that they don't have to buy the game again. And to be fair, to the folks who actually did go shell out the money, they didn't just get the new characters. They also got like a billion new costumes and all the stages and all the extra content that had come out. So you got it good both ways. I think they finally kind of landed on a happy place. And then eventually they just said, forget it. We're just going to D.L.C. drop this.

I mean, I would say this, you know, we're joking and we're laughing about this, you know, how many quotes come out of, oh, we're done, we're done. But all of this is much preferable to say what happened with Marvel Capcom 3, where in the same year, In the same calendar year, they released Marvel Capcom 3 and ultimate Marvel Capcom 3. Like, not even 12 months later, it's like, oh, that game you bought? Yeah, we made it again and put all more characters in it. And it's still so. No, there's no DLC. You know, like that was, that was infuriating.

That was infuriating. Well, I think that this is germane to the discussion of Ultra Street Fighter 4 because, like, a lot of what Capcom was doing at the time, they were falling back sort of on the old routine. they were glutting the market themselves with fighting games that either were not fully baked or would cause a lot of uproar and also the things that we sort of know after the fact is that their follow-up, Street Fighter 5, was going through some major development problems at this point. So they had been planning to make a Street Fighter 5 for quite a while at this point and it was not doing well. So when Ultra came out and Street Fighter 5 actually ran into this too is that they were like oh my god we need to extend the life of this game we need to make a little extra money off of this

let's let's basically do one more major update just so we can kind of keep things going to hold people over until a street fighter five would come out two three years later um which if you look at the roster of the characters that will put in there it's pretty obvious because at this point capcom had put out street fighter cross teckin which is its own totally nutty story yes um and so in that game They basically used the Street Fighter 4 engine to make a crossover fighting game, and they put in Hugo, basically his appearances from the Street Fighter 3 games, and he's a final fight character, Poison hit Hugo's valet, who is now a playable character, and Relento. So three final fight characters, Relento was playable in the Alpha Games 2, but they basically just, they were already in the engine, so they ripped them out of those games and planted them into Street Fighter 4. Um, Elena was put in there too, who was a huge tournament problem by the end of the game's lifespan, again, a different weird story. Um, they put in two new characters as well. But like, one of the new characters is just essentially a, uh, a head swap of Cammy. Yeah. One of her other outfits. So like, it's clear that like they, they did put a lot of work into these characters. Like, Hugo plays basically like he does in, in the Street Fighter three games. But that does sort of still work well because he wasn't really. that great of a character

in the Street Fighter 3 games, but it doesn't necessarily mean that he would be bad at Street Fighter 4. Right. So they all played pretty well. They were good additions to the game, but you could call it sort of a cash-in, and that's probably what it was,

but it did extend the life of these games a little bit longer when they needed it. It's really important to say that I think we've been saying it, but we really got to hammer home. The fact that Street Fighter 4 was insanely popular. It was the hottest game of that era. It was huge.

And even as the years went on, like, we're talking four or five years down the line. It was still a thriving community. So I honestly can't blame Capcom for putting out another one, putting out another one. Because, like, every time they did, and I say this as a person who was at that time just a fan, right? Like, it felt like, oh, yes, we're getting new stuff for Street Fighter 4. Hell, yeah, let's go. It didn't feel like, oh, look at them coming to the exploitation engine again. And, you know, it didn't feel like, every time it felt like a surprise, and it also felt like getting a present on Christmas.

Like, here's brand new characters to play. Yeah, let's go. We can pull it out again. And we can, just as you think your interest is flagging, here comes poison. And suddenly, like, it's the coolest thing in the world. And, like, you know, remember Ricky Ortiz starting to master poison and just starting to go to town. And, like, all my trans friends immediately went and glom to her right away. It was amazing.

But poison is just, like, such a sick character. Elena was such a cool throwback I mean Roland down DeCabre fine whatever but the balance changes that they introduced in Ultra Street Fighter 4 were really really cool and like they changed the way the game worked a bit

and it felt meat. I think it's also worth yeah to your point I think it's also worth noting that like with every update to the game the game is altered a little bit so this was also at a time where like a street fighter game would come out and it'd be encased in amber like nothing would

change there's a reason that people complain about third strike and that it's unbalanced because they're never going to go back and rebalance it and if they do at this point people who there'd be blood in the streets but now fighting games are built on the idea that like every couple of months someone is going to get nerfed someone's going to get buffed things are going to change right like this season of this game is one thing next season of street fighter six or tech and eight or whatever is going to be different. You have to accept that. So this was still a relatively new concept, but it wasn't that they were just rebalancing the game. They were adding and changing things. Yeah, they had the red focus attack. Right. So we mentioned earlier that there was an

additional option for an ultra move. By the time that arcade edition came out, you could do two ultras. You could do both ultras in the same round. You didn't have to choose. You had them both there. But the Ultra Edition introduced the red focus attack. So you could absorb as many hits and burn extra meter to basically get unlimited super armor

and also new crumple options. So new combo options opened up. And that, it didn't fundamentally change the game, but it added a different fun dimension to it. So like, they weren't done tinkering with the game, even though they were like subtly balancing characters. They were like

fundamentally changing the game slowly over time, and that's very interesting. And I think a lot of this reflects the fact that Street Fighter 4 is essentially the last Street Fighter to have a really strong arcade legacy because every edition would appear in Arcade at some point. And, I mean, Ultra Street Fighter 4 appeared in the arcades first. And, like, that's the arcade way of, you know, you put it out in the arcade, you see people play it, and then if you need to tweak it, you could tweak it and bring

out another version. So I feel like you could see the legacy there. Yes. But I do feel like one of the things that got in my cross, certainly, as a Street Fighter fan, is sort of the hype machine that surrounded the Ultra Street Fighter 4 release is that they were very vocal about, oh, we're bringing five new characters, five new characters. And then, John, as you correctly pointed out, four of these five characters were already in Tekken, Street Fighter Tekin, a game that no one wanted. You know, they did not sell well, flop. Well, people wanted it until they got it. wanted it until we really wanted it, and then what came out was not what we wanted.

They didn't want what Capcom made, basically, is what I'm saying. They wanted the game, but Capcom did not deliver. It's a good, it's a good redemption story at the end here, like Street Fighter 5, actually, but yet, yeah, this is, it was not the game we thought we wanted. So, they're hyping five characters, four of them are already out in a game for sale that did not do well, and the fifth one is essentially an edit of a character we already know, and that was the one they hyped the most because it was a mystery. Like, They reveal the other names of the purse. Oh, the mystery fifth character, mystery fifth character.

You know, my hardcore street fighter friends were like rattling off obscure choices from this and this and this. I'm like, I don't know, I don't know. And then it's like, it's Cammy in a mask. And I was like, it's Cammy in a mask. Come on. Come on. Yeah, I was deflated by that. In a game that already had Cammy for God's.

Yeah. I mean, I don't object to putting Cammy in a mask, but it's like if you're going to spend months or maybe even an entire year, hyping Cammy and a Mask I'm gonna be I'm gonna pissed off I'm sorry I'm gonna be mad

It should have been more than Cammy and a mask yeah Yeah But anyway, Alt Street Fighter 4, 2014, it appears on PS4 in 2015. I think that version did very poorly at launch, but it has been since been improved. I'm sure that's probably the version you get on PS5 today.

It's on Steam. Altistry Fireter 4 still active on Steam, to this day. It's doing pretty well. Because it's a great game. Yeah. It's got a crowd. It's got a crowd. We can play it.

And final character tally, just would do the math here. So final, Ultra Street Fighter 4 has 44 playable characters. That includes all 17 Street Fighter 2 characters. Seven, Street Fighter 3, not a lot, but not bad. It's a lucky number. Nine alpha characters, if we're including ones who came from the first game or a final fight. And 11, quote, unquote, new characters, but that's including, like, you know, DeCopri, who is Cameron in a mask.

So in the end, one quarter of. Street Fighter 4 is original characters, quote, unquote, but for the most part, it is a huge revival. I really view it as Street Fighter 2, too. That's how I picture it. That's exactly what it is. But it worked. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at the sales rate, if you look at the popularity, if you look at the goodwill, I feel like Street Fighter 4 was a tremendous return to form, and it's what fighting games, I really think fighting games needed. Certainly Capcom needed it because, you know, they were having problems in other areas. you know. Oh, it completely brought Capcom back from

the dead. Yeah, it kept the lights on for a while over there. Like, Capcom was going on the path to becoming basically a monster hunter factory, and Street Fighter gave them, like, vibrancy and the ability to do more than just that. And, yeah, they went back to Street Fighter, too. I mean, this is one of the greatest, like,

tribute love stories to, like, or early fighting games there is, right? Like, it's like, here's the greatest hits of everything. We're just going to go out with a big bang. And the thing is, though, the game still plays good. It's still fun. It's still easy to pick up for anybody to play. It's still just

okay, so here's the thing. I'm going to end kind of with this one story I've got, right? When I was a kid, I always wanted to own a fighting stick. I was a stick player first and foremost. I'd begrudgingly used controllers. I just always wanted a fighting stick. Fighting sticks were always way too expensive. And like

when I got married and like I was unemployed for a while because 2008 happened and it was like the end times that we all get fired and I would tell my wife, I'm like, look, when I get a job, when I got a real job, the first thing I'm going to do with my paycheck is I'm going to go and buy a Madcats fighting stick. Because Madcats, the company that in the 90s and 2000s were known for making the most garbage-ass pieces of plastic.

Of all people. Literally the worst controllers of all time. They were the flag poster child of garbage third-party crap. Out of all the people in the universe, they were the ones that God gifted with the ability to make the greatest fighting sticks of all time. Shout out to Markman. One of their players. He's a hero, right? And, like, I went out, I got a job, a real job with a big boy salary, and literally the first thing I did was I went out and I bought my ass a street fighter for fighting stick. I came home, plugged it in, and it was like Valhalla opened and brought me back to the Valkyries and said, you have returned home, here's your Ryu, here's your stick, let's go. And it was seriously like tears are streaming down my eyes. I couldn't peel myself away from the TV all night.

it was greatest day of my life. It's so good. God, like, this game is just full of these fucking memories for me of just, like, absolute joy. Of just watching, like, Street Fighter 4 at Evo, Street Fighter 4 on, like, tournament scenes. Just the joy of watching people do amazing things. Sitting at home with all my friends with these fighting sticks and whatever,

like, customizing them, going and buying, like, sameitsu buttons and getting an octagonal gate or a square gate and having these debates, going and modding all these things, creating this culture again. Street Fighter 4 revitalized and almost created from scratch the entire culture of modern fighting games using the modern internet, the modern social media, giving us connectivity, giving us the ability

to just share these things. The game was stylish as hell. It was beautiful. And it just felt good. Every character you played felt good. They were cool. Even to this day, I could sit and jam with my son and we can play Street Fighter 4 on the PS4 collections or whatever. And it's just great.

It's easy to pick up. It's joyful. It celebrates itself. So many fighting games, like Street Fighter 5 doesn't celebrate itself. Street Fighter 4 celebrates itself. It is a game that knows its place in the history, knows its place in culture, brought fighting games back from just the obscurity of becoming just anime 2D fighters or like a couple of 3D things here and there,

back to being a big driving force of culture in games. And it's just, it's in my opinion, one of the pinnacles. of gaming. Yeah. I don't like this game. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't. I loved it when it was brand new and I played the hell out of it. And then third strike online edition came out and I'm like, okay, I'm done doing that.

No, I do this. This is what I do now. But I don't hate on it, right? Like I, we would not be having conversations about fighting games right now like this without this game. I would not have met a lot of the people that I have met. in the last 10 years or so without Street Fighter 4, I wouldn't have picked up freelance games writing work.

I wouldn't have done a lot of the things that I've done on the internet if there wasn't Street Fighter 4. Like this game, even though I don't love to play it, it is an important artifact to me. And I've got my own Matt Katz Arcade Stick Story. And I've got my own weird stories about like just meeting random dudes on SRK forums because like, I can't just play this online anymore. I need to go find, I need to get involved, right?

Like, you know, that's the, you know, I need to start finding locals. I need to get involved with this stuff. So it's, for me, I think this game, it really shown a light on what people were sort of doing, like any small community that have just been sort of languishing underground for years, that like, you know, these guys were like building arcade sticks on their own, like weird creatures that they were just like destroying PS2 controllers to make arcade sticks with, that kind of thing. but like and you know the streaming culture around this like streaming almost like the the birth of streaming video games and online fighting games is it's almost a perfect circle of a Venn

diagram right like they were symbiotic with each other like the fact that we have YouTube now that like you don't have to parse all kinds of arcane knowledge and weird notations on forums and stuff like that to learn tech and fighting games you can just go to YouTube right now and type in Lydia combos in Tech and 8, and you just get an ocean of shit. And if Street Fighter 4 didn't come out with the ascendance of YouTube, that wouldn't be the same thing.

It's really impossible to understate what this game did for the genre, and I think that's so much better for video games as a whole, that, yeah, I mean, it gets a lot of criticism from the old timers, like the old timers hated this game. They hated it. But it grew so much on its own.

And it just did so many things right, right out of the gate that the culture, the texture of video games is a better place because we had that kook, oh, no, make this game. Amen to that. Well, I'm sure Street Fighter's Five were its own conversation. You know, what happened after Capcom built up all this goodwill? I mean, Street Fighter Five, and suddenly everyone got angry again. but that game turns that game is 2016 so we'll get to that in you know 2026 so you know look forward to that when my children are in high school I guess but yeah I personally I just my my closing thoughts I was super excited to see straight fighter foreback I was a little disappointed at first like oh I love 2D this is you know this is 3D wearing 2D clothing I don't know but I ended up playing this a lot I ended up playing I bought the 3DS launch version I played that game a lot on 3D because I was having fun, just, you know, trying out combos and practicing and going into the, you know, the training mode.

And so this was, this was a big deal for me. And, you know, towards later in the life, when we got the, you know, the ultras and things, I was like, okay, I get it. I've had enough Street Fighter 4. Let's move on something else. But still, I do really appreciate what it did. And I think, I think it made a big difference. I think other companies also looked at this, said, oh, we can do this, we can do this. I feel like there's, there are a lot of companies that either went back to their old games.

or just had more confident in things that were in production to say, oh, well, if Street Fighter 4 can be popular, maybe this could be popular, maybe this could be popular. And I think we owe, we owe Capcom credit for that, for, you know, just taking the risk, even if they eventually kind of mucked it up in their own adorable way. In their own Capcomian. They're very Capcom way, yes. Yeah. Look, dude, it was a golden age. I'm just going to say that. Like, Street Fighter 4 is,

one of my favorite games of all time. I'm just going to plant my flag and just say that right now if you didn't notice from the past two hours of conversation. I'm just crossing my arms right now, and I just want to say, for the podcast, Bison High Kick Forever, Bison High Kick Forever, Bison High Kick Forever. Just the best.

The best move. It's so good. I can't believe. I can't believe it. Why is it anti-air? It's amazing. The most amazing hitbox is incredible. Anyway, that's it. That's it for Street Fighter 4. It's not the end of Street Fighter because it's plenty of other Street Fighter games we can talk about at some point.

But for now... God knows, I'm happy to talk about all of them. Yeah. For now, that's the end of this series for now, but I'm sure we'll find new ways to talk about Street Fighter and Street Fighter adjacent properties. So I'd like to thank my guests for coming on and spending so many hours of their time with us.

Please, John, why don't you tell people about yourself and where they can find you on the internet. Hi again. My name is John. You can find me on Twitter at John underscore learned. That's L-E-A-R-N-E-D, which is my name. I have a modest YouTube channel called Annotated Games. You can just look me up on YouTube slash John learned. And I'm doing a series on I'm annotating Third Strike. I swear to God it's going to end sometime soon. The last episode is kind of a weird labor of love. It's got a lot of moving pieces, which is why it's taking a long long, long time to make, but one more episode to go. But I also streamed Third Strike on my lunch breaks on Thursdays and Fridays at noon Eastern. And then we have a happy hour on Fridays at 4 p.m. Eastern. If you want to watch a bald, beefy guy in Ohio, have a couple of drinks and lose and Street Fighter in the afternoon, you can. So that's just Twitch slash Johnny Pants 7, which, because, yeah, John Lernard was taken up by Twitch for some reason, but you'll have that.

Schiffen, please. Ah, yes. And as always, my name is Shiven Putt. You can find me on the internet at ElectroTal or at Gearupuri Gears if you want to hear me talk about magic. And if you want to hear me talk about magic, I've got two magic podcasts. One is called Casual Magic with Shiven Putt, where it comes out every Tuesday, and I sit and I interview people in and outside the community about magic the gathering or peripheral things like Street Fighter. And we end up talking about game design stuff, or I talk to game designers, I talk to game players. It's a great conversation.

and also I have a podcast called Shreveman Wheeler Love Magic where me and one of my dear friends sits and takes a magic set every episode and talks about basically every cool card the way that people who just love the game do because, you know, frankly, there's too much hate on the internet and it's more fun to celebrate things you really like.

I also have a podcast called Chronicles of Dragon Lens where I sit with my other buddy and we sit and just talk about Dragon Lens books because I love Dragon Lans books. Turns out I just like talking about things I like. Retronauts is like where I come to talk about all the video games stuff I want to do. So, yeah, you can come and check me out all sorts of places or just wait a few months and you guys will have me on again for something else.

Absolutely. Thank you again. Thank you again. Meanwhile, this has been Retronuts. Thank you very much for enjoying Retronuts. If you're listening to the free feed, thank you for listening to Retronauts. But did you know, if you go to patreon.com slash retronuts, for a mere $3 a month, you can get episodes like this one week early and at a higher quality bit rate. But for $5 a month, which is just $2 more than the number I just said, guess what?

You get early episodes. You get two exclusive episodes every month. Those episodes do not go live later. They never go live for anyone else. You only get them. You get weekly episodes from me. I write a column and then I read it to you every week. You get a monthly community podcast hosted by me and one of the other returauts.

We read your comments. We read your feedback. We talk about news. We're recording this in June of 2083. So we're going to talk about Street Fighter 6 because that's the new game. That's out June 2020. And, yeah, we've got lots of retronauts coming. We're doing lots of episodes.

We're making lots of podcasts. We hope you could support us because we need fans like you to keep us going and to keep growing and making more and more episodes and having more and more hosts with more and more expertise. Who am I again, by the way? Diamond Fight. My last name, F-E-I-T. That sounds like Fight Street Fighter, but it's my last name. It's different. So you can look me up on the internet anywhere you like as Fight Club.

C-L-U-B is a normal spelling. So my fight club, my last name, plus club. You get it. It's very clever. I'm sure my parents knew about Street Fighter when they had me. And we were planning ahead. I'm sure they were planning ahead. In any case, we're all done.

One last time. Bison High Kick Forever. Bison High Kick Forever. Bison High Kick forever. Good night. me tough. Indestructible. Nothing's going to stop me now. Indestructible. Going to, kind of, going to, kind of, going to keep a call. Indestructible. The last man standing.

Indestructible