Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 435: Street Fighter Alpha

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

It's a dramatic battle of conversation as Diamond Feit squares off against Jeremy Parish and Brandon Sheffield to look back at the time Street Fighter counted from II to Zero with 1995's slick (and literally anime-influenced!) Street Fighter Alpha. 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

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, name a number between one and two. Hello again. Welcome, good morning, good evening. It's Retronauts time. This is episode 435, I think. And we're here today to talk about video games. Old video games, but, you know, good video games. I'm your host this week, living Jojo's Bazaar adventure reference, diamond fight. And with me today, we have two knowledgeable people. Let's start with the one who directly employs me. I guess that's me. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I'm looking for the shadow loo so I can have a potty break.

And over in the state of California. Oh, yeah, that's me. I'm Brandon Sheffield. I live in the state of California always. I've never lived anywhere else. Probably never well. Wow. That's amazing.

I haven't been to California recently. Seems like a nice place, though. Yeah, I mean, one of the things we got is the same weather all the time. Big fan of that. No snow. No, uh, um, what's that other stuff you got? Rain. Yeah.

Rain. Yeah. It's been a big problem. Hale? We got some recently, we got, we got some rain and hail recently, though. Last month we had a bunch of it, um, enough to keep us alive for another year probably. Oh, that's always good. Yeah, fingers crossed.

Well, uh, I'm glad we got the, uh, climate talk out of the way. Oh, wait. Should I say who I am? You don't want you Why don't you say a little bit Because it's been a spell Since you've been here on Retronauts Yeah, yeah

So yeah I'm Brandon Sheffield I'm the creative director of Necrosoft games We make little video games That you can enjoy We got a game called Hypergunsport Coming out soon

And I also, relevant to this Have worked on a bunch of digital eclipse collections Including the Street Friday 30th anniversary collection So that is my relevant experience to this episode. Yes, well, Brandon, you said the magic words.

This is another part of our Street Fighter series. To catch everyone up, 361 was an episode about Street Fighter 1 and Street Fighter 2010, because why not? 367 was all about Street Fighter 2, the original game. 377 was a side quest into Final Fight. 386 was back to Street Fighter 2 about the various versions of it. And then just last month about this record. recording 423 was about the Street Fighter 2 media umbrella, which is very relevant to this conversation, because today we are talking about Street Fighter Alpha, which is a direct descendant of some of that associated media.

But before we go into what this episode is about, Brandon, this is your first appearance on a Street Fighter episode of Retronauts. So please tell people what happened when you met Street Fighter? When was that? What was that like for you? So I encountered Street Fighter first in the 90s, as many people that were alive at that time did. Difficult not to, really. Yeah, it's true. Early 90s playing, like, it was either, I can't remember if it was playing Street Fighter 2 on Super Nintendo at my friend's house or playing Street Fighter 2 at the 7-Eleven in an arcade machine around the corner from that same person's house. But it was one of those two. You know the zip code. Yes, exactly. It was in El Cerrito,

California that I did this. And yeah, it was pretty obtuse to me. I didn't know what was going on. I was trying to figure it out. And I couldn't because I didn't, I neither owned a Super Nintendo nor had an arcade machine close to me. So I couldn't just like go and figure it out, which is kind of of why Street Fighter Alpha is important, because the next, the first Street fighter game I owned was Fighting Street on the Turbographic CD. So sorry. Well, I loved the music. Like, I didn't enjoy playing it, but the music was so cool that I was, uh, that placated me.

But I was like, this series can't be that good if this is what they got. Um, and incidentally, I actually, I at some point got the, um, still unpublished history of the porting of Street Fighter as Fighting Street to the Geographic CD. I should publish that at some point. I got that from the person who did it straight from the horse's mouth. But anyway, later on, I wound up getting Street Fighter Alpha on PlayStation, and I thought it was okay. But then when Street Fighter Alpha 2 gold came out on the Sega Saturn in the Street Fighter collection that they had,

that was when I was like, okay, I'm actually really into this. Like, I had already sort of gotten into and sort of understood King of Fighters before that based on my limited rudimentary knowledge of Streetfighter. But once Alpha II gold came out, I was like, oh man, I should play this game. I played that a lot. So for me, the Alpha series was really my entry point into the world of Street Fighter in a serious way. in a serious way. Not that I ever became a serious player,

but in terms of being super into Street Fighter, it was the Alpha series that made that happen for me. Well, I would say that was perhaps by design. Definitely. We'll get into the origin story of the series. But, yeah, Street Fighter Alpha, or it's known in Japan, Street Fighter Zero, was basically derived from the 1994 anime, which came out.

It's funny, 94, we had the Hollywood movie, And we had the Japanese anime, and I think everyone at this point agrees that the anime is a lot better. I don't know. By all means, did you two see the animated film? Yeah. I mean, better is one way to say. It's like, they're very different because the actual live action movie is ridiculous and stupid. And so, like, I can't take either one completely seriously.

And as something that's stupid, I think, uh, Street Fighter the movie is stupider. And so I can enjoy it more as a piece of filth than I can the anime, if that makes sense. Yeah, the live action movie is very campy. And, you know, some of the actors were kind of in on that and understood what they were doing, especially Raul Julia. Like, he really, he really sells that movie. Like, he understands that it's just ridiculous. And he, he plays that up. Whereas the, the anime is much more. like quintessentially early 90s action anime with all that that entails, you know, lots of violence, lots of blood, the obligatory Chunli shower scene where she's on display fully for everyone to enjoy and then has a fight in her underwear against Vega or fall rock if you prefer. It's a great fight, yes. But I mean, it definitely, you know, it's of the era. It's definitely going for, yeah, kind of the lowest common denominator in a lot of ways, although, you know, generally the animation

quality is pretty great. There's some really great, you know, as you said, fight staging. And of course, there's the iconic, you know, fight that we'll talk about in the course of this episode because it's so essential to what Street Fighter Alpha is and the inspiration. It's dramatic, you might say. It is. It's very dramatic, a dramatic fight, really, dramatic battle. Yeah. So, yeah, there are two different pieces of work. And I can definitely understand why Capcom in Japan would be like, let's use the cartoon as a basis for what we're doing with this, as opposed to the live action movie. Yeah, it makes sense.

And I guess it was also with new hire Naoto Kurosima's art, who did an illustration for some magazine. And then one of the higher-ups was like, okay, well, if this art is so cool, because I think it was, who was it that kept talking about it? One of the principles of Street Fighter Alpha kept talking about how cool it was. And then a higher-up was like, all right, if it's that cool, let's make a game about it. And then the guy was like, oh, no, no, I have to do this. But it makes a lot of sense because, like, the Alpha series has fewer colors and a more simplistic style.

But it just has this crystalline purity to it. that makes it, you know, you get that sense that they were looking at sell keyframes and stuff like that when they were making this. It really has a lot of character while having less shading and being almost flatter. But it brings a lot of character forward. I love it. Alpha series. Are we talking about the whole Alpha series, by the way, or just Alpha One? Well, the focus I think today will be Alpha One, but we can certainly talk about its legacy and its sequels as well. Yeah, I don't, I don't honestly have a whole lot to say about Alpha 1.

It just kind of slid right past me. And, you know, we can talk about this too, but it was just kind of hard to notice it, I think, because there were so much Street Fighter out there at the time. And this just seemed like, to me, you know, kind of in passing, just another one. It was Street Fighter Alpha 2. And weirdly enough, the Super NES port, which was shockingly good. The very tail end of the superinius era. Certainly trying its best.

Yes. Oh my gosh. It tried so hard. They did so much with that. They gave it load times. That takes real talent. Yeah, one of my roommates bought it because we had really enjoyed, you know, playing Super Street Fighter two together.

And then I kind of dropped off, but he bought it. And we were just like, this is mind-blowingly good. Who are all these new characters who are so cool? What's up with this really cool artwork? It's great. So that was kind of where I, I came in, and Street Fighter Alpha is one that I've never really spent that much time with because it just feels like, you know, since I jump straight to Street Fighter Alpha 2, what is there that Alpha has to offer that Street Fighter Alpha does it? And I hope this episode answers that and gives me reason to go and visit Street Fighter Alpha.

It may well. Well, let's begin the beginning, like Street Fighter Zero. So the idea behind the name was that, at least to the producers, they thought Street Fighter Zero encapsulated the meaning of origin. Another working title for this game was Street Fighter Classic, which they were actively abbreviating as SFC, which they thought is funny because it was also, you know, Super Famicom. We have a quote here. A lot of the quotes in this show are going to come from two different interviews.

I found a 1995 Transatlode interview with Noritaka Funamizu, who is the producer of Alpha, Seiji Okada, who was a programmer from Street Fighter Two Days, and who also worked on Alpha. and Haruo Murata, who says he was in charge of planning and writing all of Street Fighter 2, Turbo, and Alpha. And there's also some bits in here from a 2020 oral history, which was done by Matt Leone on Polygon. I think we've all, we've recommended that multiple times in the show by now, but by all means, check out that series. It's just so much first-hand information about the making of these games, which is fantastic.

Can I talk about those two sources for a second? Sure. There's something interesting there, which is, it's always really interesting to look at interviews from the time. And the 1995 one is before release, I believe, of Street Fighter Alpha. And then looking at what came after and seeing what is the truth that they're allowed to tell in 1995 versus the truth that they're allowed to tell 25 years later. And one particularly interesting thing that I noted that was different between the two is in 1995, they're like, you know, we were experimenting with making a game in 10 months. And then you come to find out 25 years later, they were given three months, but they actually

did it in six. And if you add those together, three and six is almost 10. That's right. But they were, you get the sense in 1995. they didn't want to tell people they made this, that they were trying to make this game in three months because people would be like, this is another cash grab. You're just trying to, like, shift another one of these out here

and get rid of all these boards. But to me, it's remarkable that it, in that time, it came together as well as it did. Okay, I just wanted to, like, I love reading an old interview from the time and then a new interview and just seeing, like, the truth spew out in between the interviewing, intervening years.

Yes, I'm grateful that the more recent chat sort of lays bare a lot of just frank stuff. Like, yeah, this, you know, partly this was business. It's like we had, we had all these parts and we had to use these parts. And that was really common. Like I talked about the last episode that I was here, actually, with Samurai Showdown. They had all these extra MVS carts, NeoGeo MVS carts that they needed to put stuff on because they had overly fulfilled. They had too many unfulfilled orders for Samar Shadown 5 Special. And so they had to make one more version of it.

And sometimes you just get a warehouse full of inventory and you get to put it somewhere. I guess that actually happened with the Super Nintendo game too, right? In the sense of stuff being crammed into a warehouse? Yeah. So in the oral history, the Super Nintendo version of Alpha 2 did not sell that well. And so they had like all these overstock copies and they had the gray market, send them out to South America and stuff. Yep. That was one of the kind of things that really created a fracture between Nintendo and Capcom in that era.

And why you didn't see a whole lot of Capcom stuff on N64. I think they didn't publish until like 2000. And it was like Mickey's magical Tetris and a port of Mega Man Legends. And that was pretty much all they did on N64. And a big part of that is because they... Resident Evil, too. Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right. That super compressed version.

They lost a ton of money in the late super NES era because Nintendo required them to pay up front for manufacturing and, you know, all that stuff. And when their games didn't sell, Nintendo was like, I don't know, you paid your license and we manufactured stuff. It's on you guys. So that happened with a few developers and publishers in that era and created a lot of ill will. And then Sony, of course, came along. And they were like, we'll just give you. money for free. It's going to be great. Yeah. Yeah, especially if you look at the contrast, you know, by that point, 96, 97, you know, they've got, they've got lots of PlayStation games

out there. You know, Resident Evil is already a huge hit, and they're just, they're just printing out discs, printing out discs. Meanwhile, to get, you know, to fit Street Fighter Alpha II onto a cartridge, they had to invest all this money, and then it didn't sell well, because again, by the time Alpha II hits the Super Nintendo, you know, the N64 is already out, so it's kind of a smaller market. They don't sell as well. They have this extra inventory. You look at those two directions, which will, well, I guess, let's make more discs, you know. Right. Yeah, I mean, the Street Fighter Alpha II cartridge is one of the few games on Super NES that uses the S.A2 chip, which is kind of the most complex chip.

I thought it was the SDD1. Is it? I thought it was S.A.2. Okay. In any case, it's one of the absolute most complex chips and therefore most expensive chips. And, you know, Nintendo, Nintendo gave themselves all the cool chips they wanted for free because they made them. then, you know, those cards were extra expensive for everyone else. So it was just bad times all around. But I do, I do really like that port. It's really, really impressive that they managed

to cram that much into a 16-bit machine. Yeah, they really tried. Also, speaking of which, have you seen that there is an initiative right now to port the game to Sega Genesis? I had not seen that, but you know, someone is porting Symphony the Night to Genesis. So at this point, all bets are off. Yeah, and it's actually looking pretty good. Like, the characters are pretty large. The movesets are starting to be there. It's impressive to see.

It's all thanks to SGDK. I saw a video of Tomb Raider running on GBA over the weekend, so, like, nothing surprises me anymore. Oh, you're right. It's the SDD-1 chip. I blew it. I thought I was a cool guy, and I'm not. It's all right. We knew it was a chip.

We just didn't know what the comments you were. It had an S in it. That's important. a one. And hey, I got to know something about Nintendo. So that makes me pretty heavy. Oh, well done. Umarito. Kramer. And as he put it, Capcom US had a long history of trying to rename every game that came out. And so when they heard the name Street Fighter Zero, they're like, well, okay, that's not going to work. As he put it, that sounds negative. And so since they heard, you know, new beginning,

they heard prequel. They proposed Alpha as an alternate, which is funny because a few years later, Capcom did indeed make Resident Evil Zero, which is that title in all locations. And of course, these days, you know, Yakuza Zero was a big hit. A couple of years ago, there was a rather forgettable Dracula movie that was called Dracula Untold in the U.S. here in Japan. So they're still here zeroing it up in Japan. There's the whole Mega Man Zero thing, although I guess that kind of gets a buy because the character is named Zero. But still, still. I would argue, though, that Zero is not a negative name. It is, in fact, not negative by its very nature. It's neither positive nor

negative. It's technically not negative. Damn it, Chris Kramer. But I do think that in 1995, if you said Street Fighter Zero, all the game magazines would have made fun of it. Like, when did Coke Zero come out? I want to say it was before that. So I think, I feel like that was, I feel like that idea of like, I don't know, maybe that was why actually. Maybe they were like, oh, this is, you know, Street Fighter without the calories. This is like the diet version of Street Fighter. It's less than the real thing.

So that I could actually see that. I could see that. Yeah. It does bug me, though, that the idea that, that. they stuck with the zero name in Japan, because as the people behind the game explained, it's not before Street Fighter 1. It's between Street Fighter 1 and 2, hence my little joke at the beginning. As Maratha put it, as he thinks of it, this game takes place several months or so after Street Fighter 1. They wanted the audience to imagine this as being something that follows

one, but precedes 2, but they game it zero. So it's where the players, so in Street Fighter 1, one, they have a lot to learn before they beat him. Right. And through the Alpha series, they learn a lot. That's how it goes. That's my Street Fighter one joke. Street Fighter Learning. Yeah.

So I, sorry, I have to correct myself here because if we don't, someone's going to, apparently just history is blurring together for me, and Coke Zero was not introduced until 2005. Oh, man, yeah. Wow. Okay. That's still older than I thought it was. Maybe you think you have clear Pepsi or Crystal Pepsi, whatever.

Yeah, Pepsi's Crystal Pepsi was the late 80s or late 90s. I want to say there was like Pepsi Max that ended up being renamed Pepsi Zero. And I remember Pepsi 1. I remember Tom Green used to hug Pepsi 1 when his show was big. So that would have been like 2000, 2001. Yeah. But I don't think, I don't think Pepsi 1 exists anymore. Anyway, it really doesn't matter.

I just want to throw it out there. So people are like, God, Jeremy, what a moron. People are going to still say that, but at least it won't clutter up the comments. It's all right. We're all here. We're all having a safe conversation. And as part of the serverly conversation, we talked about those extra boards. Yes, there was, in fact, a very economical reason to make another tree fighter game.

And that's, according to planner Hideaki Itzunul, they had a lot of extra CPS1 boards laying around. They were trying to get rid of those boards. And then they realized they also had CPS2 boards left over. So they had this mountain of extra arcade boards sitting around, you know, some, probably some factory in the outskirts of Osaka, and they had to get rid of it. So part of the motivation to make this game was, what are we going to do with all these boards that we got? So the Alpha Project sort of began as a sort of, you know, let's put this stuff to good use. Let's use this, because at that point, you know, this is 90, late 94, early 95, Dark Suckers is already out. Vampire Hunter is either out or coming out very, very soon.

those are very advanced, in my opinion, gorgeous games that deserve their own episode of Retronauts. I'll make a note to myself on that, but Alpha is not, Alpha's not beautiful. Alpha is just sort of efficient. It's, it's there. You know, Brandi, you said it has fewer colors. I'm sure it has, it definitely does not have the amount of animation that, you know, a Dark Starkers game does. But it certainly, it pops, you know, it's the designs and it's, I think it's very eye-catching. even though it's not as gorgeous, you know? No, it's, it's stylish, I would say. It has, it has its own, I mean, the style really developed over the time,

over time, especially by the time you got to Alpha 3, and you had like intro graphics sliding in different directions and stuff, and it looked really cool, but it was along the path to that where it was going for, it was going for drama and flare over, detail, and I think that worked really well for it. Yeah, I feel like a lot of really good things have come out of, you know, arcade manufacturers saying, oh my God, we've got all these expensive boards. What are we going to do with them? You know, all these expensive components. Obviously, that's where Donkey Kong came from. And, you know, even punch out. They were like, oh, we've got all these, these dual monitor, or all these extra screens. Let's make a dual screen game. But the thing that really appeals to me about Alpha style is that it seems like it's really, directly going for a cell animation style, which is something you really didn't see done that much at this period. Because, you know, video games, when they were 2D, desperately wanted to be 3D, and they would accomplish that by adding more shading and adding more dimensionality and depth and,

you know, basically mass, you know, volume to their characters through kind of the visual illusion of having shading and lighting and everything. And, you know, Street Fighter was definitely a big step in that road. Like the graphics, when that game first came out, I mean, you look at it now and you're like, oh, yeah, that looks cartoonish. But at the time, like, to me, it seemed like they were really pushing more towards some sort of visual realism, even if the character faces didn't look, you know, like human faces. They were cartoon faces. You still have that kind of visual depth. You had that with the backgrounds and the, you know, the multiple layers of parallax scrolling and the kind of the illusionary foregrounds on the floor that would shift and change perspective.

of you as you moved around. Like, they were really going for that, that sense of space and mass and volume. And that was, that was what everyone wanted. You know, games were really, really pushing hard to get to 3D. And in 1995, you know, that's the year that Saturn launches in America. And everyone says, poop, that's all 2D graphics, except Panzer Dragoon. And we like that. And PlayStation launches, and it's got Ridge Racer and all these other games that are 3D. And they look so cool and so immersive and impressive. And then you have Capcom saying, here is Street Fighter Alpha, which takes away all the depth and dimensionality to create much more of a pure cartoon style with like flat colors and maybe a single shade of, you know, of shadow for shading. And it was, it really,

you know, black outlines on characters. Obviously, they had done some of that with, with dark stalkers as well. But this was, I feel like it was a really kind of a bold step to take a game that already had precedent with that sort of fool-the-eye 3D element to its shading and coloring and to say, no, actually, now it is a cartoon. It's flat. It looks like a cell. And there's much less of the kind of immersion that you had in the previous games with this one. And, you know, I can see where that was probably a hard cell at the time. But it just, it looked really interesting because you didn't see a lot of games doing that. And the characters, all had much more dynamic and I feel like energetic designs.

You know, there was more energy to their stances. They had more exaggerated features, like bigger muscles, spikier hair, like crazy eyebrows, like on Dan, you know, it just everyone was, and Ken, yes. Oh my God, Ken's eyebrows. They just won't stop. It's like, I understand, you know, now that I'm in my 40s, I'm like, oh, my God, what's happening to my eyebrows? Like, I understand Ken was there years before.

me, and now I'm sympathetic. But you just have that energy that isn't really possible with more realistic graphics. And then you look on the other side of the fence, and you have mortal combat, and you have killer instinct in games that we're going for, either the digitization or the pre-render 3D graphics. And yes, they have a lot of depth and they have a lot of detail, but they just seem so static and lifeless by comparison to alpha, which just has, it's bursting with energy. Even in this first game, like by the time, as Brandon said, by the time you get to Alpha 3, it's just like, bam, in your face. But even here, there's just this sort of liveliness that was not really present in previous Street Fighter games, especially in the competition.

So it's kind of a bold stance for, you know, approach for Capcom to take. But, you know, I think they're pragmatism and kind of like, let's get this game out in as little time as possible and do what it takes to do that to accomplish that, you know, born of pragmatism, it still was a great creative idea and really, it was a strong choice that really helped the game stand out. Yeah, I think also the, it helps the game. game to not look particularly dated because it's stylized from the start. They were going for a specific look that wasn't going to date itself like Toshin Den, which was trying to be as 3D as possible and did a good job for the time, but, you know, it wound up, it winds up

looking cute in a, in a different way than they intended at that time. Like, it was supposed to be cool and modern and edgy and I feel like Street Fighter Alpha, if you look at it for the first time now, it looks as good as it looked when you looked at it for the first time in 1995. And I think that comes down to the strong character designs and the limited color palette intentionally so and the way that the animation is done. It's just all, it's really like they were going for something and they achieved it. Yeah, I think they also kind of laid down a template for future game developers who wanted to create fighting games on a budget, you know, Dogen developers or indie game developers who didn't necessarily have, you know, huge studio backing with which to create a fighting game. But here is, here's kind of the keys to the kingdom, the formula for doing that.

And, you know, a decade later, you would see indie games start to take that approach, not just fighting games, but stuff like Cave Story, where it's just like, go super minimal, go, you know, with kind of low-impact graphic design that a small team can do in a small amount of time. And again, it was really kind of working backward against the processes of gaming at the time where just studios were expanding. Dev teams were going from, you know, six people in the 8-bit era to 60 people in the 32-bit era or even more, and then outsourcing stuff. You know, it just, in some ways, it was a step backward, but also kind of a progressive step forward. Yeah, I wouldn't say that Alpha rolls it back as much as like a cave story or similar, but...

Oh, sure, no, no. You can feel the origins of it on multiple vectors. One is, of course, since they had to make it work on the CPS1, they had to make it, it was necessarily limited because the CPS2 was a stronger board. so they had to, you know, they had to cut some things out that otherwise they might have done. And the other thing is, Isuno was like an unknown designer who had just entered Capcom and got hired to the project, he says, because he came in every morning and played the Neo Geo that they had set up

and played King of Fighters 95. And so they, I guess, Funomizu or whoever, was it Funomizu? Anyway, hired him up and it was like, you want to take charge of this Street Fighter Alpha series? And he was like, sure, but he'd only worked on quiz games and stuff before that. So you had, like, young, new talent, some very direct limitations with the CPS1 board. And then it's like, what can you do within that that feels new? And Alpha is what they came up with.

Yeah, there's a quote for me to know that says, this is going to be a game designed for porting. So even as they were making it, they knew that, you know, it was obviously, it came out in arcades first. We have June 95 for most arcade releases. But by the end of the year in Japan, it was already on PlayStation and Saturn, both in America, 96. And one of the weirder things, I still can't believe this is real. In 1999, you know, after the series has already, you know, had multiple sequels, there's a Game Boy Color port of Street Fighter Alpha, apparently published by Virgin Interactive. And so it came out, excuse me, it came out in Europe in 19.

U.S. in 2000. In Japan, 2001, I cannot imagine seeing a Game Boy Color Street Fighter Alpha on a store shelf in 2001 and saying, yes, this is what I've been waiting for. Yeah, but wasn't that developed by Crawfish, who then went on to develop the really, really impressive port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 for GBA? I'd have been. It was Crawfish, yes. Okay, yeah. Like, they squeezed a lot more performance out of those systems for fighting games, and they really should have been able to. seeing that when it came out and thinking, wow, that's, uh, that's, you know, one, a huge step backward. It's two games backward. Uh, but also I just, I can't imagine trying to cram that into a Game Boy color, but by all accounts, you know, people who have played it have said

surprisingly good. I mean, it's basically there. The game is in there, you know, it doesn't, there's not a lot of, but yeah, they didn't, they didn't do a NeoGeo pocket color with it and turn everyone into like little chubby characters, you know, like yeah, like either the whole Neo Geo Pocket Color approach to fighting games now that we mentioned, you know, now that comes up is really kind of the alpha approach of just like stripping out detail and super stylizing everything to the point where, you know, you just kind of pair it down to the essence. It's taking that approach, you know, a few steps further. But they, uh, they didn't go with that for the Game Boy Color game. And it's, it's much more of like a, an attempt to be the, the arcade game on

game boy color. Yeah, the characters are very, very tiny. But you can, it's very clear which characters, which they're identifiable, and all the characters are in there, they did not cut anyone out. So I do appreciate that that is a nice, a nice gesture. But yeah, it sounds, it sounds really bad. And I can't imagine. Maybe it's playable.

I don't know. I don't have a Game Boy Color on hand. I've played it. It's okay. I mean, it's not, it's not great, but it's definitely one of those, like, if you've only got a Game Boy color, you can play it kind of things. Yeah, I mean, on the grand spectrum of Game Boy fighting games, it's got to be fairly high up there, which is, I admit, like, not a great, you know, metric to judge by, you know, not the most impressive

metric, but, you know, it's something. It's a tall person in a shallow pool. Exactly. Yes. I can't relate to that, but yes. Me neither. Thank you. Coming soon to hyperX.com, HP.com, and more fine retailers everywhere.

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Good to know. I wanted to use this time to impart some words of wisdom from Eslo. Straighten up your hair once I'm gone. You got a style all over the ladies. La la la la la la la are the words to his new hit single, Live Long, Love Long. And also he woke up from a dream where he forgot to study for the test. so did he really say all those things yeah yeah these are all things that that I discussed that he discussed with me that's magical chat of the wild breaking down Zelda and Zelda like games one dungeon at a time Wednesdays on the HyperX podcast network live long love long baby the world went to hell around the year

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and more fine retailers. So, let's talk about the economics of this factor. So, yes, as we mentioned before, this game was made on a very short timeline. The initial interview speculated as being 10 months. They said it started in October 94, which would have been about six months after Super Street Fighterer 2 Turbo was finished. And as Funomizu put it in the day, he said, if we only had 10 months, we wanted to challenge ourselves and see just how much we could pack into a game with a 10-month development period. But, yeah, Funamizu 25 years later said, we had a three-month deadline. So, you know, he says it eventually took six months.

But yeah, the older version of Funomizu is less flowery with his description of working on this game. And I really think even for me at the time who knew nothing about development time and costs and such, you could tell when you look at the first game, it's got, you know, corners were clearly cut. The one that always stood out to me is the fact that, you know, you look at Street Fighter 2, you look at basically any game that came out after Street Fighter 2, and one of the sort of mainstays of the genre is, every character occupies a space, you know, like this is the, this is the EU stage, It's the Chun Li stage. You know, if it's Fatal Fury, okay, this is the Big Bear stage.

This is the Billy Kane stage. Alpha only really has five stages. You know, they add some effects. They sort of make a day-night cycle going on, but basically they made five backgrounds. You know, it's like, it's a Simpsons joke again. You have, here are five backgrounds. So it's very visible to me, even at the time, that they clearly didn't have a lot to work with. Or it was, they wanted to get out the door, perhaps.

But I don't think it's, it's not necessarily a negative, but it's, It's something that is obvious, I think, when you look at it. Especially, for me, one thing that stands out is if, depending on who you play as in this game, you have a different final boss. It's all based around what character's journey, you know, who are you and who are you fighting against? Like, you know, Sagaat is obviously going to fight for you, and I think for some of them it's Bison, but if you do fight Bison as the last boss, you're fighting him like in this

weird sort of like train graveyard. It's just like, it doesn't make any sense for who he is. is, you know. He hates trains. Right. He killed the ball. He's, you know, he's got his own temple. He's got this giant bell. Everything about that stage is sort of like, oh, this is it. You, you know, you've reached the end of this game. And in Alpha, it's like, oh, yeah, I think I fought Bertie here. You know, it was just like, yeah, sort of anticlimactic. It also felt like a step backward in terms of the character roster. It has, what, like a dozen characters? And I feel like Super Street Fighter 2 had 16? Alpha has a total of 13 characters. Oh, 13.

Which is less than Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but not bad if you consider the fact that, you know, they're all new, everyone here's a new drawing. You know, like Street Fighter 2, they kept adding, adding more characters and kept the old ones around. But this is like, okay, here's their new game. So they made 13 brand new, like, drawings, which is, you know, which I do appreciate. So let's go ahead. Let's talk about the roster then. We have the roster. So we have a quote here from Funimiso.

He said, we knew we had to keep you, Ken, and Chun Lee. And then we decided the rest from there. And he said, they paid attention to the back. background of the characters, we didn't want to end up with just Japanese and Asian characters. So, they thought about, you know, they put a little thought into diversity. I think that's one reason why Birdie is now black. In the original Street Fighter, he's just a big white guy, but now he's a darker skin person. Funamis also said they looked at Final Fight because Final Fight's working title was Street Fighter 89. They're like, okay, well, that's a Street Fighter

then. And they go ahead and they grab Guy and Sodom from Final Fight, put him in later games at Rolento and Cody. Hagger never shows up, but... Yeah, I never knew if Sodom was originally Japanese and changed to be a white guy in Alpha. I always, that was my suspicion, because when I played Street Fighter originally, I was like, oh, they brought a Japanese samurai here into this cage match, and that's what's going on. Like, they flew this guy in to fight this match. and then in in alpha he's this like weibo white guy who loves samurai culture and um is big

doof and i was like i remember seeing this character and being like wow these people really hate me you know it was it like felt it felt like a character attack against the people in the in the u.s that like their games uh or at least the the white folks in the u.s that like their games i i don't know I never took that as being like, hey, you like Japanese stuff, you suck. It was more like, hey, you don't have any real common sense about how you express your like of Japanese stuff. You suck. You know, there's, I think there's a difference.

And this is, he is definitely a guy who they characterized as like not, not knowing when to step back and calm down. And having encountered lots of people like that in my time, I can appreciate the comedy there. Yeah. just as a, when I was 14 or 15 and encountering this, I was like, hey. Yeah. Well, it does give him some sense of character. As you said, in final fight, in final fight, he's just sort of this weirdo who appears

and, you know, he's got a helmet on. You can't see his faith either way. And his only thing is like, I've got swords. You've got fists, I've got swords. And in this game, he doesn't have swords anymore. He has a, I looked it up. It's called jit, these little sort of stubby sort of defensive weapons, really. but he still carries two of them

he's still a big guy he moves around a lot pretty strong I do appreciate the fact that they've added his chest piece I don't know what armor I don't know what you call that thing

it's got you know she the character for death on it but even when you look at it it looks a little bit off you know it looks like he painted it on there himself and he didn't do a good job of it

very good which to me is a very personal story because geez probably about 20 years ago or so now. I remember I was, I got dressed for Halloween one year, and I decided, oh, let's, let's just be, I've got all this extra stuff from my trip to Japan. Let's just go

with a zombie and I'll put on this Japanese stuff and I'll be like a Japanese zombie. And my big brain idea was, hey, I know some kanji. I'll draw the kanji for death on my forehead. But I did it in the mirror. So, sure enough, you know,

I went to, this party was in New York City. You know, I think the first Asian person I encountered is like, yeah, that's on backwards. And I was like, oh yeah I did it myself it's good self-own there that's for sure yes let this be a lesson to all of us about cultural appropriation

yeah stay in your lane only do American stuff you can only eat hamburgers Anyway, the other characters, however, we have, we have New and Ken, they're both back. You can tell the alpha design is very much based on how they look in the movie, because Dew is using a white headband instead of a red headband, which Ken actually gives him in the movie. And Ken has really long blonde hair. And as he said, Jeremy, he's got very big eyebrows. They think they're almost, they're almost like clipping through his

hair. Like, that's how giant they are. And I appreciate the fact that at this point, you know, in Street Fighter 2, Rio and Ken and later Akima were basically, it's basically one sprite with different heads on it. At this point, they're clearly trying to make the characters drawn a little differently. They're giving them slightly more and more different moves, different kicks, you know, overheads. Like, they're trying to make the characters journey apart. it really, they take big steps in Alpha that just they couldn't do in Street Fighter 2 because they didn't want to redraw the characters. Yeah, this is where Ken starts to become my go-to character because he's got the hurricane

kick that's a little stronger and goes in the air. Maybe Ryu could do it in the air too, but, and then going straight into that, sure, you can, just being a spammy jerk, the beginning of that flow chart. for me, starts there in Alpha, and that's where I really started to like Ken. So, he mentioned Chunli. Chunli had to be there. She is there. However, now she's wearing a track suit instead of a dress. She is no less muscular. I love that one. The track suit is the best outfit. It's a really good, it's a good look, because the top still has the same sort of decoration on it, but the bottom is just this big solid color, and it shows off,

you know, she still has the same moves. She's still good at the kicking. Likewise, Speaking of redrawing, so she now has a unique animation for throwing her fireball, the Kikokin, and it's not just, you know, a recolor Dalsam Fireball. It's a unique sprite. She's got sort of this, this, how do you explain this move? She, like, sticks her butt up and her hands out. Like, it's a really great sort of dramatic pose to attack with, you know, as opposed to Street Fighter 2, where they just took one of her animations and made a fireball come out of it. Yeah, she puts her back into it, like, literally, like, her whole. back into it. Yeah, it's like it's coming from her spine. Yeah. And I also appreciate the, in Alpha One,

anyway, her stage is the Great Wall of China, which is just, it's a cool looking place to have a fight, even though not a street, but, you know, we'll accept it. We'll accept it. There's kind of like a road on top of the wall. Yeah. You could, yeah, you could get a bike on there, for sure. I've been on there. You could drive a car on there if you got the right kind of car and found a way to get it up there. All right. I haven't, I have not been. I'd like to go. It was pretty good. I drank a beer up there on the top of the Great Wall, and they got people up there just like old grandmas and grandpas selling stuff out little coolers. And there are parts you can go, parts you can't go. And you can also, when you leave, depending on what ticket you purchase and where

you go, you can take a bizarre, dangerous, not very well monitored slide all the way back down to the ground level. It's wild. There's a little lever to control your speed. It's super fun. Oh, all right. Sounds like I know about that. I've got a plan. Get drunk, operate slide.

There you go. That was my plan. Other returning characters. Sagat is back. He's, I would say, he's way less beanpole now. He's still a tall guy. Yeah, he's chunky. Yeah, now he's a lot thicker.

And speaking of thick with two seas, Bison, my goodness. Wow. Yeah. He is totally, I mean, he was not slim in the first game. He was definitely a guy who, you know, did not skip Arm Day, but Jesus Christ, his Alpha Sprite is something else. Yeah. And the first game, he, you know, he had a military suit. So you were like, are those legs like thigh muscles or are they jod firs? But now, you know, in Alpha, it's like those are thigh muscles and also jod firs. And he's got thigh muscles on his arms, too. Yeah, he's having a hard time keeping those things contained in the sleeves. So that's for sure. Those boys are going to just burst out all over the place. Boom.

Again, clearly taken directly from his look in the anime, which, you know, made him a giant of a man. He also, in Alpha, his psycho crusher is now super move. You can't just zip back and forth across the stage all you want. But he uses his psycho power. He can sort of throw these sort of kinetic balls. And he can also teleport now. He's got to teleport. In Japan, it's, you know, in Japan he's called Vega.

So it's Vega Warp. In America, it's called Bison Warp, which, I don't think it's the same ring to it, but it is a teleport. And also he keeps his cape on during combat, right? Yes. Whereas in Street Fighter 2, he shows up with a cape, and then he's like, I can't keep this on here. He throws it to the side, and it kind of flickers into non-existence.

But here, he's like, nope, I don't care what they said, you know, what they told me in the Incredibles. I'm going to fight this way anyway. Yeah, and it's probably because they were redrawing it. So they were like, hey, we could probably do some cape flap. It's a lot of work, but they wouldn't do it. That's why it's only two colors. Yeah.

Who else is back? Oh, it's Akima, Akima or Goki in Japan. He is back. He's still a secret boss. You can select him on the basic screen if you push him shenanigans, but otherwise he's in there. He also has, again, kind of like you and Ken, you're starting to see a little bit of diversion there. He's got some extra moves. I forget the name of them, but I know he's got that move where you sort of like do a quick hop-up

and you can decide whether you want to come down at a punch or come down in a kick. You know, he's got his warp. He's got the Shungoku Satsu move. He's got all his stuff. And then let's talk about Dan. Shall we talk about Dan? The other guy who's sort of similar. So Dan is at first glance kind of a joke character, but he's not really a joke.

Let's let Funomizu explain. Funomizu says that good old Akiman made some art for a CD booklet, and he drew Suckat holding this guy by the head, just completely owning this guy. guy who's got a little ponytail and he's got a fighting gie on. And the staff looked at them as like, hey, that looks a lot like the characters from Art of Fighting, which, you know, Art of Fighting was 92 on Neo Geo, and, you know, Art of Fighting has two lead characters. You have ponytail rich boy Robert, Robert Garcia, and you have ghee clad, you know, Japanese American Dio Sakazaki. And here's this guy who kind of looks like a fusion between the two.

And they look at him, they sort of giggle a little, they giggle of this and like, oh, well, that's funny. What if we actually take this and make this guy a character? So that's, that's where Dan was born. And his approach is definitely comedic. He's definitely got a lot of moves that are clearly based on stuff in artifying. Like, artifying uses a spirit meter. You can't just throw fireballs over and over and over. You have to sort of charge up your spirit.

And if you don't have enough spirit and you throw a fireball, it just sort of pops. It doesn't go anywhere. You just, you do the whole motion and it just doesn't go. and that's what Dan does. If he throws a fireball, I think it's called Gadokin in Japanese, it just sort of goes one centimeter in front of his body, and that's it. The super version goes maybe like four centimeters. But, like, that's always got.

He does, he has his own dragon punch, but it has no invincibility whatsoever. So you can hit him out of it. It's no problem. He doesn't have the Takamatsu, Takamaki, I don't want to say it in Japanese, honestly, the spin kicking thing, but he does have a move where he launches forward and kicks three or four times, which is, again, kind of based on a move and art of fighting. And Fulamizu, he insists it was not supposed to be some sort of dig. You know, as he puts it, everyone in Street Fighter is kind of like amazing martial artists.

They're all, you know, they can literally, you know, swing their fists forward and shoot energy out of him. And his idea was, what if we added someone, quote, who wasn't like that, who was just a normal martial artist? It would highlight how incredible the other people are. In other words, we wanted to try adding a character with. the concept of a second-rate martial artist. Yeah. Which I think is cute. I honestly think it's cute.

Yeah, he's a great character. I really like Dan. In Street Fighter Alpha II, I really like Sakara. They're just, they were really pretty far outside the kind of standard of Street Fighter characters and just fighting game characters in general. They were so, so distinct and came from a place that was kind of not self-effacing, but, you know, a little bit like, hey, these are kind of normal people who just kind of

found their way into this martial arts tournament and they're doing their best. What I would say is like with the vampire hunter, vampire savior, whatever series, Capcom started playing with more humor in the games.

And so with Alpha, it kind of removes some of the dour, direness of Street Fighter 2 where it was about saving the world and stuff. There's still some world saving. But you've got Sodom, Dan, Sakara,

you got characters, I mean, guy, not guy, Cody, does a lot of hammy stuff. There's just a lot of characters in here that are kind of goofy and messing around. And it gives it more of like a Shonen manga vibe where you've got some very serious characters like Ryu who's never not going to be serious. And then you've got other characters that are goofing around and just here for the lulls. And I think it's kind of nice. And it helped with the accessibility of the game to make it feel like, okay, this is, you know, maybe you weren't that great at Street Fighter 2, but here's your chance to come in and mess around a little bit with this. And I also appreciate that, you know, as the game series went on and

they added more more characters, some of whom were established, those characters also got sort of a lighter side to them. Like, I remember when Blanca shows up in three, I believe, his, one of his, like, wind poses is he just, like, plugs a blender into himself and, like, charge of the blender to, like, make a smoothie for himself. Like, it's, they're having a lot of fun with the characters who you already know, but now it's like, oh, what if, you know, what is this, you know, if a guy had electric powers, wouldn't he do that? Yeah, probably. Just one more thing, though, before I wrap up Dan here, I just want to point out they do have a quote from Toilheisa Tanabe

who is, was, probably was, a producer on the King of Fighter series. So he said that when he saw, when he looked at Dan, he was like, I always felt Capcom was one step ahead of S&K. So when Dan came out, I was like, oh look, they're noticing us.

They made a character on us. And he claims that as Yuri Sakazaki, who is a character in the King of Fighters in Art of Fighting, he says, as she learned more, more karate moves. He put moves on Yuri that were in Capcom games. So that was his response to Dan is that he gave Yuri more moves from Capcom characters, which I think is also cute. Then it all kind of comes full circle in S&K versus Capcom when those two do the same like intro pose together

and it looks really goofy and silly. It's great. Yeah. And I think there's got to be at least one game where someone looks at yo and thinks he's due or vice versa. Like they definitely start, they joke around of that, because let's be honest, you and you are very similar names. Yeah, it's true. Other characters we want to shout up for Alpha One, these are, so we got Aidan and Bertie are both returning from Street Fighter 1. Adon's like a Muay guy, but he's just like a really small, he's a smaller, faster guy. He does a lot of jumping around. He's got, you know, the Jaguar kick. I love his little shrieky voice.

Yeah, very loud. I really like that. And also, it was, to me, it filled a gap that S&K, I mean, that Capcom has. from the S&K lineup, because S&K always had Joe. Yes. And I felt like Aidan was, as someone who had been playing a lot of King of Fighters and particularly liked Joe Higashi, when I came over to try to play Alpha, I was like, oh, this Aidan character looks like something I could get into.

And so that was, I think, the first character I really tried to play because it was familiar from K-O-F, which is kind of odd. But that's how it worked. It makes sense. Also, we mentioned Bertie. Yeah, Bertie, aside from a slight race adjustment, he has a lot. He's a big, he's like the big bruiser guy. He's definitely the, you know, the Zangi-style character.

Except one thing I really like about Bertie is they gave him a lot of moves that give him sort of a surprising amount of agility. He's got a move that he just lets him jump forward and grab you, which is perfect for, you know, in a game where a lot of people can just throw fireballs over and over, he can just jump over them and grab you. So I thought that was a really cool sort of addition to him. In fact, he's a super move like that. He just, he can jump across the entire screen, just grab you and pummel you, which I think is, you know, a fun surprise.

And he's got a hole in his Mohawk. You can't beat that. I love that. Yeah, how does that even work? I don't know. I was like, I guess they don't, you know, they can throw fireballs. Maybe he's got some special power that allows his hair to be like that. Speaking of amazing hair, let's talk about Charlie, aka Nash in Japan.

I don't know why they couldn't agree on that, but Charlie now has a face. You know, in Street Fighter 2, Giles. entire story revolves around his buddy Charlie being gone. And that's why he wants revenge against bison. And, you know, you never see Charlie because he's dead. Well, here he is. And he's got a gigantic swoosh. Like, how do you describe that hair? It's like a Nike swoosh, but it goes down over his face. Like, it's, it goes up and it comes straight down. It's very good. Yeah. It's very good. It's if he and Gile, I mean, if their friendship has any rivalry to it, clearly there were hair rivals as well.

I mean, move-wise, they're basically identical. You know, he's got the sonic booms. He's got the somersault kicks. He just looks a lot better. Definitely, Charlie's got the better look. He's got the glasses. He's wearing glasses at the start of the fight.

Yeah. Naturally, in the endings, Charlie has to die. And I think he dies in the ending of Alpha 2 as well, but then in Alpha 3, I think they'll let him live. So, yeah, they decide to bring him back because people like the character. So it's like, ah, come on. That's right. become best buds with, oh wait, no, that's Dan. Dan and Blanca become best buds.

Yes. Yeah, that's right. Dan is, Dan has a good relationship with Blanca. And I think he and Soccer also get along later, because they're both like, they're both self-taught students. So they have, they have a, a kismit connection there. I think Dan proclaims himself soccer as teacher. Right. She does not necessarily acknowledge it. And who are we missing? Oh, yes. One more character. Rose. Rose is the. the only truly unique character in that she has no, there's no direct previous street fighter character for Rose.

However, she is this spitting image of Lisa Lisa from part two of Jojo's Baza adventure. I mean, she's got the gigantic scarf. She comes in, she's a fortune teller, so they've got some tarot card imagery. Yeah, it's at the time I didn't know that, but now

that I know it's, yeah. Was she the tryout for getting the Jojo license? Was she like their, you know, their spec script? basically the equivalent like hey look what we did can we make your game now for you thank you i i found her character amusing because again as a 14 year old or whatever i was like oh so this is what italian people look like my introduction to italians rose from streamfighter alpha we also didn't talk about guy yet oh yes i'm sorry i mentioned him briefly as as coming for final

five but yes guy is here and he's he's got a lot of running moves he can do a triangle jump uh the cues describe him as good as poking. That's a technical term, but yeah. I would say that in Alpha 1, I was like, why is he here? Because it felt like he didn't have a lot of moves, and it felt like there was potential for him to do stuff with like chain combos and stuff, but it was so complicated as to not appear worth my while. And then later on, they made him a little more useful, and I actually quite liked him. And in a way, his limited move set, was like, oh, okay, maybe you can really learn this guy and his normals and stuff more. But, again, as a 14-year-old, I was like, what's the point of him being in here?

It's cool, but, like, doesn't have a lot of stuff. He's got two issues. I was always really confused by his, he's got one super move that just, he basically sort of slowly moves upwards, like punching and kicking, so it's like, it's purely anti-air. Like, if you do it on the ground, you're not going to do anything. Yeah. So you only do it if you're, if someone's jumping at you and you know they're jumping at you. Yeah.

Rose has one, too, but she just grabs you and throws you. which looks cool. And he just sort of, like, is doing punches and kicks as he moves upwards. Yeah, and hers has an angle to it. Right. Possibly multiple angles, I forget. But his is definitely just like, I'm just going to go straight up. But then they give Ken one of those later.

His double quarter circle back kick move that I don't remember the name of where he just has like a swirling dragon go straight up. But that one's a little more understandable to look at because it's like, okay, I'm making a big pillar of fire. But with Guy, it was just like Flump, flump, flump, just going straight up It's like he's climbing the ladder. I wasn't sure about that one. I do like that

New and Guy both, they're the Japan characters, quote, and in their drawing, in their background stage, you've got like just a standard convenience store, but they named the convenience store Son Son Son, which I always thought was cute. Very good. Yeah, it is cute. So that is all the characters from Alpha One.

Let's talk for a second about the new stuff. Because Street Fighter, as we mentioned, this is sort of a restart for Street Fighter. They threw in a bunch of stuff there that was not new to fighting games, but new to Street Fighter. So one of the things that I thought was definitely a big surprise for me at the time was when you play Street Fighter Alpha and you choose your character, you get to choose right away. You can choose manual or auto. And manual is like how you expect a fighting game to play. Auto, the game will automatically block a certain number of attacks for you unless you are attacking at that time. If you're just standing around and someone tries to punch you, the game will block for you.

So I guess that's, you know, it's a slight olive branch to sort of throw to people. If people aren't used to having to push the joystick to block, okay, well, we got you. We got you. So that's like the opposite of Street Fighter 3's Perry system, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious how people felt about that because for me, even as someone who wasn't very good at Street Fighter at the time, I found auto confusing. I didn't really get auto block until the awesome. a 120% series, which I love very much.

But I didn't feel like I had perfect information about the system when it was going to block, when it wasn't going to block. And so I turned it off in order to save my confusion and at least know that if I didn't block something, it was my fault. I never actually used it because I was came to the series straight out of Street Fighter and all those other games, so I felt like I didn't need it. So I never actually used it. That and also like, I don't know.

I find that I'm not standing stock still very often in these games. I'm always kind of moving around. Maybe that's because I use more mobile characters. But, like, if I'm just kind of standing there and taking punches, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Yeah, I mean, blocking is a valuable tool no matter where you are. But if you don't know when it's, when for sure it's going to happen, then that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm saying, like, I block just to activate the auto block. You have to just kind of be standing there, I think. Oh, right. That was kind of my understanding. It can't be attacking for sure. Yeah. So that's what, that's what threw me. Yeah.

Speaking of blocking, you can now block in the air. I love it. I love it. But Street Fighter Alpha adds that to the Street Fighter series. Those are the Alpha counter, which I think is a very interesting mechanic. You can spend one level of your super meter, and you will just, you just throw off a move, and it will knock anyone out of whatever they're doing to you. Yeah, that's, I always thought that was very interesting.

but I never got proficient enough to where it felt like it was useful to me. Like, I wasn't sure that I had made a good trade-off because, like, am I going to take, is it going to take so much life off of me, this attack that the opponent is doing, that it's worth me not being able to do a super on them? And that trade-off, I guess I'm a very agro player, and so it was hard to spend meter on defense. It just felt it made me mad. I didn't like it. I hear you. I definitely, I didn't use it that often, but I did appreciate, you know, if I was stuck, especially if it was like maybe late game and maybe they were trying to chip me out, you know, just with block damage. It's like,

okay, no, I'm getting out of this corner. I also liked seeing the little, I'm flipping in the air animation for everybody. Yes. They had those little, yeah, that's cute. It's like a spin rings or something. It's, yeah, nifty. Made them all a little rotate. They should have had at the end that everybody's on a rotissory or something. Speaking of Supermeter, the supermeter system has been dramatically overhauled. So in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, everyone has one meter. It's either full, either it's full and you can use it or it's not full and you can't do anything with it. Now in Alpha, you've got three levels.

So the more you fill it up, the more you can do with it. And you can also choose whether you want to use one, two, or all the meter to deliver a giant move or just do one move and then save some for later. I loved that myself. I thought that was so cool. It was great and you could like, your opponent wouldn't necessarily know which one you were going to do when it started out. And so, I don't know, it felt like, it felt like the right level of options for someone of my ability at that time. Because I could really understand what it was doing for me and how to use it. I really liked it.

We have a good quote here from Murata. He said the Supercombo gauge also saw some major changes. At first, you wouldn't be able to use Supercombo the way you could now. For example, certain moves had used specific gauges, one gun gauge, two gauge, blah, blah, blah. But during the development, they decided, oh, they felt it was too hard to understand. So they submitted a new idea as like, okay, let's let players choose what they want to do. And as Okada said, it was exhausting because they had to redo the whole thing. which again, this game was made a very short time schedule.

So it must have been difficult for them, but I think in the end they got a much better product out of it because... Worked up for me. Yeah. The only move that I know for sure is the Akima Shungok Satsu, the super, you know, raging demon, whatever move, that has to be level three. Yeah.

But everything else you can choose what you want to do with it. Also, it's no good making fun of people's word flubs, but I really am enjoying the idea of a super condo. I want to know. You know, Ken and Ryu live next door to each other. Yeah. They live together. They live next door to each other in the Supercondo.

They share a backyard. You know what? I saw Spider-Man No Way Home last week. So let's say that's what I mean by Supercondo. Okay. Yeah, I'm afraid I wasn't, I'm not good enough at fighting games to really get the most out of the Supercombo system. Like, you know, sometimes I make it work for me and I'm like, yay.

but it kind of feels like, hey, tiny miracle. So, you know, I understand the system. I'm just not great at executing it. But I like the concept, at least. I think in Alpha, most of them, at least in the first Alpha, they were a little more simplified, the motions for them, which I appreciated. But then they got more complicated, like, well, actually,

maybe Chunleys was like that from the start. But her, like, down diagonal to up diagonal. back-and-forth move thing to get hurt. I don't know. I have a hard time with charge characters to begin with, but some of those motions were a little like, okay, maybe that's a bit much. On the other hand, Nash's Charlie's super

was much easier for me to execute as a charge character than others had been. The big frigging... Sonic boom that stays in place, the big disc. I think in Alpha 1 it's just a series of Sonic booms That's right It's just a bunch of little sonic booms And then I think later games

It becomes like a big boom Later he gets the big boom Big Bada boom Speaking of combos That's also a big change for this game Almost every character can just link Light attacks To medium attacks to heavy attacks

So you can sort of just choose Which way you want to go with that And it varies character to character But most characters have some form of that sort of linkage It's also much easier to cancel normal attacks into special moves or super moves, and this was deliberate. We have a quote from Kramer, Chris Kramer, yeah, from the American branch. He says, Alpha was going to be the new player-friendly one because arcade operators were saying,

hey, the only people who play Street Fighter 2 are these hardcore guys, and they can put in tokens and stay on the machine for an hour. And new players don't want to put in money because it's so overwhelming. So that's why Alpha had airblock and counters and combos and stuff that was a lot more friendly. Although to counter that, we do have a quote from Seth Killian, who used to be a Cavcom. I don't know sure he's doing these days, but... I believe he's at Epic. Is it Riot? I think he's it riot.

A riot? I don't know. Some place. But anyway, noted fighting game Maven, Seth Killian. And he said, both airblock and chain combo systems were done well in later games, but Alpha One's versions felt underbaked and threw the baby out with the bathwater. So Killian was not a fan. Yeah, I understand where they're both coming from, really, because for my money, Alpha's extra systems were like, it felt like here's a bunch of stuff that you can use, and it was friendlier for new players in that you didn't have to do all of it, and it was still friendlier, and there was a lot of, like, if you learned one of those systems, you got a lot out of it. But there was also, there was so much that learning all of it required you to be hardcore and sort of, to actually fully utilize everything would have required the dedication that Street Fighter 2 required almost.

But I think that's why they simplified it for future series, for entries in the series, I would say. One other cute small edition I want to mention is the fact that characters can taunt now. You push the start button, you taunt. And for whatever reason, you're only allowed to taunt once. Chun Li actually, her taunt is actually an attack. She sort of does a quick little bow and says, gomene, but if you are standing too close to her, her little hand gesture will hit you.

Yeah. And it does one micron of damage, but it can KO you. And I think she has a special, like, I think she gets a special victory badge if she caos you with a taunt. I actually, I love watching combo videos. with Chunle from Alpha because they people love to end with that taunt because it can do this tiniest amount of chip damage uh well it's it's the equivalent of chip damage basically and uh so it's

really fun it's a fun brag to end your combo with that and have that be the killing blow um it and also the whole thing with taunts goes into the you know the lighter tone and kind of a rich not a return to, but a, at the addition of goofiness to the Street Fighter series, because it, it just makes it, like, it lightens it up a little bit. It makes it friendlier and funnier, and it feels more like it's for a wider audience. And as a fun character note, Dan is a lot to taunt as much as he wants. He is infinite taunts. And I believe... You can just roll all over the place. Yeah, I think later games give him, like, advanced taunts, and eventually, I'm not sure which game starts at, I don't think it's alpha one, but he eventually gets a super taunt, where you

spend, you can spend meter and taunt. Yep. Very good. So, I think it's time to talk about drama. Drama? Yes. It's here. So, the animated film ends with a big two-on-one-one fight where you and Ken fight bison at the same time. It's an incredibly well-done scene. It's really cool.

This theme song kicks into the background. It's just this awesome, you know, awesome theatrical moment. And Funemisu says, in the middle development, I said, it would be pretty fun if we could do something like this without even thinking about it. Then Okada said, sounds good. Let's do it. And Okada regretted that. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes when you're crunching for months at a time and never sleeping, you say things without really thinking about it, and then you spend weeks regretting it.

But yes, it's a hidden mode in the game. I think it's probably harder to do in the arcade one because you have to put in coins. But in the home system, it's just like you put some codes in the menu. And it's a secret hidden mode called Dramatic Battle, and do you and Ken together fight bison? And you can't choose any other players, and that was intentional. We have, again, a quote for Finamizo. He says, when the playable characters are you and Ken, you have two distinct clothing colors, white and red. This was one of the main conditions for the mode, because the two characters are there at the same time.

They also share a life bar, which is why this mode is so interesting to me, because it's not, you know, on paper, that sounds like it's going to be overwhelming. But when the two characters share one life bar, that means if, you know, if Bison gets in one good move and hits both of you, you're just gone, because he'll hit both of you for, double damage. Especially if he does a psycho crusher, he can just wipe you both out. But if the two of you can get around Bison and just jab him to death, it looks really funny. Anyway, this was directly based on the

anime, so they actually, in the Japanese version only, they include an instrumental cover of the pop song, which plays in the film, which Ito Shih Tzu Satu, Setsuna Sato, which was a big hit. It's still a karaoke standard to this day. So there's an instrumental version of that.

in the arcade version, I think maybe the home versions too, but only in Japan. And they said in the interview that they had to spend a fortune on copyright fees. So that's why they didn't put in any other versions because they didn't want to pay for it. Yeah, I feel like it wasn't actually really worth it. The amount they spent on that. It's cool, though, that it's there. But, man, the rights over there for music and stuff are so different from the rights for games that like, not to name any particular names, but for certain things where you might say want to get the arranged version of a song for your video game, even if you may own the rights to that video game, the rights for that music is owned by somebody else. And you have to relicense your

own music that you made in order to put it back into the game for a re-release. I feel like that's happening more and more here with people, you know, large corporations, holding corporations buying up music catalogs and jacking prices way, way up for licensing. Like even a few years ago, that wasn't apparently such a big thing. But now it's really becoming common. And the property management companies are really putting the screws on people who want to license music for media. Well, in the case of Japan, the villain's name is Jazzrack. That is the licensing organization that handles all this stuff. That sounds like some sort of Babylonian god or something. Yeah.

I have off-topic anecdotes about Jazz Rack and how much of a pan they are. But at least in the case of this game, Jazz Rack in part played spoiler because they hid this mode in the game. It's not advertised. But apparently because they had a licensed product on the arcade machine, they had to put a Jazz Rack sticker. I've seen these stickers in Japan. There's a special sticker there. So when the Jazz Rack sticker was there, fans were like, what is this? What is this?

And they started looking for it. And that's how they found this mode because of the Jazz Rack sticker. Yeah. I love dramatic mode. I think it's a great idea. I love it much more in subsequent editions of the game, where you can choose whoever, like in Alpha 3 Saturn version.

But even just with Ryu and Ken, it's fun. And it's just a... I love the idea of a co-op fighting game, and I'm always so surprised that there aren't more of those. Like, why isn't that more common? I mean, I know there's, like, there's some tag battle ones where you can do that. There's, I think, Guilty Gear Isuka. I feel like that's in Smash Brothers, right?

There's got to be like... Smash Brothers. Team up battles in Smash Brothers. Yeah. I mean, that counts. But Smash Brothers is much more of like a... Careful what you say. You're going to make some people angry.

No, no, no, no. I'm just going to say platform fighters are more like a go anywhere kind of a thing. and in these sort of single screen, I mean, obviously, platform fighters are also single screen, but they have, you know, depth, you can sort of go under the field, you can go way off into the sky. But in these sorts of limited frame games, I feel like only Guilty Gear Isuka and some judging games, like Queen of Heart 99 and stuff, actually tried to have two-on-two real time. It's difficult to do, but not impossible, and I'm surprised there isn't more of it because it's, like, ridiculously fun.

It was always a mode I enjoyed in Mugan. Mugan had two-on-two. Oh, right. Yeah, of course. And, of course, Fatal Fury had the sort of one-time only, where when a second player joined in, the two of you got to team up against the CPU, but then you had to fight each other. Right. But either way, I definitely agree.

I do really enjoy the two-on-one fighting style. I think it's a lot of fun. And I wish more games would experiment with it and develop it and try things with it. Yeah. So with the first alpha, was the dramatic battle, did that take place in the field, the moonlit field that was in the movie? Or was that something that was introduced later? That was introduced later, yeah. That background came in two, I think.

Or two or three. No, I was in two for sure. Definitely in two. Yeah. In Alpha one, I believe the dramatic battle takes place on the Great Wall of China. but it's just, it's just one of the stages that they have. Again, they didn't have, they didn't have a lot to choose from. Right.

So I think it was great. So, let's talk briefly about the legacy of Street Fighter Alpha, because we are getting on towards the end of this episode. Alpha got two sequels on its own, which I think we will revisit in future episodes. Yes, please. One year later was Alpha 2. That was 96 in most platforms. And then 98, there was Alpha 3. Two and three both had little arcade revisions, home revisions.

There was Alpha 2 gold. Alpha 3, I think, has like dash and like upper, upper, like, the names get crazy. but each one added and expanded on the roster, you know, I sort of grouchingly complained about the number, you know, only five backgrounds, but yeah, once the series was a hit, they, they went out of their way to expand and put more stuff in there. And by the end, I think Alpha 3 ends up with like 40 characters, something outrageous. So. Yeah, 39. I have to correct us. I think that the dramatic battle in the, in the flowing grass was only in three. Oh, okay. I think in two it was in the waterfall zone. I'm pretty sure.

Pretty sure. That's all I can find looking it up right now. Just to make sure we don't look like dumbos again. Yeah, just leave that on it. Just heap it on me. Put it on my shoulders. It's okay. I'm the scapegoat this episode.

But yeah, the legacy. There's a bunch of cool stuff. And I feel like it could be a whole extra episode probably because there's like, well, I can say that all of my main objectives, well, okay, two out of three of my main objectives when working on the Street Fighter collection were to get Alpha 2 gold in there and Alpha 3 Max in there. I did not achieve either of those goals. I did manage to get Super Street Fighter 2 tournament battle in because for Switch only,

that was like the linked tournament mode for different arcade, multiple arcade machines. You could link them up and it was a special edition that only worked if you had eight arcade machines or however many it was. And we did manage to get that into the collection, which is really cool. But those alpha games, we did not get them because we were just using... It was arcade only,

so we couldn't get the home ports. But Alpha 2 Gold has, like, amazing music. Like the music, they just use different instruments, really, and a better synth. But I love the music in Alpha 2 Gold, and I think it's the best... Maybe not the very... It's maybe tied with Street Fighter 3 for me

in terms of my favorite street fighter music. I love it. And then Alpha 3 Max just adds all that dramatic battle stuff. That's the PSP version. It adds Ingrid from Capcom Fighting All-Stars. It's just got like so much nonsense in there and it's on the PSP for some reason. I don't know. I love it.

I think it's very good. That series just kept getting better. And the game that we're working on right now, HyperGonsport, has our like stage intros and um or rather round intros and also uh countdowns and stuff are all influenced by street fighter alpha three menus and um and their kind of stage intro graphics and stuff it's the the later games had a pretty big impact on on my life and my life is a game developer so um i'm glad that alpha exists if only so that the other two could exist yeah alpha three is up there with The Ridge Racer Type 4 has just the most beautiful, stylish user interfaces and presentation on PS1, you know, 32-bit systems.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love looking at it. And it's interesting, like, back in the day, I was thinking it's too bad that Alpha 3 and Alpha 2 are on, you know, it's good that they're on the Saturn because they can get all these frames of animation that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get. but it's too bad that they can't do transparency. That's what I thought as a young person. And then later, I realized that the CPS2 and CPS3 don't do transparency either. So it was actually like, it was accurate to what it was. They had dithered life bars and all that kind of stuff.

There wasn't transparency. So it was actually more accurate than I thought it was. Well, speaking of the arcades, these alpha character models became sort of the new, because they were, I think, newer and the fact that they fit more in line with the sort of the cartoon look, these are the characters that ended up starring in all the Marvel versus games. You know, this is, Street Fighter Alpha is 95, and X-Men versus Street Fighter is 96. So, and then from there, just builds and builds, and eventually you get Marvel Capcom 2,

which is like all these Marvel characters, all these Capcom characters, and almost all the Capcom characters are from Alpha or from other games, but nothing from Street Fighter 2 originally. Only alpha characters sort of have the look that faces off that well. So I also think that, you know, as the quote from Chris Kramer alluded, like, because this game was new and because it had a different look, I think it got more attention. And I think, you know, especially if you look at the long gap there between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3 and, you know, Street Fighter 3 didn't do that well in arcades for a while. So I feel like Alpha and the versus games sort of kept Street Fighter. characters, like, cool and hip for a while there? At least that's my, that's my take on it.

Yeah, I also feel like they kind of, um, the Alpha series, gameplay wise and visually was sort of what leaned toward having the Capcom versus S&K series. Like, playing the Alpha games is what made playing Capcom versus SNK2 so smooth. It was like such an easy transition to go from someone who played KOF 2000 and Street Fighter Alpha 3, I could just pick this up and be like, oh, everything is as I expect, you know? And I feel like just that smoothness of play and also the, like, the wackiness, it all led really nicely into Capcom versus S&K, CBS2. And I agree with the Marvel games as well.

Like, they obviously amped up the drama and the ridiculousness. and just like combos coming out of everybody's orifices. But it does feel like you had your serious streetfighter branch and then you had your goofy play around other branch. And that other branch wound up going much wider than the serious Street Fighter branch did. As Street Fighter was kind of stagnating and they kept trying with three

and they were just really dialing further and further into the extremely hardcore people that played Street Fighter 2. Then you had all this stuff just spinning out into the ether. And so I feel like the tip of the spear was really the Vampire Savior series, but then taking that in a streetfighter direction with Alpha, then it wound up branching out into this whole extra direction. And we got a lot of really good fighting games because of that. Absolutely.

And I also want to mention the fact that, you know, as the series progressed, they got more more characters. And almost every Alpha character would later appear in regular Street Fighter, either four or five, except for Sodom. Sodom is MIA. And did they ever get Ingrid? I feel like they didn't. Yes, she's in five. Ah, man. Nice. Oops. That's okay.

I haven't been keeping up with all the DLC. Five added a lot of characters over the years and that she showed up eventually. I don't know what, I don't know what season it was. Yeah, more characters are just showing. I got to admit, I did fall off of five. I tried to play it and it just didn't really work. Yeah, for me, Alpha 3 was the last time that I really connected with Street Fighter. After that, I tried, and it just never quite clicked.

So to me, like, Alpha 3, we'll talk about that, you know, sometime in the future. But that's kind of like the purest expression of what I want from Street Fighter. Just so much crammed in there, just everything, but also in a very approachable fun way. Yeah, man, let's do an Alpha 4. It brings Street Fighter back to 2D, do Street Fighter Alpha 4. I'm ready. I'm into it. They would probably wind up having to do it like illustrated 2D style.

I doubt they could actually do a pixel art game in this day and age at Capcom. But if they could, I'd love it. Yeah, they probably don't have the institutional knowledge for that anymore. I feel like you just don't see pixel art games coming from Capcom at this point. It's been a long time. Yeah, it would probably wind up being outsourced to somebody. But maybe that would be okay. You know, if we're dreaming out loud, how do we get a,

Guilty Gear style Alpha game, you know? Oh, yeah. Because Guilty Gear these days, you know, it still looks like animation, but it's all 3D characters. Like, how do we get that? I think you hire Arc System Works. Exactly. I think you have to have Arc System Works do it.

Alas. Yeah, alas and a lack. Well, I think Alpha has reached its Omega in this conversation. So let's wrap things up here. Let's start with our special guest, Brandon. Brandon, what should people know about you and if they want to find you or talk to you about other things? Yes, I have plugs. Yes.

Um, first of all, if you like hearing me talk about video games and make dumb jokes, uh, you can check out my podcast insertcredit at insertcredit.com and, uh, I, that's, I do that along with Tim Rogers of Action Button and Franks Faldi of the video game history foundation. And it's pretty fun, so give that a look. The other thing is, I would love for people to, uh, wish list my game hypergun sport on Steam. Um, it's a, um, it's a. a 2V2 cyberpunk volleyball with guns

video game about shooting a ball into a goal. And it's extremely visually influenced by games like Street Fighter Alpha 3, King of Fighters 2001, and other kinds of nonsense. And I can say from experience working on

that game that making backgrounds takes a really extremely long time. So I understand why they only had five backgrounds in Alpha 1. It's just like backgrounds if you want to have moving stuff and detail and parallax and nice little stuff going on it takes it takes some time to make a good one in pixel art and that's what this game is so yeah those are my things please uh please wishlist hypergonsport

if you're feeling generous it's really the only way that steam can know like i don't know if people know this but like the algorithms that push you to the top of steam will not do so unless you're already popular. And the only way to already be popular is to have wish lists. And that's why people beg for them all the time because there's literally no other way to get up there unless you have like a big marketing budget or you get some kind of flash in the pan,

unpredictable accident of fate that gets you to become popular. But otherwise, it's like, if you don't have wish lists, you're dead in the water. So that's why we beg for them. Yeah, it's great. I love it. Yeah, my wish list on Steam is approaching triple digits because that's how I approach it. Like, oh, does this game look interesting at all?

I'm going to wish list it. Very nice. Because that's, you know, it doesn't cost me anything. Brandon, do you use Twitter? Oh, yes, I do. I'm on Twitter as necrosofty. That's my company named Necrosoft with a Y at the end of it. So give a look at that.

And the game company's Twitter is Necrosoft games. And yeah, I think that's all we use more or less. So hit us up there. We also have a Discord, which is whatever Discord.g.g. Slash Neckersoft Games, something like that. We don't use it that much because I'm just not a big Discordy guy. I actually use the insert credit forums. We made old school forums.

Forms are so good. They were great. Forums are great. I love them. It's got slow communication. You can look at it whenever you want. You can catch up on it however you want. Right?

You don't feel as much pressure. It's not as ephemeral? Yeah, it's less ephemeral. You can see. the whole thread of the conversation. And if you want to have a petty argument about, you know, whether it's better to play near automata or near replicant first, you can have that kind of an argument on a forum. Like, you don't have to worry about the real world all the time. You can just have a dumb forum argument again. I mean, we worry about the real world on there,

too. It's a very left-leaning forum. But it's nice to be able to have like a lot. live journal style throw down with somebody about, you know, whether Ryu or Ken is cooler again. Another cool thing about forums is that you can post an interesting fact or, you know, valuable piece of information in 2006. And then in 2022, someone can come along and say, oh, this information is not available anywhere else. I'm glad that I found it in this time capsule from 16 years ago. You can't do that on Discord. And what's wild about that is that it still happens today. Like, we had someone join the forums recently because they were like, I was looking for this information and it was nowhere else on the internet. And the forum is only a year and a half old

at this point. So, like, that's the insertcredit forums, by the way. Forms.com. Enjoy. So Retronauts is not just about retro video games. It's also about retro ways of communication. That's right. Oh, you said the word retronauts, Jeremy. What would you like to promote? Well, this is your episode, so I'm going to let you promote Retronauts. But I am retro and you can promote me. I am Jerry Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and talking about old video games on YouTube

and often writing about old video games at limited run games in their packaging or newsletters or whatever. Yeah, I just got that big book. I haven't cracked it open yet, but that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's the first of many to come. I've got to get cracking on the second one. Yeah, I look forward to being in one

because we had a limited run game. Ah, very exciting. I will interview you about that someday, or maybe Jared will. I don't know. One of us will. We'll find out. And then, of course, I'm on the podcast Retronauts,

which you can learn more about courtesy of Diamond. I've heard of that. Yes, this is Retronauts. And we are fan-supported. Thank you so much for your support over the years. We have one free episode every week. But if you support us for just $3 a month, you get those episodes a week in advance.

And if you go one step further and do $5 a month, my goodness, Not only do you get the early episodes, you get two bonus episodes every month. You get weekly columns and recordings from me every week. In fact, I did one about Street Fighter Alpha when it turned 25 back in June of 2020. You also get access, we just made fun of it, but we have a Discord. So you can access our Discord if you join at the $5.00 level. So you can do all this if you go to patreon.com slash retronauts.

As for me, as an individual, I am Fight Club on most platforms. F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B, the noun or verb, if you like, and you can find me on Twitter, you can find me on Twitch, you can also find me on Patreon, and Kofi is my own thing, if you'd like to do that. But I believe that about wraps us up. So, Brandon, what is the name of your dog? My dog's name is Pocket. Did you hear him bark?

I did. He joined our last episode, too, so I figure at this point we should just shout out Pocket. Oh, yeah, yeah. Pocket, he's a good guy. He's doing his best, but if somebody's getting up to him. to some nonsense outside. Like, for example, walking by. He doesn't like it. He's got to let you know. Dogs are very defensive about walkers. Yeah. Sometimes he'll hear like someone jangling their keys and he'll be like, that's a dog. I need to go get him and fight him and beat him up. But

he's 17 pounds. He's not beating anybody yet. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. And I think that's it. Let's take goodbye everybody. Good night. Good night. Adieu. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.