In the year since Street Fighter IV was first announced, producer Yoshi Ono has been spreading the good news, making sure that every gamer, and not just fighting enthusiasts, knew about Street Fighter’s glorious return to the world stage. It’s rare that even a few weeks have gone by, especially following EGM’s exclusive cover story on SFIV last December, without Ono sitting down with journalists across the world to discuss the game’s ongoing development and refinement on the road to its release this past summer. But excitement for Street Fighter IV, at least in the United States where only a scant few imported arcade cabinets are available to players, is at a perilous stage, somewhere between tense excitement and frustrated impatience. We’re ready to fight, and even though the fall gaming season is just swinging into gear, it’s hard to ignore Street Fighter IV’s absence from the landscape.
To tide over the faithful, Brandon Sheffield’s interview with ubiquitous Ono running on Gamasutra today has some of the deepest insights into SFIV’s structure yet to be published. The familiar territory of how SFIV has been built to bring casual players back into the fold is covered well here, but filtered through the perspective of the fighting genre’s most technical aspects. Ono also provides some fascinating perspective on the series’ history, particularly fighter’s-fighter Street Fighter III and why it’s taken some twelve years for that title to gain the respect and audience it has always deserved:
Sheffield: Why do you think that Street Fighter III was so ahead of its time? It feels like it's starting to really get appreciated in the last two or three years.
Ono: Definitely at the time we didn't think it was ahead of its time. I think at the time, it was the right game to come out, from our perspective. The way that fighting games were at the time, their popularity, and the need for something more technical and complex... we felt that it suited the air at the time.
The reason it seems to be ahead of its time and the reason why it's gaining more popularity now is probably because it's taken people that long to get really good at it, and they appreciate the depth that the game has to offer.
Ono also elaborates on the high barrier of entry in Street Fighter III, and every other fighting game from the genre’s late-90s peak, leading to the genre’s fall from mainstream grace:
Ono: If you think about chess for instance, a kid and a grandfather can play the same game, with the same ruleset, and understand what's going on. I think through our (fighting game developers) competitive spirit back then we were always out to out-complicate each other, and make our systems deeper and deeper. It was ok then because there was a wide player base who understood how to play these games, but that's not true anymore.
Even though we know what it will look like when it finally does arrive, Street Fighter IV is still painfully out of reach for gamers not based in the Land of the Rising Sun. If you’ve felt your interest tested by the wait, head over to Gamasutra and get pumped all over again.
Related links:
Versus: Rebirth of the Fighting Game
The Street Fighter IV Boxart: A Warning of Things to Come
Street Fighter IV in NYC and We've Got Proof This Time
Trailer Review: Street Fighter 4
Street Fighter II in Your Financial Times
Bringing Sexy Back: Street Fighter Dress-Up Party!