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Street Fighter II designer reveals how the series jumped from the first to second installment
Street Fighter II is one of the most important fighting games in the industry, if not the most important. Just how did Capcom make the leap from the original Street Fighter to its sequel? Designer Nishitani Akira sat down to reveal some of the details.
When making SF2, the theme at the time was “How do we take the original Street Fighter and modernize it?” So we decided to use the experience we gained from making Final Fight and started building the game from there.
This may sound a little rude, but games at that time had a lot of things about them that were “not properly made.” *laughs* We started by investigating those things, then we began brainstorming about “What feels good?” and “What actually makes something fun?”
To get specific, things like fixing the way hitboxes worked. If you look closely at action games at the time, it was often the case where if a player hits an enemy with an attack, the attack’s hitbox would disappear. By doing this, it made it easier for the game to process, but it created stressful situations for the player when multiple enemies were on the screen and attacks could only hit one enemy at a time. There were also cases where the the game would group together cases of “enemies getting hit” with “the player attacked.” While this made it very convenient for the game engine, I really hated things like that.