Street Fighter the Movie Broke My Heart

[anoon]

SHENG LONG
All this was going down sometime during ‘93/’94 and we thought we were initially going to be making Street Fighter 3, (or at least, I seemed to think so, for whatever reason.) Now at this time, if the whole Gouken,Gouki/Akuma, Gotetsu story line existed within Capcom somewhere, we were never privy to that info. The whole Sheng Long controversy was still fresh in everyone’s mind; was Sheng Long a character? Was it a mistranslation? We didn’t know either, but what better way to get people really excited about Street Fighter again than to include the most hyped up character ever? Capcom Japan wasn’t too hot on that idea initially, saying something to the effect that “When Sheng Long does appear, it will be like God making an appearance.” What is curious at this point is that they never corrected us on the character’s name. We always referred to him as Sheng Long. Perhaps much like the way Gouki is known as Akuma in the states, Gouken, (or Gotetsu? It was never clear which one Sheng Long was a true parallel of,) would be known as Sheng Long in the US? At any rate, Sheng Long was shelved, for the time being…

…But he almost made it in after all. I’m skipping ahead quite a bit here, but I might as well put the Sheng Long business to bed. Towards the end of the project we had already digitized the majority of the actors from the film while on location of the movie set in Australia. That art was largely done, processed, and in game. There were still a couple more characters we had to do though. Chun Li, (The beautiful Ming Na Wen,) was never captured in Australia, due to contractual issues. (More on that later.) What ended up happening was that we set up a new, temporary digitizing studio in our Chicago warehouse and flew her in for the session. While we had the studio set up, we also captured two more characters. One was an alternate Ken, which I’ll mention briefly later. The other was in fact Sheng Long.

For whatever reason, the idea of adding Sheng Long came up again, and suddenly the Capcom guys were all for it. Maybe it was them, maybe it was us, but somebody apparently realized at that point that the game was going to need something a little extra other than the new fangled game play to propel it to stratospheric levels of success. Itook it upon myself to designing the look of and move set of Sheng Long. What an opportunity!!! Again, I was in heaven.

Sheng Long was going to be awesome. He wore black Gi pants and a long, green, padded/quilted, sleeveless Gi style top which was tied off with a black belt. His hair was very long and white, being done up in a single big braid running down his back. He also had a very long kung fu movie style Fu Manchu moustache. Now this is where things get a bit wilder… He also wore a thick black ribbon over his eyes. The reason for this I explained, was that Akuma had attacked Sheng Long in an attempt to kill him, and while he failed in slaying Sheng, he did succeed in taking his eyes out and blinding him. Sheng Long was so badassed though, he didn’t even really need his eyes to fight. Ok, so now the design really gets crazy… the final component of Sheng Long’s design was his arm. So as I understand it, originally Ken and Ryu’s hadoken specials were supposed to representations of their Chi, focused into a single high powered attack. “Hadoken” supposedly translates roughly into something like “force wave,” and in the original art, you can see phantom representations of their hands in the projectile. I believe that what the happened was that for the most part, your typical westerner arcade customer wasn’t familiar with the concept of Chi in that day and age, so these attacks were generally referred to as fireballs. At some point during the series, Ryu actually started throwing fireballs, and Ken developed the flaming dragon punch. As part of Sheng Long’s design, I tried to explain these phenomena. So my idea was that at higher levels of enlightenment, these karate master guys would start to take on aspects of “the dragon” as it suited their fighting style. Sheng Long was to be so advanced, he actually started to physically manifest dragon like attributes. Seeing as the words “Sheng Long” were actually a translation of “Dragon Punch” it seemed to make sense that his dragon manifestation would appear in his punching arm. The arm was green and scaly, with several horns protruding from it’s length. His fingers had fused together into 2 larger claws. Capcom signed off, and we were all set to create my Sheng Long!

The practical execution of Sheng Long went fairly well too. One of our artists served as the actor on the digitizing set as he was into body building and martial arts. The outfit was pretty simple: Black Gi pants, and a custom tailored top. The sash across his eyes was actually a mesh so that he could see while acting, but still appeared blindfolded. We hired a professional make up artist to do the hair, moustache, and arm effects. The arm looked pretty good, for the most of the shoot. Digitizing sessions typically lasted for 6 hours on average and after all of that time under the hot lights, the make up of the arm started to melt. By the end, green make up was running everywhere, and the horns were barely clinging to the actor’s arm. But it held up pretty well, all considered. (Fun fact: The artist that played Sheng Long went on to work at Midway games, where he has been creating characters for Mortal Kombat!0

Naturally, he was supposed to play like your typical Ken/Ryu character with some super Akuma style extras, as far as I recall. One major difference however was that he wouldn’t have typical block animations. Instead, the idea was that Sheng Long was so advanced, that you could never hit him unless you scored an unguarded attack. Sure, you would play him like a regular character with “back” on the stick putting your character on the defensive, but when blocking, the animation would look like a dodge instead of a traditional Street Fighter block. All of the game play would be the same, with block slide kicking in and all that, but Sheng would appear to have stepped out of the way of the attack. Would it have worked? I like to think so, but I was afraid that it broke SF convention too much, so we digitized two full sets of blocking animations so we had a back up plan: traditional and dodge style blocking anims. Looking back, we broke just about every other SF convention, so would it have really mattered? I guess we’ll never know.

In the end, Sheng Long never made it into the game, and my grand designs for what was to be a near divine fighting game experience never saw the screen. Due to time constraints, we never were able to process the artwork. All of this stuff was burnt off to CD. I hope it still survives somewhere in the vaults of Incredible Technologies. I’d love to see that footage again.

[Bacardi]

I love this thread, and anoon sftm is my guilty pleasure. i even made a combo vid for it, gotta dig it up. Bless my vid!

[AlterGenesis]

I love this thread, and anoon sftm is my guilty pleasure. i even made a combo vid for it, gotta dig it up. Bless my vid!

I would like to see that.

[Bacardi]

well I am at work right now, I made the vid in 2k2 but it was filled with a bunch of glitches and good fun. I always wanted to make another one, I would just blaze and play sftm for hours in mame, best single player fighting game ever with KI in a close second

[Sano]

Anoon - Wow, your response to the whole Blade / Gunloc ordeal was much more than I expected. What you said about Sheng Long is great too. THANK YOU!

[ChairHome]

I thought, when this movie was first coming out, that CoJ's president was supposed to have a part in the movie. I assumed that Sawada was him for some reason.

[MiLky]

- In while epic thread still thrives.

Any way to steal/post/borrow some artwork/pics of the Sheng Long character. Would be fun to see just for the hell of it.

Just played through the game for the first time in years.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMEE OOOOOOOVEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR.

[Sano]

It's funny how SRK poster Aerialgroove reminded me of this today in a totally different conversation. This is how Gouken - Ryu and Ken's master looked like in the SF2V manga. The SF2V manga was very different from the SF2V anime that it was based on, they shared some of the SF2V character designs but the story was very different/unrelated. Anyway check this out - here he has a slash going through one eye, not missing both eyes like Anoon's Sheng Long design. Kind of a funny coincidence eh?

http://fightingstreet.com/pics/temp/.../mangascan.gif

[Genosis]

i wanna be a game designer like u any advice on what 2 study

[Spectre7]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...1a/Gouken5.jpg

This is usually how I've seen Gouken. Here's another:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Vegagouken.png
He's on the right hand side.

[Shinto]

That was a damn good Shen long story, It made me want more.

Bacardi I wanna see the vid.

[Sabin]

This legendary thread should be renamed so other people can get in on this
and stickied also on the forum, assuming its not fake (which i dont think it is of course, reading ppls reactions and reading the detailed info on this thread)

I don't know why heads havent done this already.

I still have the GamePro issues breaking down SFTM back when they broke down the combo system in detail (when they used to be very good.) Good times, good times...ah I miss my childhood.

anoon, im sure the answer is no because you are probably really busy, but do you still keep up with fighting games and the fighting game scene, and have you ever played competively (been to evo) or anything like that? Did you ever have a personal interest in that kind of thing? The reason why I'm curious about is because that you could have entered events like this a a relative unknown since noone knows who the fuck you are, hehe

[9999]

That Sheng Long bit was great! Do you have any artwork or pics or anything of him?

Love the aspect of him dodging attacks instead of blocking too

[kurdt_the_goat]

Since you mention the confusion of gouken/goutetsu/sheng long in the early days, i thought i'd mention this.. the other day i was watching the latest DVD release of SF2 Movie (animated one with Chun-Li shower scene). There's a bit where they have bio's of Ken and Ryu on screen and you can clearly see that it says that their master was Goutetsu. However in all the other material on the disc (added by Udon i believe), they always refer to Gouken as Ryu/Ken's master. I haven't read the comics so i assume this to be the canon these days!?

[anoon]

...CoJ's president was supposed to have a part in the movie. I assumed that Sawada was him for some reason.

No, Kenzo Tsujimoto and Kenya Sawada are two different people. Tsujimoto is in the movie however. There is a scene towards the beginning in which Guile gives a rally speech to his troops after the operation is supposedly shut down. There are a few shots of random A.N. Troopers listening as Jean Claude is talking. One of these Troopers is Tsujimoto. I'll go home and check the DVD for the exact time tonight.

i wanna be a game designer like u any advice on what 2 study

Send me a PM and I'll try to get around to lending some advice. It's too big a topic to cover here.

This is usually how I've seen Gouken. Here's another:

Yes, I believe that is the official design of Gouken. I should say: It was shortly before, or just after SFTM released that I personally saw the name Gouken being bandied about. It could have very well been that Capcom already had the storyline and name "Gotetsu" within their organization when we proposed putting Sheng Long in. These days I'm not sure if Capcom Japan saw our Sheng Long as a different character entirely, or the same character with the Americanized name.

My impression is that towards the end of the project, things got a little weird. I don't know if they really wanted an American, MK-esque style Street Fighter for the US and trusted us with whatever we wanted to do, or if at some point they realized the quality just wasn't going to be there and they just didn't care what we happened to SFTM. I never see it mentioned in any of the books they put out, I tend to think perhaps it was the latter.

...but do you still keep up with fighting games and the fighting game scene...

Umm, yes and no. I still claim to love fighting games, though I find myself playing less and less of them. I still love Street Fighter 2, (Alpha 3 is my favorite,) and Mortal Kombat 2. I really want to like Street Fighter 3, but the characters didn't appeal to me enough to really get into it. I love 3D graphics, but I never felt the 3D fighters offered the same type of game play I was looking for. I check them all out, but I never play them for long. Virtual Fighter never appealed to me. Tekken was OK, as was the first Soul Calibur. I actually kind of liked that 3D King of Fighters on Xbox, until I quickly found out how shallow it was. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the second Def Jam game even though I'm totally over hip hop in general.
I'm still waiting for that gorgeous 3D fighter with the old school game play and feel to lure me back in!

have you ever played competively (been to evo) or anything like that? Did you ever have a personal interest in that kind of thing?

I'll be honest: I considered myself pretty good back in the Hyper Fighting/Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo/MK2 days, but I never really played competitively. I felt I never had the time or money to devote to going down to the arcade and reaching that next level. Once the arcades died, I'm afriad my skills dropped off big time. Now I read the Shoryuken forums and I don't understand half of the terminology you guys use. I'm a scrub again.

That Sheng Long bit was great! Do you have any artwork or pics or anything of him?

Thanks! I thought you guys might like that. Unfortunately, I do not have any images of him that I know of. It's possible I have some old sketches tucked away somewhere, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

[R | C]

anoon: this is great thread; a very fun read! Thanks for sharing

Questions:

1. From a gaming production company's perspective, how is the "success" of a game measured? I've never worked in the gaming industries, but I hear all the time that it comes from "the sales." Does that mean the direct sales of consumers, or the wholesales? I'd be interested in learn more about this process.

2. How "successful" was this game and did how did it compare to the team's expectations?

3. Is today's method of measuring "success" the same as it was when you worked on SFTM?

Thanks again

[fluxcore]

Stories about game development are usually good reads, but this is great! I must admit to never really having played the game much, but I may well give it a go simply because there's a connection now :D

Thanks for coming forward (however much you thought it might be a bad idea) :D
--flux

[Leebee Link]

This thread is monumental. Thank you so much anoon!

On that note, (this is going to be depressing but whatever) if you worked with the actors during/after the movie was made, did you get to work with raul julia before he died? D:

[omni]

anoon: this is great thread; a very fun read! Thanks for sharing

Questions:

1. From a gaming production company's perspective, how is the "success" of a game measured? I've never worked in the gaming industries, but I hear all the time that it comes from "the sales." Does that mean the direct sales of consumers, or the wholesales? I'd be interested in learn more about this process.

I'll try to tackle this one if no one minds.

Basically games are a business and there is a lot of money involved - especially with the next gen games that are being made these days. Success is like 90% measured in sales. Sales meaning to the consumer. Most companies are smart these days and print enough to meet a low demand then print more if the demand is higher. Obviously every game is handled different - such as Gears of War demand versus Viva Pinanata or whatever. Rarely do you have the situation anymore of stacks and stacks of games sitting on store shelves and no one buying them. Although it happens aka Backyard Wrestling 2.

The other 10% is how well the game was received from critics/consumers. If a game is received well such as Ico but sells poorly then it might still be perceived as a hit. Ico is a great example because it allowed Ueda to make Shadow of the Colosssus. But at the end of the day if SotC didn't sell well either then I doubt even he would be getting a third game.

Keep in mind that selling well isn't measured by games like Halo. Its only measured against the budget of the game. So if a game costs only $300k to make then it doesn't need to sell as many units for everyone to make their money back on. However if a game's budget is like $30 million, then it needs to sell a lot more.

The videogame industry is just that, an industry. And it's all measured in money.

Derek Daniels
http://lowfierce.blogspot.com

[ytwojay]

Posting in a legendary thread!

I hope you can find the Sheng Long artwork~

[Kyo T Robot ESQ]

This is a very cool read. Although I hated that game it still is interesting to hear the stories behind it. Anoon if you don't mind answering this question I'd like to know whose idea it was to have all those secret characters that were color swaps of Blade.

[4Play]

i wanna be a game designer like u any advice on what 2 study

Me too! I hope to get a helping start if possible. Thx.

[vasili10]

STREET FIGHTER 3, OR STREET FIGHTER THE MOVIE???
Perhaps this is all my perception, but looking back, I remember that there was some amount of confusion as to what it was we were making exactly. It could have been the international game of “Telephone,” but somewhere along the communication chain from the Capcom Japan guys to the Capcom USA guys, to our management, down to the team, there seemed to be mixed signals. I distinctly recall that originally during the pitch process the game was billed as Street Fighter 3. We were to pull out all of the stops and make the greatest Street Fighter ever. More characters! Digitized graphics! New combo system! The works! We set about writing up all kinds of great stuff to include in the final product. One of those things was even Sheng Long.

That doesn't surprise me; ever since SSF2 Capcom Japan was contemplating about SF3, trying out several kinds of technologies and ideas. They finally decided on CPS3 for it, 4 years later. Interesting though.

About Sheng Long, his name translates to "rising dragon" rather than "dragon punch."

The first Gouken pic is a rough sketch from the Zero OVA/Alpha Movie. The second is from the manga SF2 Ryu, the work which led to Capcom's decision of making him officially Ryu and Ken's master once Super X/Super Turbo came out. In the SF2V manga the eye-scarred master is named Gouun, and the SF2 Animated Movie gives evidence that between SSF2 and Super X Capcom played with the idea of naming the master Goutetsu before taking the manga's idea, but finally Goutetsu became the master's master.

Just my opinion, but when Capcom Japan told your team, anoon, about Sheng Long appearing, they meant it would be nothing short of a miracle. They knew about the hoaxes and the confusion overseas. There wasn't anything to correct you on. Sheng Long was an American creation through and through.

[Optimus Prime]

Thread Winner!!

STREET FIGHTER Vs. MORTAL KOMBAT
I previously mentioned that Super Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II were out on the market around the same time. The fact of the matter was, Mortal Kombat II appeared to be eclipsing Street Fighter in popularity. It was dominating the arcade. MK II machines were earning a thousand bucks a week or more in quarters, which was crazy amounts of dough. It appeared that gamers might be tiring of the same hand drawn sprites and 8 bit backgrounds of Street Fighter. I do not know whether or not the idea originated from Capcom Japan or one of the U.S. offices, but it seemed to make sense that Capcom should make a Street Fighter to appeal to the changing tastes of the American gamer.

THE MOVIE
Oh, and it just so happened that Capcom had signed on a bunch of pretty well known actors to bring their franchise to the big screen. It seemed like a home run! A brand new Street Fighter done in flashy new digitized graphics featuring the bona fide likenesses of major celebrities such as Raul Julia, Jean Claude Van Damme, Kylie Minogue, Wes Studi, and master thespian Gregg Rainwater! (*cough*)

Wow, I didn't realize that Capcom did, in fact, start to feel sorta threatened by ‘digitized fighter’ games (back then) that they would go as far as considering making a game of such using Street Fighter characters. Yeah, it did seem more people were playing MK back in the day, but I just chalked it up to gamers playing that game for the Fatalities and finishing moves rather than being solely impressed with the digitized characters. I don't think combo display counters were implemented in games back then, so what all guys did was basically show each other off by just doing those finishing moves (Well, it seemed like that, so I could be wrong). I think most people that crowded around that arcade game (while people were playing it) were mostly there to just view that kind of special F/X & stuff.

Very interesting stuff, my man. This thread has been a very, very fascinating & informative read for me. If you don't mind, I have some other questions for you but will PM them to you instead.


And thanks again, anoon, for sharing this.

[anoon]

Stickied!?! Whoa, I'm honored. Thanks for all of the responses.
A few more answers, then I'll post another couple of sections

2. How "successful" was this game and did how did it compare to the team's expectations?

I don't recall how many we sold, but I believe the initial run did move. So maybe there were few thousand machines sold? I really don't know how much the game cost to develop. I guess it largely depends how Capcom did the accounting. For example, if the price of the actors was billed purely to the film production, that would make the game cheaper. I really don't know how much I.T. got paid to do the project. Thinking back to coin op budgets, SFTM may have broken even, if that was the sole line item. Again, I'm purely speculating.

As far as expectations... I'll only speak for myself, rather than the rest of the team here. At the start of the project, I fully expected that we were going to make the greatest fighting game ever. I really thought we could. I felt that we had the right people, with the right knowledge, with the right resources and backing to do it. It was truly a golden opportunity. Not many people get a chance like that in their careers.

As time wore on, it became apparent to me that this would not come to pass. I am trying to write my account of that time in an entertaining tone to keep the text interesting, but the truth is that the end result of the SFTM project was a grave personal tragedy for me. Nobody loved Street Fighter more than me, and there I was: partly responsible for one of the most reviled games in history. I'm not proud of the game by any means, and the wasted opportunity truly does haunt me to this day.

3. Is today's method of measuring "success" the same as it was when you worked on SFTM?

Yep. $$$. Derek (Omni) answered much as I would have.

whose idea it was to have all those secret characters that were color swaps of Blade.

I really couldn't say specifically. It was probably one of those groupthink things as palette swapping just seemed like the thing to do at the time. More characters for relatively little extra effort.

I didn't realize that Capcom did, in fact, start to feel sorta threatened by ‘digitized fighter’ games

Maybe I should edit that section of text you quoted a little. I come off as a know it all.
So, I don't know if "threatened" is the right word... please keep in mind: I really don't know Capcom's true motivations or the mechinations at that time. I'm just relating the experience as I percieved it.

In any business, when new technology arrives, companies are best served to evaluate and potentially adopt it, lest they be left behind. Digitizing was the hot video game technology of the day. Capcom already had the movie in production, so with this new technology came the opportunity to really bring their product a step closer to believability. So, was the fact that MKII was earning buckets of cash the sole motivation for Capcom to do the SFTM? I doubt it. Did they take notice and was it a factor? I'd wager Yes.

I suppose my perception that MK was a motivating factor stems from the fact that Capcom hired us americans to do it, and they largely let us implement the game play the way "we" wanted. I plan on getting more into the whole fighting engine and game play of SFTM after I get all of this up front stuff posted.

...gamers playing that game for the Fatalities and finishing moves... ...so what all guys did was basically show each other off by just doing those finishing moves

Well, I'll have to politely disagree with you there. I really feel that Mortal Kombat II did have a great deal of depth. It was different than SF2, but it had it's own unique systems and game play that largely worked. I still love MK2 to this day. The fatalities may have drawn people in, but I believe that once there, they stayed for the game play.

if you worked with the actors during/after the movie was made, did you get to work with raul julia before he died?

We did briefly meet Mr. Julia, but sadly, he was very ill at the time, so we did not get an opportunity to digitize him. The actor you see in the game is actually his stand in/stunt double.