With Street Fighter 5 ongoing and getting a steady stream of updates, as well as the various collection re-releases that we’ve seen over the last few years, it’s almost hard to believe prior to 2008, the fighter series was basically dead. Street Fighter 4 managed to not only revive the IP, but also the fighting game community in general. But it almost didn’t happen. Or, I should say, it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if certain original plans went through.
In an interview at EGX, Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono, who oversaw the series as a Producer during this revival, originally had the idea to bring the series back as a turn-based fighting simulation. You read that right, a turn-based…fighting simulation.
“I did have an idea though that I thought may be revolutionary to turn the game into a turn-based simulation, so you would take the moves you wanted to do and put them together like blocks,” said Ono. “Then they would run automatically, but obviously we didn’t make that in the end.”
It’s hard to believe that at one point the game that revived the fighting scene was considered to be…that. Not that the turn-based idea doesn’t have potential, and there has been titles that have experimented with similar ideas, particularly in the mobile space (as well as sounding very similar to Puzzle Fighter), it’s pretty hard to believe the spirit of battle would be revived had Street Fighter 4 looked anything like that. Thankfully, though, someone came to their senses and the rest is history.