Development time was around half a year long
While Street Fighter Alpha started off as an answer to Street Fighter 2 being too hardcore in terms of player skill required, it would eventually (mostly) ditch this reputation with the following games in the series.
Hideaki Itsuno was interviewed a ways back about the creation of this iconic franchise, by none other than Street Fighter 6’s director, Takayuki Nakayama, and they get into the creation of this series and why it came about.
The story starts off with Itsuno arriving to work 30 minutes early to clean up his workspace at Capcom, and playing King of Fighters ’94 before his shift started, as he typically did most days.
During one of these times his boss tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to work on Street Fighter Classic, which was the first Street Fighter (1987) game which they were looking at porting to the Super Nintendo (SNES).
“At the time they had Bengus, who was creating awesome concept art of the first Street Fighter, and one thing led to another and they talked about making it into an actual game,” said Itsuno.
“Someone was thinking of the story, while my boss Noritaka ‘Poo’ Funamizu was looking at the big picture. But there was no game designer on the project,” he said.
They asked Itsuno if he wanted to do this project, even though it was during his first year at the company. This project would evolve into Street Fighter Alpha, or Zero in Japan.
At this time, the company’s attention was heavily on Street Fighter 3, and getting rid of old CPS-1 arcade hardware.
“A lot of the ‘real’ aces went to [Street Fighter 3], and eventually everyone went there, so there really was no one available,” said Itsuno.
“On top of that, with the CPS-2 appearing everywhere, we were also asked to create something on CPS-1 to help get through the available stock we had,” he added.
“Oh, er, I don’t think we can write that, haha,” Itsuno divulged.
“Despite having the best arcade board for 2D fighters in the CPS-2, we also had to develop a version for the CPS-1,” Itsuno said.
“Basically, it became a hit and then a CPS-2 version was also made,” said Street Fighter 6’s director, Takayuki Nakayama, to which Itsuno responded yes.
Itsuno goes on to explain that SNK appealed to more casual fans back then, and they tried to offer up what users were demanding.
“That’s what [Capcom] wanted to aim for, I think. Get some new blood that’s closer to the fans and still has their way of thinking and awareness. I think that’s why I was asked to join the team,” Itsuno stated.
“From the beginning Capcom was never worried about sales of the title,” he added.
“They just wanted to get rid of stock, so they figured if you use some of the new guys to do what you want, you should go out and do it,” noted Itsuno.
“And that’s why it was such a challenge, in a good way. We didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have much in the way of animation, and the polish was something that we tried our best to do,” Itsuno relayed.
He was then asked about the very short development period for the first Street Fighter Alpha.
“I joined the team in December, just before the Hanshin Earthquake, and we had the location test in America the following May,” said Itsuno.
Basically, Street Fighter Alpha’s development was about a half of a year long.
“I think the thing that takes the most time, animation, took priority, but still took a while to finish. We didn’t have any producers to manage schedules and had no idea how much things cost,” Itsuno noted.
“We just basically did the work and created stuff without thinking about that,” concluded Itsuno.
Closing this out, Nakayama asked if Itsuno got a raise for creating a hit game, which the latter laughed at and gave a firm “No.”
You can read even more of this interview on Capcom’s CFN website.
Also, there are currently no Street Fighter Alpha characters in Street Fighter 6’s roster, and we explore if that will change in this piece.