Former Capcom artist, the legendary Akira ‘Akiman’ Yasuda, spoke about the process of developing the iconic Street Fighter 2 moves back at the company, and the team behind that game had an odd unspoken rule with these attacks.
“The characters for Street Fighter 2 were checked by three people: myself, [Akira ‘Nin-Nin’] Nishitani, and another developer,” Akiman said via a Shmuplations translation.
They had an odd rule about how moves should look in that game — wanting their style and approach to be so over the top that it would cause laughs among the team.
“We’d go through the moves one-by-one and approve them. There was this unspoken rule we operated by, where ‘It wasn’t good until it made us laugh.’,” said Akiman.
“Take Dhalsim’s punch, for example. In the actual planning documents, we set a limit on punches, that they couldn’t extend further than 128 pixels,” he said.
“But in that process of reviewing the characters, we decided to extend it a little further, then a little further, then a little further more… until one day we saw how long his arms came out and everyone cracked up. That was the moment we knew it was good,” Akiman noted.
From there, Street Fighter 2’s development would take a turn, where horsing around and cracking jokes became the standard.
Chun-Li illustration by Akira ‘Akiman’ Yasuda
“That attitude transformed the atmosphere of the development. Joking around and laughing became the rule of the day,” said Akiman.
“Blanka, too, started out with normal skin color, but as we were flipping through the palette and trying out different colors, green came up, and everyone burst out laughing. It was like, ‘What?! Why would this human have green skin..!?’ We thought it was hilarious,” Akiman concluded.
Akiman has quite the origin story at Capcom where he may have showed up for his first job interview in pajamas. Also, you can check out some of his other Chun-Li illustrations.