Creating Dan
Dan was the only one that was decided once I joined the team.
So that means you're basically the father of Dan, right?
Someone brought the design and said, so there's this one bad guy, but can we make this kind of character?
You mean... Sakazaki-san!?
Only after Street Fighter Alpha 2 did Dan get his own unique movement and moves.
During Alpha 1, the only thing he had other than attacks was the special taunt pose*.
So a bunch of us worked together and then went to Funamizu-san for approval, and he was like "wow this is awesome", haha
"This is really awesome, actually", he said, haha.
So once you added Dan, you did some balance tweaking on top of that, correct?
Dan just wants to be like Ryu and Ken, right?
So we made him weak on purpose.
So we made only his Dan Kicks strong when they come out.
The idea was to make it seem like he can barely get his kicks off the ground, and if you hit with the base of the foot it's strong.
But his Dan Kicks ended up being too strong, so we had to make them weaker, haha.
But they weren't planned to be weak characters.
So if your opponent selected Dan, you had this huge pressure to not lose, haha.
If someone challenges you and Dan pops up, you'd be freaking out.
We asked the designer what color looked the weakest, and he said pink or tea green, I guess, so we used those*.
The Taunt
We actually programmed it so that if you get a perfect round, it has a 1 in 256 chance of showing up.
It'd be something like if you saw Dan give you the thumbs up in the arcade, it'd be such a rare thing that no one would ever believe you, and you'd only hear it from your friends or other arcade patrons, since there was no internet.
But it really never showed up.
I did the QA check for it and I only saw it once or twice.
Dan didn't have an ending scene either.
Super Combo Levels
How did that come about?
Wait, really?
Oooh!
It was supposed to be an evolved version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo.
Then you had the Alpha Combos.
We wanted to have combos that were a little easier to perform and to make the user feel good, so they were an offshoot of super combos.
So I said, "oh, uh okay, when do you want this done?"
"Tomorrow." Hah!
"Oh, tomorrow... uh, okay. I'll get on it!"
So I spent all night coming up with a design doc that had all of the characters super combos, complete with illustrations.
Then the next day, half of them were rejected!
But that's basically how the Alpha series unique game system came about, right?
It made for much more intense matches.
But I think if you set the dip switches* to the maximum damage setting, if Rose's level 3 Aura Soul Spark reflected Sagat's level 3 Tiger Cannon, I think it one-shots Sagat.
Three seconds into the match you'd have two super flashes and then the super combo KO flash screen or something, haha.
I was thinking, if someone was dumb enough to throw out a Tiger Cannon right at the start of the match, they'd have it coming to them if it got reflected and they got killed in one hit.
I think most people at the time would've been fine with that.
Characters I worked on
What did you think about them?
I wasn't allowed to touch Ryu or Ken.
They only let me work on the second-string characters, hah.
You can tell a lot of work was put into them.
Rose in particular was a pretty crazy character. At the time I wanted to have her projectile reflects, create clones and counter Dragon Punches, and I got to do all of those.
I also wanted Birdie to destroy fireballs, and have a 0 frame throw.
I wanted to change up Zangief's throw whiff too.
Yeah, there was so much stuff to do on that game, it was all really interesting for me as the new guy.
Thanks to your work, the Alpha series became the gateway to success for all of the new hires.
Takayuki Nakayama
Hideaki Itsuno