We didn't give them birthdates because we didn't want them to age. If they got older, we thought things would be pretty difficult when we got around to making Street Fighter IV.

And then SFIV ended up being set before SFIII.

I thought, oh, that's one way of dealing with it! lol
Dealing with ages can be tricky.

North America wasn't originally the main market for Street Fighter. Ryu was popular as the Japanese karate fighter, so in my mind, pro wrestling was what I thought of when it came to American fighting.

Even now though, martial arts are more popular in America than in Japan. So thinking that we should have the main character be American, I asked Yasuda-san for a design and this is what he came up with.

Originally, he was a police officer*1 who used to be a pro wrestler.

That we do. Yasuda-san brought me the rough sketch and I we decided to go with it. At the time, a certain pro wrestling "federation" was pretty popular, which influenced our decision.

That was a bit difficult, but if we made him to be like Ryu then it wouldn't have been original. And we'd decided on having Ryu in the game as well.

I like having a simple protagonist. Then you can have the supporting cast be flashy. Like Phoenix and Cygnus in that Saint Sei...something or the other manga.

We decided the country of origin before anything else.

Once we decided on Africa, we felt that a female character made for better style. A male would end up being stern, and we already had plenty of stern characters.

Our image of African women was that they hand long arms and legs, so we felt capoeira was a fitting fighting style for her.

But we didn't have a lot of materials about it, so that was difficult.

At the time we couldn't quickly look of videos on the internet, like we can do now.

We got the most info from videos that were related to travel, lol. We bought everything off the shelves without knowing if it'd have any useful info in it or not.

Capoeira wasn't as well-known as it is now. If there had been a martial artist using it, we could have at least gone to see one of their matches.

But even under those conditions, we decided we were gonna do it!

We just didn't have any info to work with. Lol
That's what I remember most.

We wanted these guys to be popular characters from the start. They're flashier than the main character, and we wanted to have them utilize the parry system using their kung-fu. So you could say these are the characters we gave the most consideration to. We also wanted to emphasize their boyish-youth.

First, there was talk of boxing being a "gentleman's sport" that was currently being perfected in England.

Up to now, all our boxing characters had been bad guys - the image of boxing wasn't very good. So when we came up with England as the place of origin, we more or less had the framework for Dudley down from the start. I remember him being the easiest character to finalize.

Yeah, we didn't have any shortage of reference materials. lol

Since this is Japan, we could find plenty of materials on ninjas and their techniques at the bookstore.

Ah, but the difficult thing about making Ibuki was putting her hair together.

She had 1.2 to 1.3x the character data, compared to the other characters. We had to attach her hair parts to all of that.

Yes. We had multiple hair patterns, and since there was no one else to help, I did it. Little by little, every day, while getting help from everyone along the way. It took several months.

When I first looked at the data, I thought "Wow, the hair is going to be difficult. Good luck with that!" And then a few months later, it ended up being me doing the work. lol

That it is.

If I had to pick a SFII character that most closely resembled Necro... It'd have to be Dhalsim. Dhalsim gained his stretching abilities through the miracle of yoga, but as that's not possible for most ordinary people, we made Necro an android. That's dipping into the science-fiction territory a bit though.

We even gave him a girlfriend.

Yes. Basically, in order to give our characters more depth, we decided to give them all supporting characters. They would be seen in the endings and what not. Every character has one, right?

Unlike the SFII era, it would be difficult to try and make a story with just the playable characters. This was something extra to give them depth.

Yes. We thought it'd be good to have a lot of interesting hooks. Things that would interest people.

Her? I have no idea.

That's probably the scientist who modified Necro. Eventually she ended up as seen in the game. I was kind of thinking of someone more majestic for a scientist, but eh, it's fine.

She's a bit too unique. Too far from the realm or normal, so difficult to use. lol
But hey, you could make her into a playable character at some point.

It was the same for Nash. He started out as a background character, and eventually became playable. You get insights into how the background characters feel as well. If they're popular enough they can become fighters.

Everyone except her. lol

The original idea was a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, like that Gracie fellow.

That was the design we got from the designer.

The design for Oro was present among several others, and upon seeing it we thought "this guy is awesome...".

The character modeler said he wanted to see him in action, so he ultimately got the thumbs up.

He was not. But we didn't have enough characters...

We couldn't finish Hugo in time, so we pushed him back to 2nd Impact.

Sean is what we call a compatibility character. He's a character that people could use when they wanted to give themselves a handicap. So for example, if friends wanted to fight but one was stronger, the strong one could say "I'll use Sean, so let's play!" In that way, friends could play together.

We felt we needed a weak character in order for players to give themselves a handicap, and that's how we ended up with Sean. To explain his weakness, we made him a student. lol

Even during the time of SFII, people primarily weren't playing it for the single player. But especially for SFIII and to some extent the Darkstalkers series, it became all about the versus battles. As such, the skill gaps between players began to emerge.

It's difficult for someone to say, "just let me play single player!" so we needed some kind of policy in regards to that.

Players could get started with the game, and then eventually start to fill in the skill gap.

Right now I'm making smartphone games, but I feel like this concept hasn't changed from then to now.

（笑）
He wasn't red and blue at first.

Unlike M. Bison, he isn't a villain - instead we sought to make him a multi-faceted character. He seeks to control the world, but he's neither villain or hero. We were able to come up with a character that contrasts Bison. I didn't want to deal with Bison, it would have been a pain.

Ha ha ha (lol)

That's right.

Ever since Dungeons & Dragons, I'd wanted to make a character who could use both fire and ice. As you said, it's difficult to make a character who can use ice. So Gill is a bit of a science-fiction character.

Also, at the time we had the idea for "attributes" in the plans. Fire, wind, water, thunder, etc. Even if we didn't implement it in SFIII, we have some experiments left over where we wanted to see if it could be used in a future title.

Ultimately, we felt that having a character would had attributes, was new, and could parry was a bit too much.

Back then, you could see Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, K-1 fighting and professional regularly on TV, so that was how we got our exposure to martial arts. But now I feel like games are the closest thing we have now.

I wanted to reproduce martial arts. That's how I felt. As a result, I didn't really like combos.

We tried adjusting the rhythm when performing combos. A good rhythm and sound is strong. Kind of like the sound off the bat of a home run in baseball.

After doing this for a while, I've come to feel that the sound is the most important thing. Isn't that why people like combos? The attacks are all about the sound. We adjusted the Shin Shoryuken only with sound.

Character balance is one thing, but it's essential that people enjoy the game.

One of the basic principles for games is - "reaction upon something happening."

In fighting games, it's not just getting hit. And it wouldn't be interesting if we just made getting hit patterns. lol

There were more than half of us who wanted to allocate more time for it, taking from the time and capacity devoted to attacks, and I even wrote a design document for it, but it never came to pass.

But we did end up doing the "spinning hit" and the "crumple KO".

The designer said, "the crumple KO is pretty interesting" and I said - "See, I told you!", but we didn't have the time for it.

I wanted to do something flashier for the spinning hit, but we couldn't do it due to issues for wakeup pressure.

Yeah, but it would have been very difficult to make.

Well, we did have them make those reactions in the background. A character dropping their bowl of ramen and what not.

Even that got a bit of hate. lol
I begged, saying "at least just the ramen..."

And so the designer said, "the ramen is pretty interesting" and I said - "See, I told you!" lol

We were able to do it within the time allotted for the backgrounds, so we could come up with quite a bit. Getting that first one made was very difficult though. lol

One thing I really wanted to do though, was if a Hadoken was parried, it'd be deflected into the stage. But technically speaking, that was difficult. Pros could deflect Hadokens into flower vases into the stage and get score points for it.

Because of that, we didn't really have a use for the Judgment Girls*6, even though we made them.

We used them a lot more at first. Then as the battle adjustment proceeded, they began to be used less and less. I guess that's just how it goes. lol

A lot of people wanted to play the game seriously, so they said they didn't need things like ramen and girls.

But then you start to create a gap between the beginner players. That's a pretty important issue.

Right. At any rate, a bowl of ramen toppling over has nothing to do with the outcome of the battle, so that should be fine, right? Lol

We included both Sean, and the Super Arts select system in the game to try and appeal to both groups.

But that's something you don't really understand while making it. lol