Saving the Street Fighter Franchise

Gamasutra did an in-depth interview with Yoshi Ono, producer of Street Fighter IV, about trying to bring the series back to the quality and popularity of the '90s. Ono also talks about broadening the market to include casual players, who were slowly driven away from the game by the increased focus on competitive play. Quoting: "If you think about chess for instance, a kid and a grandfather can play the same game, with the same ruleset, and understand what's going on. I think through our competitive spirit back then; we were always out to out-complicate each other, and make our systems deeper and deeper. It was ok then because there was a wide player base who understood how to play these games, but that's not true anymore. What we're trying to do with Street Fighter IV is bring them back in. There's not a whole lot of other fighting games out there to compare it to, but hopefully, if we play our cards right and get people back in to the genre, we can blossom the genre itself again and spread things out and get it back to the way it was."

Comments

Smash Brothers?

[orkybash]

Yoshi Ono seems to place a lot of focus on bringing completely new, casual gamers into the SF franchise. So why does the article not once mention the one of the biggest "casual gamer" fighting games? He talks a lot about reducing the amount of memorization needed for a fighting game - this is exactly the argument that my friends used to get me into the original Smash Brothers on the N64. Be as derisive as you want, the Smash Brothers franchise (especially in Melee, somewhat less so in Brawl) is incredibly good at providing a fighting game that casual gamers can enjoy but that can also be played at a much higher level in a flourishing tournament scene (to the point where casual players, while still enjoying the game, have no idea just how good they can get at it until they sign up for a tourney).