'Normal players couldn't go into an arcade and play' - Capcom has been wrestling to balance casual and competitive crowds since Street Fighter Alpha
You won't spend much time around FGC discussions these days without hearing about how many modern titles tend to dumb things down in order to be more inviting for casual crowds. Shortcut motions, liberal input windows, automatic combos, and over-tuned comeback mechanics are just a few of the ways developers have tried to give greener players a chance against seasoned competitors, and so often we hear older Street Fighter titles cited as good ol' games without training wheels.
The Street Fighter Alpha series, which kicked off in the mid 1990's, came long before many of our modern training wheels were invented, but it turns out Capcom had already noticed the divide in player class during the Street Fighter 2 days and actually designed Alpha with an initiative to give newbies a better shot at winning.
Polygon has graciously given the community yet another entry in their "Street Fighter Oral History" series as they've recently released a recounting of the early days of Street Fighter Alpha as told by the Capcom team that worked on it.
The article covers notable highlights surrounding SFA's earliest chapters of development, interesting snags in the road, reasons behind creative decisions, and plenty more. However, we were first intrigued by some oh-so familiar sounding talking points.
There were two main factors that led to the creation of Alpha according to Noritaka Funamizu, Street Fighter Alpha planner for Capcom Japan. The first of these was an overabundance of CPS boards that the company wanted to make use of, but the second (and almost unarguably more interesting) was the incentive to make a game less skilled players could have fun with.
"[T]here were a lot of players whose skill and technique were incredible," notes Funamizu to Polygon. "It was a problem because normal players couldn't go into an arcade and play anymore. Everyone was too good. So we wanted to create a game that would lower that threshold."
As the FGC has marched on into this current chapter characterized in large part by eSports initiatives, a portion of the community have expressed disdain at the clear attempts to make games more accessible. The general fear here seems to be that making things easier can easily water down competitive aspects and skew the balance of risk vs. reward in games to the point of futility.
It's not to say that this direction of change couldn't be present both now and 25 years ago, but noting the particular details to see exactly how developers might be going about achieving this both then and now will shed light on its evolution.
Street Fighter Alpha public relations associate for Capcom USA, Chris Kramer, also chimed in on the subject.
"Alpha was going to be the more new-player-friendly one because arcade operators were saying, 'Hey, look, the only people who are playing Street Fighter 2 games are these hardcore guys, and they can put tokens in and stay on that machine for an hour. And new players don't want to put money in because it's so overwhelming: You have to know moves and countermoves for everything.'
"So that's why Alpha had air block and counters and combos and stuff in there that were a lot more friendly, and the input timing is a lot more forgiving than Street Fighter 2 as well. So they really did kind of look at it as a split within the Street Fighter games in order to make a game that would be easier for new players to get into, slightly less intimidating to learn."
Clearly "air blocking and counters and combos and stuff in there that were a lot more friendly" wouldn't be ultimately sufficient, but it seems this process of making fighting games less intimidating might be something of an endless endeavor. Do you think we'll ever get to a place where the balance between competitive and casual is found? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check out the rest of Polygon's piece for plenty more on the history of Street Fighter Alpha.
