Street Fighter Was Inspired By A Loose Game Adaptation Of A Jackie Chan Movie

1987's Street Fighter was Capcom's first fighting game, and it was where the six-button control and input system that has been a huge part of fighting games ever since was invented. While the series became much bigger and better with Street Fighter II, the original is a very important game--and as it turns out, it was first envisioned by the director when he was bored in a meeting and thinking about past jobs.

In a new deep-dive oral history of Street Fighter on Polygon, game director Takashi Nishiyama has reflected on the game's creation, and how he started to conceptualize it during a meeting. "One day at Capcom, we had a meeting between the development staff and the sales team, and this particular meeting happened to run very long--I think it was about two hours," he recalls. "Personally, as someone on the development side, I found it very hard to stay interested during these meetings, so I tended to daydream and think about games."

Nishiyama says that the game came to him into this moment. "There was just this one moment where the idea for Street Fighter popped into my head and I drew it out on a piece of paper during the meeting," he recalls, saying that he showed it to Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto (who was sitting next to him) and it earned his approval.

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