Street Fighter II - Development

Development

Although the original Street Fighter had not been very popular, Capcom began to make fighting games a priority after Final Fight was commercially successful in the United States. About 35 to 40 people worked on Street Fighter II, with Noritaka Funamizu as a producer, and Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda in charge of the game and character design respectively. Funamizu notes that the developers did not particularly prioritise Street Fighter II's balance; he primarily ascribes the game's success to its appealing animation patterns. The quality of animation benefitted from the developers' use of the CPS-1 hardware, the advantages of which included the ability for different characters to occupy different amounts of memory; for example, Ryu could take up 8Mbit and Zangief 12Mbit. The game's development took two years.

The game's combo system came about by accident:

"While I was making a bug check during the car bonus stage… I noticed something strange, curious. I taped the sequence and we saw that during the punch timing, it was possible to add a second hit and so on. I thought this was something impossible to make useful inside a game, as the timing balance was so hard to catch. So we decided to leave the feature as a hidden one. The most interesting thing is that this became the base for future titles. Later we were able to make the timing more comfortable and the combo into a real feature. In SFII we thought if you got the perfect timing you could place several hits, up to four I think. Then we managed to place eight! A bug? Maybe. —Noritaka Funamizu,

The vast majority of the in-game music was composed by Yoko Shimomura. While Shimomura initially had reservations about doing the music for a fighting game, a genre of which she was not particularly fond, she soon came to enjoy working on the project and stated that while Breath of Fire was her personal favorite of the games she worked on while at Capcom, Street Fighter II was the most memorable. This was ultimately the only game in the series on which Shimomura worked, as she subsequently left the company for Squaresoft. Isao Abe, a Capcom newcomer, handled a few additional tracks for this game (most notably Sagat's theme) and subsequently became the main composer on the remaining Street Fighter II games. The sound programming and sound effects were overseen by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, who had been the composer on the original Street Fighter.