Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game: The Article
I was right there when Street Fighter II changed everything. The cast of selectable characters, the joy of controlling them, and the intensity of the battles you’d get into at the arcade. The juggernaut fighting game deserved every bit of its popularity. I hate to use a phrase as hacky as “game changer,” but like, it’s a game we’re talking about here. Come on. Let me have this.
My point is that Street Fighter II was immensely popular. Not just with kids, and not merely for an arcade game, but a bona fide smash hit.
So as inexplicable as it is on one hand, it’s not that bizarre that they’d greenlight a movie adaptation of a game as successful as SFII. It was always going to become a common practice as the lucrative medium advanced far enough to include narratives1.
So the Street Fighter movie wasn’t surprising when it was released in 1994, as silly as it looks in hindsight. Hell, as an SFII super fan (and awful, awful player of said game), I was genuinely excited. Plus, starring as Guile, would be the coolest person in the world: Jean Claude Van Damme2 . I was all the way in. His unshakable accent standing in direct defiance with Guile’s characterization as one of the game’s All-American fighters didn’t mean jack shit to me.
I honestly don’t remember seeing Street Fighter in the theater so much as I remember riding home with my mom and brother afterward during a winter night, chewing on the disappointing film. It wasn’t even terrible so much as it was odd and incoherent. Looking back today, the movie feels like a disjointed cosplay or some kind of dress rehearsal for a better movie. It’s like you’re at a Street Fighter amusement park but have to leave before the show starts.
On top of the tricky notion of cramming 15 characters into one coherent story (sorry Fei Long heads, he didn’t make the cut), the film underwent a rocky production.
Reports indicate that Van Damme was often absent from set, busy either partying, recovering from partying, or carrying on with the very popular Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, who played Cammy. Van Damme’s behavior reportedly created many days where scenes had to be rewritten on the fly.
A good example is this prison breakout scene. Guile was scripted to feature prominently in the sequence, again, because he’s the star of the movie. But since Van Damme was MIA, the scene was changed at the last minute to focus more on Ken and Ryu. This is presumably why Guile is in the very beginning of the scene, and then apparently sprints away to a different building after delivering his dialogue, only to appear in close-ups and shots with Cammy for the rest of the sequence. (Also no spoilers here, he’s just faking getting shot in the stomach by Ken. They’re horsing around.)
I don’t know how good it would’ve turned out if they shot it as intended, but as it stands, the Street Fighter movie is incomprehensible at times, and I think it’s largely because Jean Claude Van Damme really liked to get fucked up in 1995. You deserved better, Street Fighter.
Over on the video game side of things, Street Fighter was shaking a generation down 25 cents at a time and had no intention of stopping. From 1991 to 1994, Capcom released Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo3.
Eventually, Capcom ran out of synonyms for “speedy,” to attach to Street Fighter II’s title, and had to shake things up. Alas, two unstoppable forces met: the Street Fighter machine and the much faultier Turn-Movies-Into-Video-Games machine. And so in 1995, we got Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. Some shit I’ve thought was funny since I was 10 years old.
To not be overly cynical and needlessly mean to a 30-year-old game (oh my god), I can let myself see the inspiration here. I understand wanting to showcase the cast of Jean Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, and uh, some other people. They did do martial arts training and really got to know the characters they were portraying. Plus, a lot of the game’s signature attacks were cut from the film, so it’s kind of cool to see these guys actually doing the character’s moves4.
So what’s this game that’s been cut with a bunch of bullshit like? If you can believe it, it’s a bunch of bullshit.
Starting the game, players are treated to a highlight reel from the film’s final minutes that makes it seem like more of a good time than it is. Also, exciting footage from the movie is in such short supply that a lot of this stuff gets reused in between levels in the game’s story mode, which consists primarily of Guile calling Cammy and talking about which vague locale he should go fight someone in next.
It’s all very underwhelming, and once Jean Claude and the gang got converted into video game forms, the subpar comparison was now unavoidable. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game does not stack up to the other games in the series. Not even close.
It may, however, outshine the film it's based on. Neither is very good, but at least the game has Guile throwing Sonic Booms and doing upside-down jump kicks.
Interestingly, this ridiculous game gave Capcom an excuse to ape its biggest competition in the fighting game space at the time: Mortal Kombat. You don’t pull anyone’s spines out of their bodies in SFtheMtheG, but using actors allowed them to echo the motion-captured performances that were another signature of the series.
I have no idea if this was an actual motivating factor, by the way, and I refuse to look it up. I’m just saying that in 1995, when a Street Fighter game came out that looked more like Mortal Kombat, it was impossible not to notice.
It’s hard to imagine a world where the clunky game based on this movie made much of an impact. By switching to digitized actors, Street Fighter was playing in Mortal Kombat’s territory, and in hindsight, it’s not surprising that they didn’t succeed.
Ironically, just two years later Mortal Kombat would have a disastrous pivot attempt of its own.
Having released Mortal Kombat III, Ultimate Mortal Kombat III, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy in two years, maybe Midway wanted to hold the line a little longer before they released 4. Perhaps it took longer because the series was switching to 3D graphics. I don’t know. I really should.
What I can tell you is that rather than making games based on the movie fiascos that they’d produced, the Mortal Kombat kurveball was thrown in the form of Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, a spinoff game that gave Sub-Zero his day in the frozen sun, kind of like when they gave Joey from Friends his own show and nobody cared.
I kid, but running around as Sub-Zero and doing familiar moves and combos while leveling him up sounds like an okay idea for a game. No part of the promise is delivered upon, sadly. And then there's the jumping.
Oh god, the jumping.
Do you know how you jump in these fighting games by pressing Up? Imagine being asked to precisely navigate a janky PS1 game with moving platforms and enemies coming at you using those controls. It’s an inhumane thing to do to people.
While not a terrible idea on paper, MKMSZ is undone by baffling decisions. It wants you to run down long corridors and beat up enemy after enemy like you’re in Double Dragon or something. Yet despite being on 32-bit systems like the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1, you have to press an honest-to-god button to make Sub-Zero turn around! You will straight up run backward through the game if you don’t press L2 to make Sub-Zero turn around. Get out of my face with that.
It makes you realize how many things you take for granted, like not having to tell a character in any other video game in recorded history when they need to turn around. Usually "left" makes you walk left and "right" makes you walk right, but the producers of this game had a vision. Or possibly a hard time programming the controls, I’m not sure.
Regardless, Street Fighter the Movie: The Game and Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero: Just The Game are horrible departures for two series that were fortunately too white-hot to be derailed by a single shitstorm. Perhaps Capcom and Midway were wary of sticking to mainline installments and thought drastic changes to their flagship franchise’s style, looks, and genres were the ticket to longevity.
In 2024, we know that’s not necessarily the case. Maybe these clunkers were early educational mistakes that made sure they didn’t try to do that weird shit again. Did you enjoy Street Fighter 6 or 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11? I think you can thank Van Damme and Sub Zero for that.
Now, could someone please turn this article into a play? I think that’d be really cool.
Nevermind the fact that it took decades for video game movies to become Things That Were Sometimes Not Disasters
Please remember I was a young boy and was so, so fond of kicking.
I’m still not clear on a lot of the roads in the neighborhood I’ve lived in for two years now, but I can tell you about the distinctions between all of these
If you’d like to hear a lot more about this movie, consider checking out the Street Fighter episode of 50 Percent Fresh, a podcast I cohost with my wife about movies that got bad reviews. Season two coming soon!