Friends, I have been asked to give my thoughts on Hakan. Good, bad, indifferent? Let's just say that inspiration and great character design go much deeper than looks. Who is Hakan, where did he come from, what purpose does he serve in the Street Fighter universe? The bold color, the exaggerated proportions, surely we've seen them before!

In a couple of weeks I plan to post my complete thoughts on Street Fighter character design. This is something that I've been going over for almost 20 years. I am going to put my thoughts down and hopefully get a whole new generation of artists and character designers to understand what makes the Street Fighter cast unique in the world of gaming, anime, comics and manga. Could the next great Street Fighter character design come from outside Japan? Follow my series and we will find out.

My pal Truest Strike clued me in to a topic over on the Capcom-Unity forum. The people on the boards were discussing whether there should be a remake of the original Street Fighter and if so how should Capcom go about it. He had mentioned that there was talk of making the characters DLC and keeping it simple and if so which older characters should return. I didn't give the forum a visit because this is a topic I had been thinking about on and off for almost a decade.

There are two fighting games that I would like to produce if I were at Capcom. One would be a massive fighting game with a cast of hundreds, multi-branching paths and tremendous online networking modes. It would cost millions of dollars and years to produce. The other one is simpler and more straightforward, a fighting game that returns Street Fighter to its roots. It would serve as a careful deconstruction of everything that made the SF series memorable, this includes the bold character design, animation, control, balance, plot points and amazing moves. At the same time it would continue pushing the genre into new territory and mark out its own chapter in SF lore. The "simpler" game, the pure fighter, is the one I would like to talk about in this blog.

This game would have been set before the events in the original Street Fighter. Not by a little bit of time but rather by a wide margin. Taking the universe back to the edge, just before the events that set Gouki down his dark path and moreover, before the lives of the other fighters in the universe were forever changed. I would like to take SF back to a time when the true masters walked the Earth. The characters that we would now call "bosses" were at one time warriors that met the battle by going from town to town and challenging the best. Traveling locally and abroad to prove themselves. The era of fighting before the hype of mixed martial arts, the shenanigans of horrible character design and modern media tuned us all into skeptics.

I would like to include my crude original sketches for the cast, not all of the characters were drawn, some only named in my notes. Please excuse the quality of my illustrations and try to imagine instead that Bengus revised and fine-tuned all of the characters for the game. The visual style and animation is not in 3D like SF IV. Instead the character models and backgrounds should hint at the exaggerated realism of Street Fighter Alpha 2, or SNK's Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Two games which visually inspired an entire generation of artists and graphic designers. To help make the characters and animations in my game better than they were in Alpha or even in SF III, I would incorporate the tricks learned by SNK during the development of the sprites for the King of Fighters XII, aka the rotoscoping of 3D models to speed up the animation process. SNK calls this format Dot Style animation. The only worthy rival to this format would be the rendering tricks that Sammy / DIMPS used while creating the sprites, which were actually 3D models, for the Rumble Fish 2. I would not call my Street Fighter game a numbered project. Like the best fighting games in the genre, it is actually set outside of continuity to ask "what if?" Similar to Alpha or Garou which were fighting games but not set in between parts 2 or 3 of the series for example. My game is not even named Street Fighter, instead I call it by it's code name and would eventually like to produce it by the name "Round One."

Anyhow, let's get to most of the cast featured in Round One and try to figure out the motivation for having a fighting game set before Street Fighter.

Here are most of the early character choices that I had decided should be in the title. Sorry for the sausagefest. I have yet to think up any female characters that existed pre-Chun-Li that deserve a spot in the lineup. Those that have played most of the Capcom fighters should be familiar with the cast. They are the old men of the universe, but taken back to when they were in their prime. The "kid" in the game is actually Sagat. Back before he lost his eye and before he got that grizzly scar on his chest. The others were fighters at near their peak of physical ability. I decided on a broad spectrum of styles and the best at those styles during the period before Ken and Ryu. If you notice there are wrestlers, ninjas and karatekas listed in almost even pairs. Street Fighter has always worked best with some sort of symmetry in mind.

Before Yoshinori Ono decided to rewrite the history books and bring Gouken back from the dead I thought that the best way to have actually played the character was if somebody made a game that took place before the original SF. In this way players would also have access to Gouki (Akuma) right away as well. I would not plan to give these characters simply the same moves of Ken and Ryu. The brothers would have some familiar moves like the fireball, hurricane kick and dragon punch, but the ways in which they perform the moves would have slightly different animations. They would also have moves and combo attacks that Ken and Ryu did not have. In this way we would see how much more advanced these men were when compared to the youthful Ken and Ryu from the numbered SF games.

The ninja presence would be based on the hulking Raizo from Rival Schools and also Zeku, the master of Bushin-Ryuu. Those that aren't familiar should know that Zeku was the master of Guy and appears in the ending of Street Fighter Alpha 2. In my game both Raizo and Zeku would have been much younger and we would have gotten glimpses of them as fighters. How do you suppose they moved or fought? Similar to the way they appear now, or would they have employed different moves and strategies than characters like Guy or the ninja Geki?

I decided to include the anchors of the Final Fight canon as players deserve to see where the bitter rivalry between Belger and Mike Haggar started. What was Haggar like before he became a wrestling champ? Who was his wife, the mother of Jessica? What happened to her and why didn't Capcom give her a face? Why was Mike a wrestler, was it his size and strength that made him a natural at that?

What of Belger, he has a motorized wheelchair in Final Fight but can actually walk, run and even jump faster than most characters in the game. What type of fighter was Belger before he became a tycoon? What would have driven him to despise Haggar? Would a woman have come between Belger and Haggar, or was it something else? Belger has appeared in Final Fight, Mighty Final Fight and Final Fight Revenge. He knows how to brawl and has served as a boss character in all three titles. He was a well dressed character in all three games, a regular dandy, but he wasn't a pushover. What type of fighter would he have been in his prime?

Although I didn't draw Victor Ortega I would have also added him, as he was and remains arguably the most powerful wrestler in the Capcom universe. The power gap (at least according to canon) between him and Zangief is equivalent to the gap between Ryu and Gouki. There is a certain lack of technique, strength and ability that only experience can bring. How would Bengus have presented the greatest wrester never to have been in a Street Fighter game? How would his look and move selection have trumped Zangief, Darun, R. Mika or El Fuerte? I can only imagine and speculate that they would have been amazing.

What about Sagat, how was he as up-and-coming fighter? How did he claim the title of best in the world when there were so many other amazing fighters out there? Was it his murder of Gou Hibiki that earned him that frightful title? Although Sagat filled out with muscles as he got older, there must have been something imposing about a tall and lean youthful Sagat (with hair!). He must have been dangerous with depth perception!

Other characters that I would have included would be Gen and Retsu, masters of Kung-Fu and Karate. While the fighting monk Retsu doesn't have the fearsome reputation of Gen he should be remembered for starting to pick up things from Goutetsu in his latter years. How would his library of karate moves have been when compared to those of Gouki and Gouken? Would he have had a karate style more akin to a character like Makoto, or somebody else entirely? As for Gen, we are already familiar with many of the moves given him in the Alpha series (two sets of moves in fact!). How would he have been in his "younger days," when he was supposedly faster than he is now? As a master of Kung-Fu would he have known more styles than those presented in Alpha, perhaps tiger or snake style? Gamers would be intrigued by the move changes given to the characters, all of the characters featured in Round One. At first they would try using the same set up and attacks learned from previous SF games only to learn that there are counters and strategies that those without projectile attacks could use against opponents.

I had imagined that the final "boss" character would be Goutetsu. The master of masters. What was he like when he was still in fighting shape? What were his moves? How do you suppose his style looked like in comparison to Ken, Ryu, Gouki or Gouken? I'd imagine there was more of a Kung-Fu stance in his version of the art, as he had brought over the assassin's fist from China and had refined it into a form of Karate. Would he have had kicking moves that were unlike the hurricane kick? Or a strike that was unlike the dragon punch?

All we can do is sit and ponder. So what do you think of my take on Street Fighter? Is this a game you'd even be remotely interested in? Or am I just another fan thinking out loud?