Street Fighter 2 HD designer speaks out on 'struggle'

Lead designer David Sirlin 'ignored' orders not to rebalance gameplay.

David Sirlin, lead designer on the recently released Xbox LIVE title Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, has told of his "struggle" rebalancing the classic fighting game's gameplay, telling VideoGamer.com "nobody around me really wanted this thing to even happen".

In the first part of a massive post-mortem interview with the developer and fighting game expert, the first part of which is due to be published tomorrow, Sirlin revealed that his rebalancing efforts were initially conducted "somewhat under the table" following developer Backbone's "flat out no" response to the idea.

SSF2THDR, released on Xbox LIVE last Wednesday (the game is yet to see a PSN release in Europe, despite being out in the US), contains a Remixed mode which includes character rebalancing and easier special move motions, all of which were championed by Sirlin. It's a sterling effort, and garnered a well deserved 9/10 score in our review.

Sirlin told VideoGamer.com that he "ignored" Backbone's rejection of his rebalancing proposal and began teaching himself how to decipher the original Dreamcast source code, from which the game is based.

He said: "I struggled almost every day with that whole project trying to get something done. A real critical hurdle for me was having the rebalanced mode at all. Backbone, they just didn't want to do it at all because it sounded like too much work. Who's going to pay for all this, it's hard enough to ship this game in the first place and, were they going to assign programmers to help me? They didn't want to do that. So they said, 'no, we're not going to do it'. Just flat out no. I pretty much ignored that. I started reading the source code myself, and I'm not a programmer, and I'm certainly not an assembly programmer, so it's complete gibberish to me."

Sirlin used the Yoga Hyper book, a Japanese tome that details Street Fighter hit box data and frame statistics and, with little help from Capcom or Backbone, taught himself how to understand the code.

"Nobody around me really wanted this thing to even happen and here I am researching code. Every once in a while I would ask some programmer that's sat next to me, 'hey can you look at this and tell me what this means?' and I would try to figure it out. Finally I was like, 'oh I think I know how we can change these hit boxes'. And the very first thing I did was change Cammy's Spinning Backfist so that could go through fireballs like it could in Super Street Fighter. That was like a proof of concept. I did it! Oh I get it, I know how to do this now. Over the course of HD Remix there were so many different things that I would want to do though. Not just turn off the hit box, what about changing the size of the hit box? What about more recovery? What about changing the dizzy power? And so on and so on. There was research throughout the whole project of how do we do all of this? Like I said, a lot of it was me, I mean it wasn't all me, there was a real programmer that helped too. But it was somewhat under the table for a while."

Sirlin said that eventually his efforts gathered "too much momentum to stop", adding, "no-one came round and told me I had to stop so I didn't."

Look out for part one of our mammoth Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix retrospective with designer David Sirlin tomorrow, where he goes into even further detail on how the game came to be and the challenges he experienced rebalancing the gameplay.