Street Fighter II is one of the most popular video games of all time, and when it launched in the early 1990s, it not only revived the flagging arcade industry but made the one-on-one fighter the genre of choice for millions of players all over the world.
It's also the game which really popularised the concept of characters having special, superhuman moves like fireballs, stretchy arms and the ability to electrocute their opponents. According to illustrator and designer Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, there was one rule which came into play when coming up with these moves: they had to have the development team in stitches.
In a 2003 interview translated by Shmuplations and highlighted by Event Hubs, Yasuda explains the process of coming up with new moves and specials. "We'd go through the moves one-by-one and approve them. There was this unspoken rule we operated by, where 'It wasn't good until it made us laugh.'," he says.
"Take Dhalsim's punch, for example. In the actual planning documents, we set a limit on punches, that they couldn't extend further than 128 pixels. But in that process of reviewing the characters, we decided to extend it a little further, then a little further, then a little further more… until one day we saw how long his arms came out and everyone cracked up. That was the moment we knew it was good."
This totally changed the way the team approached these iconic moves, Yasuda adds. "That attitude transformed the atmosphere of the development. Joking around and laughing became the rule of the day. Blanka, too, started out with normal skin color, but as we were flipping through the palette and trying out different colors, green came up, and everyone burst out laughing. It was like, 'What?! Why would this human have green skin..!?' We thought it was hilarious."