Capcom certainly isn't short of cash these days, and is very good at keeping its vast catalogue of games alive, be it via brand-new entries (like Street Fighter 6) or retro collections (such as Capcom Arcade Stadium and Capcom Fighting Collection 2).
However, given the company's decades of history, there are bound to be franchises and IP that fans feel could use a new lease of life, and, as it turns out, we almost got some timely reboots around a decade ago.
Cast your mind back to 2014, and many of you will recall the excellent reboot of Strider by Double Helix. A rare case of the developer understanding exactly what made the original games so appealing, Strider launched on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC to pretty positive reviews, leading many to hope that it could be the beginning of a fruitful relationship between Capcom and the Californian studio, which came into being in 2007 when The Collective and Shiny Entertainment merged.
Speaking to Time Extension, Tony Barnes—who shares a director's credit on the game alongside Capcom's Koji Oda—reveals that we very nearly got a raft of other Capcom reboots.
Barnes explains that, shortly after Strider launched, Double Helix pitched for a whole host of titles. "It made sense for them to hand our team another dormant property, or at the very least, as a fallback, for us to do a Strider 2, right?" he says. "Strider 2 was merely like a one-page document that said, 'Do this, do that, make this better'. It wasn't explored a whole lot because we felt it was best for us to put our effort into other pitches that weren't a given."
These pitches included some of Capcom's most famous dormant properties, and ones which we'd have loved to have seen Double Helix take on, but there was one franchise that was off the table. "I remember our boss wanted Mega Man because, from a business point of view, that makes sense — it's one of their biggest properties," says Barnes. "But from the perspective of a game maker, a fan, and a person that's played Mega Man since day zero, I didn't want to touch the Blue Bomber because there was too much weight and too much baggage and the fan base is pretty split. I told them that the best we could do is probably a [Mega Man] X game, which would make sense because Strider is very similar to X."
Barnes was more interested in reviving other Capcom classics. "I really like Black Tiger and I think that there's a lot of opportunity that's missed there for doing a 2.5D run-and-gun game," he tells us. "And I knew that if I worked on something like Black Tiger or Forgotten Worlds, which is another one of my all-time favourites, I'd be left alone—kind of like I was with Strider. It would be like, 'Oh, you work on that thing over there, I don't know what that is'."
However, it seems that the pitches which got the furthest were Power Stone and Final Fight, and even then, Barnes had his reservations:
The other ones that we talked about heavily and got further into discussions for were Power Stone and Final Fight and we were really leaning towards Final Fight. But my problem with Final Fight was, it's so tropey at this point, that if you enhance it too much, it's not Final Fight anymore. But if you're so true to Final Fight, then it's just another Final Fight. There's a million games that are just like Final Fight. And so it was like, 'What can I do to Final Fight that would actually make it justify its existence and not piss off all the fans?' And what I came up with was I really wanted to use assets from Street Fighter IV, because I wanted it to look like that.
So you basically would be going through with this Final Fight/Streets of Rage-y type action, but it would all be in the Street Fighter IV aesthetic and proportions, with the line work and all of that. I thought, at least then we'd be furthering the Capcom brand, and it would all be part of the same universe.
Sadly, all of this came to nothing following Amazon's 2014 purchase of Double Helix; shortly afterwards, the studio was absorbed into Amazon Game Studios. "Double Helix got bought by Amazon and we couldn't work on anybody else's IP," laments Barnes. "Hence the reason that [Killer Instinct] got sent to Iron Galaxy, and hence why there was no Strider 2, Final Fight, or Forgotten Worlds."