Between Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the recently-announced Street Fighter/Tekken tie-in, it seems fair to say that the fighting-game genre hasn’t been this healthy in ages. The question, of course, is how to keep it going — how to keep fighters from falling once more into the creative pit it wandered into around the turn of the millennium.
“I think that if we want to take the fire we’ve started and really fan the flames, we need to up the number of opportunities people have to interact with fighters,” SFIV producer Yoshinori Ono told Famitsu magazine this week. “That’s why we made SFIV for the iPhone and are making Super SFIV for the Nintendo 3DS right now. Having it on lots of different platforms gives users more chances to interact with it, and it lets them enjoy fighting games in a light and easy kind of way.”
SFIV’s release triggered buzz, no doubt, as did the rise of a robust tournament scene. “To be honest, I’ve been making fighters for a long time,” BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori said. “Fighter fans tend to be pretty dedicated to start with, so I really haven’t noticed if there’s a boom going on or not. If there is, though, I’d say SFIV contributed a lot to it, as well as Daigo Umehara becoming a pro player. If we can see more star players like Daigo, I think that’ll earn more popularity for the whole genre.”
