The landscape around fighting games has changed since the '80s and '90s, says Capcom's
Street Fighter IV producer Yoshi Ono. "It's kind of a bit lonely making a fighting game now, because not a lot of people are doing it," he says.
If it's true that only the stalwart remain to perpetuate the genre, then what happened since its heyday? "What happened was that gradually, the games became more and more focused on the hardcore audience, and we really shut the casual players out," Ono says.
Speaking as part of
an extensive Gamasutra feature, he elaborates, "If you think about chess for instance, a kid and a grandfather can play the same game, with the same ruleset, and understand what's going on," he says. "I think through our competitive spirit back then, we were always out to out-complicate each other, and make our systems deeper and deeper. It was okay then, because there was a wide player base who understood how to play these games, but that's not true anymore."
But Ono hopes that
Street Fighter IV can rectify the schism and bring down those walls of over-complexity. "What we're trying to do with
Street Fighter IV is bring them back in," he says.
"There's not a whole lot of other fighting games out there to compare it to, but hopefully, if we play our cards right and get people back in to the genre, we can blossom the genre itself again and spread things out and get it back to the way it was."
The full Gamasutra feature
goes in depth with Ono on bringing
Street Fighter IV back to its heyday (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).
