Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix released last week on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network to great acclaim, but according to lead designer David Sirlin, the game was a momentous struggle with which he received very little help.
"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," explains Sirlin. "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."
Undeterred, the designer used the Yoga Hyper Book, which contains Street Fighter hit box data and frame statistics, to basically teach himself the code. He received very little help from either Capcom or Backbone, who didn't want the rebalanced mode to happen.
I can believe this of Backbone, who has made a career of doing straight ports so faithful, they even leave in all the glitches. Massive kudos to Sirlin, then, who went above and beyond the call of duty and delivered a game that was more than the simply standard port everyone else wanted it to be. Lazy developers be damned!
Contest:
12:22 PM on 12.04.2008
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With that said, is Sirlin a bit of an egomaniac, or was it really the one-man show that he's making it out to be? In the article he says, "Like I said, a lot of it was me, I mean it wasn't all me, there was a real programmer that helped too."
He's talking specifically about the rebalancing, so this quotation is taken somewhat out of context, but I still get a little uneasy after hearing things like this.
Bottom line: the game fucking rules.
What a motivator! I'm sure everyone is lining up to work with him.
Did you see that he ranked first on the leaderboards last week?
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2008/11/29/1-on-street-fighter-ranked-matches.html
I'm glad he busted their chops and got something special made out of the project. Score one for actual game development!
Please Capcom, stay on Backbone to keep this game patched properly.
That's not his first run in with Backbone's laziness. Back when we chatted (it was a call in internet show), he did tell a story about how those guys didn't even want to put in an option to remap controls for one of the Capcom Collections. He had to fight for that too.
So while he may come off as an egomaniac, you gotta realize that he fought to make games that he worked on better. I'm sure a straight port would have sold well; but HD Remix will sell even better and have more staying power.
Remember these haymakers?
http://maxim.com/Games/BalrogsTurnPunchStreetFighterIISNES/slideshow/46623/4443.aspx
Thats amazing that he learned the code. Well, not amazing, but its awesome and its great for the community. He brought back Super Turbo to the spotlight and just in time for SF4 hype.
There's word in the fighting game commnunity that this will replace the old Super Turbo in major tournaments while SF3 3rd strike will be phazed out by SF4 soon as it releases. Good stuff.
That's the main reason I was not sold on the game back when it was first announced cause it was only going to be in HD and nothing more. So Ultra Props to Sirlin for actually taking the time to do something he had no idea with and balancing a game Capcom refuses to do.
At least it's confirmed why we won't get actual new 2d sprites for Morrigan or any actual updates on the constant ports. lol.
This questions if we'll never get the minor fixes STHD needs. It's nothing game killing tho, thank goodness.
ugh
-the pixel nazi
The shitty thing is, is that Backbone will reap the rewards of Sirlin's hard work and we will most likely have to wait a couple months for any substantial patching.
Also, E. Honda has huge tits in that game.
Or have i just gotten that rusty over the years?
get it in my hair Sirlin! Im on fire! put out the heat with your golden stream!
thats right, an HD rebalanced 3rd Strike would be worth letting Sirlin PISS IN MY HEAD...maybe for a whole month or so.
but all things considered, I really admire his dedication to making a quality product.
One of my teachers showed me a program he wrote in assemby that takes in a number "n" and will then output the first "n" prime numbers... and it was just shy of a gazillion-billion-trillion lines of code long. In Java or C# or even C or Perl I could do that in under 20 lines.
So being a non-programming person and teaching yourself Assembly? Well done I say, that is true dedication (and competely mind-blowing!)
It's pretty clear Capcom OK'ed Sirlin's rebalancing proposition from day 1, even though they didn't assist in doing the work on it. Maybe clarifying the item with "He received very little help from either Capcom or Backbone, the latter of whom didn't want the rebalanced mode to happen." No reason for Cap to get slagged for "rejecting" the rebalancing of the game, when they were in favor of it with no problem.
Props to Sirlin for the work he did to provide Street Fighter II with at least another 15 years of longevity.
Larry "Liontamer" Oji
Assistant Soundtrack Director, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
Head Submissions Evaluator, OverClocked ReMix - http://www.ocremix.org
Creator, VG Frequency - http://www.vgfrequency.com
Staff, VGMdb - http://www.vgmdb.net