Almost every aspect of a videogame will go through a myriad of changes before becoming a finished product. Thanks to a nifty new Street Fighter V artbook, we’ve gotten a good look at some of the characters and designs that didn’t make the final cut.
The artists down at Capcom went through a heap of iterations of various characters and designs before agreeing on finished versions. It looks like at one point we were gonna get a brand new character in the form of a football player because fuck it why not?
You can take a peek at a some of his intended moves below.Would you believe that he mostly would have used his footballing skills to kick stuff? Madness.
Other abandoned ideas include a sinister looking bearded guy, and a burly business man with the air of a 1980’s coke dealer living in Miami. See if you can work out which is which below.
Other major changes pertain to characters who actually managed to make it in to the game. The weedy looking FANG for example, started out as a spry shaolin monk, while Necalli (now a muscly red haired human) began life as a Sasquatch type creature.
Street Fighter V received mixed reviews when it came out last month, with a lot of critics bemoaning the lack of content at launch. I actually thought it was great.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.