The Strange Saga Of The Street Fighter RPG– PRIME
From Avatar: the Last Airbender to Star Wars, licensed properties have made for some amazing tabletop RPGs… and then there’s Street Fighter.
When it comes to roleplaying games, one of the best ways to quickly gain an audience is to find a licensed property with a built-in fanbase. This is why some of the bigger releases, like Avatar: Legends, Alien, even The Labyrinth all pull above their weight. It’s a lesson the gaming industry learned back in the earliest days as well.
Back then, you could find games licensed for existing franchises like you wouldn’t believe! Games companies created RPGs for popular properties like Ghostbusters, Conan, and Indiana Jones– though each game was met with mixed success.
Players loved some of the systems for these games– others were so reviled that the founding company was ordered to destroy every copy.
And then there’s White Wolf’s experiment with the licensed RPG franchise Street Fighter: The Roleplayig Game. Street Fighter is certainly an interesting choice. It’s not exactly the first property that jumps out and screams “play in my world!” It was also built using mechanics from World of Darkness.
Both of these facts were a part of the perfect storm that allowed this game to be made. But White Wolf, flush with the success of The World of Darkness in 1994, rolled the dice on it. Without Vampire and Werewolf, there would be no Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game.
Perhaps owing to the odd nature of Street Fighter‘s mechanics, White Wolf developers felt emboldened to experiment with the game. The co-developer of Street Fighter has spoken in the past about a big part of the inspiration coming from playing the popular video game at a convenience store in between developing stages for Mage: the Ascension.
“I was writing my sections of Mage: The Ascension and every now and then to take a break I’d go over to the convenience store and play the hell out of Street Fighter. So I got to be a big fan of the game. When I came back down to Atlanta to take over as CEO of White Wolf, I presented to Stewart [Wieck] and Mark [Rein-Hagen], and I said, “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but this game is massively popular. I’m a fan and I’ve always been a big fan of martial arts. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I think we should try this.”
And so Street Fighter began its development. But the game was a challenge for the World of Darkness. Street Fighter is a fast-paced video game full of quick, sometimes simultaneous actions and choices. Moves string together for combos, and special moves can buy you seconds to recover or relaunch your attack.
In order to emulate this pace, the developers came up with a system of cards. These cards were printed out with discrete moves based on your character’s fighting style. A pair of fighters would lay down cards simultaneously (with speed ratings to determine who carries out the move first), and the fight would continue through a rapid-fire series of rounds and resolution.
But equally important was the world. Or rather, the lack of one. Street Fighter, at the time, had only a fraction of the characters and story development that it does today. But this was an opportunity for writers working on the game.
“I recall there was a world bible, although it didn’t have a whole lot beyond some character backgrounds. One of the appealing things to writers like me was that we could fill in a lot of the world.”
And fill it in they did. The only restrictions the developers faced were that none of the main characters could die– but outside of that, the designers had free rein.
This resulted in one of the most earnest takes on an RPG. Where the World of Darkness was chock full of modern gothic plots and styles, Street Fighter had vibrancy and color. It had “fun.”
And that was all due to the experimental approach designers were able to take. Today, the game is out of print. But if you find it, you too can play one of the most successful adaptations of a video game in RPGs.
