For almost 30 years (of our time) M. Bison and Shadaloo terrorized the world of Street Fighter, but we finally got to see more view of what everything is like without his evil influence after what happened in the last game.
Although the dictator has been gone for years during Street Fighter 6’s story, it seems the developers may be teasing an eventual resurrection for the villain.
SF6 Director Takayuki Nakayama and Producer Shuhei Matsumoto recently sat down with IGN to discuss Ed and the upcoming additions to the game including Akuma.
One of the first things they talk about, however, is SF6’s first new stage in the Ruined Lab and what’s contained within.
“Maybe a lot of you weren’t expecting this to be the setting of the new stage,” Nakayama said. “So hopefully everyone is pleasantly surprised by this. This is the ruins of what remains of the Shadaloo base. Everything is dilapidated and destroyed. But if you look at the chair in the very center, there is some kind of red thing lying there. I think that’s probably the noteworthy item.”
In case you somehow missed it from Ed’s gameplay trailer and subsequent footage, that item is of course M. Bison’s iconic red hat sitting in the chair.
This isn’t just some random chair either considering it seems to be a device likely used to transfer consciousness and power to a new body, which is something the dictator is well known to do multiple times in the past.
The lab itself also contains multiple Seth bodies in tubes as well as one more in the middle of the machine that’s behind the chair, except this one is hidden in shadows.
In Ed’s gameplay trailer, he is shown to have a round-win animation where it looks like the Psycho Power within him is starting to take control while he glows and laughs.
While he does this in the video, a surge of what is likely Psycho Power can be seen overloading the massive machine in the background causing everything to shake and move.
What’s more, however, is that Bison’s hat starts to levitate off of the seat briefly too that’s harder to catch if you’re not looking for it.
Bison’s body was indeed destroyed completely at the end of Street Fighter 5’s cinematic story mode by Ryu’s power of nothingness, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone for good.
His soul still managed to hang on to the world as a Psycho Powered phantom haunting those with connections to him though we’ve yet to see much reference to that ghost still being present in SF6.
Though Bison’s been gone for so long, it seems the developers are setting up that all he needs is a suitable body to come fully back to the world of the living, and there’s quite a few potential ones sitting in that new stage even if it’s a temporary one.
It made sense to let Bison rest after the conclusion of SF5, but considering how iconic he is and having been on the roster of every main Street Fighter game except the original and Street Fighter 3, there’s still a lot of reasons to bring him back at some point in the future.
Whether or not this new stage is just to leave the door open to his revival or a tease of things to come is up for interpretation, so maybe we’ll be learning more in Ed’s story bits in SF6.