The divide between gaming developers and their audiences is shortening as the internet clues us all into the wider communal conversation, and some intriguing evidence of this movement in action just popped up in Street Fighter 6.
Capcom rolled out a major update for Street Fighter 6 just last week when they introduced newcomer Terry Bogard along with some balance changes and a new V-Rivals AI mode, the latter of which appears to directly reference prominent fighting game content creator Bryant “Smug” Huggins.
To appreciate this, we’ll need to cover a little history that takes us back just a few years to the days of Street Fighter 5. Smug’s propensity to entertain manifests through both his ability to pull off crazy sequences within games as well as to come up with charismatic one-liners from without.
When G dropped as SF5 DLC back in 2018, Smug picked him up and started figuring out ways of landing the character’s notably slow 12-frame command grab. While 1/5 of a second doesn’t sound like a long time, other SF5 command grabs might come out in as few as 4-6 frames, (and in SF4 there were one frame command grabs) a massively significant difference when single frames can make or break an attack.
With G’s grab being so slow, many naturally saw it as unusable at first since it would theoretically be hard to get people to sit still for those 12 long frames. In reality, however, G’s other attacks made opponents afraid to risk exposing their feet and thus holding down and back against him became commonplace.
As Smug became especially proficient at landing this move, he came up with an appropriate one liner for all his victims, noting how they would all be “actin’ like they won’t get command grabbed.” This phrase caught fire to the point one could hardly watch a Smug round without hearing a commentator mention it in some capacity.
In Street Fighter 6’s new V-Rivals Mode, AI technology effectively creates opponents who play with the tendencies and skill of various online ranks. If you have V-Rivals set you up to practice against command grab characters like Manon and you win, you might see some familiar looking text:
I approve https://t.co/j8uGmgk9Qq
— SMUG (@SmugDaBeast) September 29, 2024
One has to wonder just how much more content like this we’ll be seeing in Street Fighter and beyond as developers offer fun nods and acknowledgements to fans.