Dan Hibiki is perhaps the most prominent and well-known joke character across all of fighting games. His unique origin story has been well-told as developers from the very first Street Fighter branched away to create fighting games for SNK, many of which had characters that were clearly Street Fighter-inspired.
Dan was Capcom’s eventual retort as they wanted to design an intentionally poor-performing fighter who was unmistakably derivative from Art of Fighting figures. Unlike most other joke characters, however, Dan has both survived and thrived over the last three decades in a way that the term “joke character” simply doesn’t fully satisfy. Looking back through developer statements from Polygon’s Street Fighter Alpha Oral History, it seems Dan was more than a quick SNK ribbing from the very start.
At one level of analysis, developers design joke characters differently than others as they’re not meant to be good, but they are meant to be interesting. Dan has a relatively impressive attendance record as he’s appeared in three of the seven mainline Street Fighter entries as well as in a number of spinoffs and crossovers. Why? Because he’s always been interesting.
Would fans fork over extra cash to play as a character that exists fundamentally as a now thirty year old joke between companies who have reached good standing?
They did for Mr. Hibiki’s most recent appearance as one of the final DLC characters in Street Fighter 5. He was clearly worse than the majority (though perhaps not all) of his roster mates, but people were still actively interested in playing Dan.
Noritaka Funamizu, Capcom Japan’s planner for Street Fighter Alpha, acknowledges Dan’s beginnings as a shot at SNK, but always saw him as more.
“That might have been the case for the person who designed the character and brought him to me. But I didn’t think of Dan as a mockery of SNK’s characters,” starts Funamizu. “I think the person who came up with Dan wanted to put in a character who wasn’t so strong, physically speaking,” he continues.
“The whole idea was you could use this character, and even though he wasn’t very strong, you could use him and win battles — I remember noticing that about the character… I thought it would feel satisfying for more skilled players to win fights with a weaker character like Dan,” finishes Funamizu to Polygon.
This “win with weighted training clothes” concept actually goes a long way in the world of fighting games. There’s a special place you enter when you use a character whom everyone knows is disadvantageous, where you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. On the other side of the coin, your opponent has everything to lose by falling to someone playing Dan, and gets almost nothing from winning since the expectation is already there.
Dan always has conspicuously worse versions of attacks than the likes of Ryu, Ken, or Akuma, but you’re a fool to count him out. He was enticing enough, even to the seasoned competitors of late stage SF5, for pro players to use Dan in tournaments.
By that same “weighted training clothes” token, Dan has been a powerful reason for audiences to tune in to Street Fighter. It’s not entirely unlike when a conspicuously unlikely challenger faces off with an established player, such as when 801Strider faced off with a child on stage at Evo 2015. Strider won the bout handily, (spoilers) but was actually booed from the stage by playful audience members who would have rather seen a dramatic underdog victory take place.
Playing Dan doesn’t immediately make you an 8 year old facing off against a seasoned pro, but it does place you in that same ballpark.
If developers successfully walk the line between designing the joke character to be obviously bad, but still viable given a little luck and extra creativity, they stand to make a character with enough depth to stick around for 3+ decades, which seems to imply more depth than a mere punchline.
The pressure is off (of you, at least) when you play with Dan, and just like the Fatalities of Mortal Kombat, winning with him adds a tinge of playful insult to injury. What happens if you spend all your resources performing a ridiculous taunt that leaves you open to attack, AND you wind up winning?
Dan is both a low stakes character for lower level players to use and simultaneously a handicap that masterful players can use to show off just how skilled they are. What he isn’t is the equivalent of a delicate vase with SNK’s picture crudely taped to it, and the fact that Capcom was able to create the former (especially amid what was likely an emotionally fueled feud with a legitimate competitor) is a laudable accomplishment, to say the least.