It’s not Joe and Mike from the first game
Terry Bogard’s gameplay trailer finally released for Street Fighter 6, and it’s clear the developers put a lot of love into their first guest character.
But that attention to detail doesn’t just stop at fighter either, as the trailer itself packs in some really fun references to the past of both Street Fighter and Fatal Fury too.
Starting at the first opening seconds of the showcase, longtime fans are immediately greeted with a callback to Street Fighter 2’s original opening.
There’s a couple of semi-familiar looking fighters duking it out in front of a crowd before the one on our left gets decked in the face.
Our initial thought was this was just a fun callback to the title that kicked off the fighting game craze around the same time Terry first appeared on the scene in Fatal Fury, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It appears as though these two are the actual characters from the intro over 30 years later (in our time).
Something that’s easy to forget is the SF2 intro fighters are not Joe and Mike from the original Street Fighter.
This was a common assumption among fans until the Street Fighter 5 era when Capcom officially confirmed they were different people entirely, Scott and Max.
Capcom updated their designs (and especially Max’s) at that time, which appear nearly identical to the characters in the Terry trailer.
The bald guy has the face and arm tattoos, shades, golden chain and a tank top while the other guy has slicked back blond hair and dark eyebrows, which Scott had in SF2 but not his SF5 art.
Max is also missing his hand wraps as well as his arm tattoo looks like it’s on the wrong side, but I’m pretty sure these are supposed to be the actual guys and not just look-a-likes.
Although they were basically absent for like 25 years, this wouldn’t be the first time Capcom had Scott and Max make a cameo appearance.
Max actually stood next to the car in the High Roller Casino stage in SF5 while both of them can be found in the middle of the Ring of Arcade stage.
So it seems the guys are hanging around and still potentially hold some sort of grudge against each other… though perhaps a punch in the face is just a hello in Street Fighter’s universe if the World Tour is anything to go by.
And then immediately after that, we’re hit with another classic reference to the original Fatal Fury.
Terry is shown getting out of a taxi cab with a bag over his shoulder in Metro City and looking up at a billboard of a boxing match.
This is exactly what happens at the start of Fatal Fury’s intro just minus the scary looking taxi driver.
Street Fighter Director Takayuki Nakayama has been pretty open that he’s a big fan of classic SNK fighting games, and there’s probably quite a few like him on the team.
For the franchise’s first outside guest character, it seems they really wanted to homage the classics as well as Terry’s legacy throughout the years, which looks to be a success thus far.
They’ve even gone so far as to give the Fatal Fury protagonist mechanics wholly unique to him including the ability to switch lanes and do extra powerful versions of his Power Geyser.
And of course there’s the Pão Pão Café stage he’s coming with that’s filled with references to SNK’s first flagship fighting series.
The trailer itself too has more callbacks and homages throughout, but we’ll get to those another time considering we went this long just looking at the first like 8 seconds of the video.
What’s your favorite little tidbit they packed into this two minutes of footage?
We’ve seen a bit more of Terry and his move list thanks to his playable demo at Gamescom this week, and he’ll be officially launching on September 24 in SF6.