Though it wasn’t quite the same Wild Wolf we’d come to know and love
After first being announced three months ago, Terry Bogard is finally almost here as the first guest character in Street Fighter 6 and the series in general.
But Terry has also technically been part of the Street Fighter crew since the very beginning.
The Hungry Wolf as we know him made his debut in Fatal Fury: King of Fighters back in 1991 at SNK though that’s not really the full story of how this fighting game icon came to be.
There’s two developers in particular, who played a big hand in the creation of both fighting games being Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto.
Nishiyama served as the Director of the first Street Fighter while Matsumoto worked as a planner for the game that would set the stage for what 1v1 fighting games would become.
This is where the idea for Terry would first arise, but the pair would depart Capcom to join the forces of SNK before they could have a chance to flesh him out for Street Fighter 2.
Both Nishiyama and Matsumoto were featured among other developers, designers and artists in a special interview for the SF25: The Art of Street Fighter book a decade ago to help celebrate the big anniversary.
It is here where they had some interesting things to say about Terry, Street Fighter and Fatal Fury.
“Do you remember the title demo for Street Fighter? There’s a white man in a leather jacket who appears, but he doesn’t show up in the game,” said Matsumoto. “The protagonist was set to be a karate fighter in a gi, so I wanted to feature that guy if I had the chance to create something next. In other words, he is the precursor to Terry.”
Although you couldn’t play as him, the man from the original SF intro appears to be the same person as Joe, who was one of NPC opponents Ryu could face on his way to Sagat.
So in some weird alternate universe, we could have ended up with Ryu and Joe as the faces of Street Fighter perhaps if Nishiyama had stayed on for Street Fighter 2 at Capcom.
Ken was technically already established in the first game too, however, with the Shotos being the same in terms of gameplay, which the Director recalls was at least partly due to deadlines and capacity issues.
Interestingly, Joe would never really appear in the series again, but his and Mike’s stand-ins from the Street Fighter 2 intro, Scott and Max, were included as Easter eggs in Terry’s trailer for SF6.
One aspect the developers also wanted to focus on for Fatal Fury that didn’t happen in Street Fighter was more of an emphasis on the story, which was then further expanded in Art of Fighting.
“After starting work at SNK, I wanted to challenge myself to create a more emotionally engaging story and character development that we couldn’t achieve in Street Fighter,” said Nishiyama. “That’s how Fatal Fury was created, but by the time we released it, Street Fighter 2 was already hugely popular.
“There was only a gap of a few months between the releases, and we didn’t have time to develop something new after SF2 hit the arcades. Ironically, although we had already created Street Fighter, we faced a lot of accusations of copying Capcom(laughs).”
It is funny but also a little sad that the guys instrumental to creating Street Fighter would be accused of copying Street Fighter 2, but it couldn’t really be helped back then when a lot of that information wasn’t publicly shared or paid attention to by players.
But now, two of their signature creations are finally joining forces once again though Nishiyama and Matsumoto don’t seem to be involved in this crossover.
They both left SNK back around 2000 when the company faced bankruptcy to help create Dimps, who would come back to help Capcom develop Street Fighter 4, Street Fighter x Tekken, and Street Fighter 5.
Terry himself is set to Power Dunk his way from South Town over to Metro City in just over a day on September 24.