Fans of Capcom fighting games were hit with quite the surprise recently when Street Fighter 6’s Director hinted that he worked on an unknown Darkstalkers project, which ended up being canceled.
But it turns out, however, that wasn’t the only nor apparently even the first time Takayuki Nakayama dropped some teases about a modern Darkstalkers — that now connects to Street Fighter 5.
The problem was most of the world didn’t have access to the required materials or even know of the media’s existence unless you were in Japan at a very specific time.
We were luckily able to recently get our hands on a copy of the 28th and final volume of the Capcom Secret Files, which we’ve now been able to translate a very interesting portion of.
These booklets were released in Japan dating back all the way to 1994 where Capcom would give fans special information about a particular game like Street Fighter Alpha 2 or X-Men vs. Street Fighter including developer interviews / stories, concept art and funny parodies.
Although the Secret File booklets were originally discontinued in 1999, they were brought back in 2010 for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and finally in 2020 for Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition.
That last one contains the secrets we’re most interested in today.
On the last page of the Secret File book, there’s a Q&A section with the development staff of SF5 where they were each asked four questions / prompts — and the second of which is the most important to look at for this.
“This is your chance to open up about a past failure or something interesting that happened during development, so please tell us whatever you’ve got,” reads the prompt as translated by our own Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.
And the Director had a quite surprising response.
“Master F.A.N.G’s concept was actually a dropped design from a new ◯a◯◯◯◯ game as a character called ◯su◯◯, but this is a secret of secrets,” said Nakayama.
Obviously, he doesn’t completely spell it all out there plainly, but it highly suggests that the poisonous SF5 newcomer was originally planned for Darkstalkers.
The blank letters don’t match up with Darkstalkers of course since that’s the western name, but rather the word lines up perfectly with the original title Vampire — specifically in the Japanese spelling “ヴァンパイア.”
As for what the concept that would eventually become F.A.N.G was named, there’s too many possibilities to really offer a guess on that front.
If you would have asked us before which new character in SF5 was originally meant for Darkstalkers, we probably would have said Necalli given his ancient Aztec powers and ability to transform, but who knows, maybe they did have some similar ideas floating around back then for him too.
That being said, a wacky poison user would probably fit right at home with the Darkstalkers cast though we’d really like to see what his original concept looked like (if they ever had an appearance assigned to him at all).
The original design of F.A.N.G presumably would have looked very different than SF5 because he’d be too close in appearance to Hsien-Ko with their elongated purple sleeves and similar outfits.
From the SF5 concept art for F.A.N.G we have seen, there was a time when Capcom thought to make him more beastly with a tiger fighting style as well as a short and round design where he could roll himself up in a ball.
On top of that, some attack concepts also appear very much like Hsien-Ko by having a chain he could throw from under his sleeve attached to a claw or other weapons.
And now we have his apprentice in Street Fighter 6 with A.K.I., who does have individual claws she can extend.
So this makes at least two instances now where Nakayama has seemingly hinted at the short-lived existence of a modern Darkstalkers project without outright confirming it was real officially.
Nakayama responded in part to our original story that “maybe someday he’ll be able to talk about it,” and we’d certainly love to hear that story.
What do we know about the failed revival then?
Well, a new Darkstalkers project was apparently being worked on inside of Capcom beginning sometime between 2010 and 2012 around the same time as Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Street Fighter X Tekken.
It is unknown how far along the project was before it was canceled, but available information and discussions from people with knowledge suggests development was halted very early on — quite likely before ever leaving the concept phase.
Nakayama would have been on that team, which was then transferred to work on Otoranger, and at least some of them joined the Street Fighter 5 team shortly after that.
Many fans believed the “Darkstalkers are not Dead” trailer from New York Comic-Con 2012 was pointed towards something specific going on behind the scenes instead of just a nebulous teaser of what could happen in the future, and that was likely the case after all in some fashion though it doesn’t mean the footage was from the planned game.
The project would have been canceled likely before Darkstalkers Resurrection released in 2013, and that release’s poor performance was not going to help bring it back.
Former Capcom Producer Yoshinori Ono stated in 2016 he was still “striving hard to attain” the approval for a new Darkstalkers and later lamented how he was unable to achieve that goal when he left the company in 2020.
This new timeline of fighting game development at Capcom and information about F.A.N.G also has us very curious what other (if any) concepts or ideas from Darkstalkers were carried over or reworked into SF5.
Perhaps one day we’ll be lucky enough to learn the full tale of the Darkstalkers game that never came to be.
Contributions to this story were made by Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.