Although the game basically flopped upon release and marked the end of the series’ original arcade legacy, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike still remains one of the most beloved titles in the genre as a whole, which took a ton of work behind the scenes to end up as the classic we know.
With Third Strike now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Khanage recently released an interesting look at the cut content not just in that game but all of the Street Fighter 3 entries that never made it to release.
First on the stop is going all the way back to New Generation where we can see a glimpse at an earlier version of the character select screen with different portraits for Necro and especially Ryu — plus a beta battle HUD that looks pretty basic.
Interestingly, this footage apparently came from a Japanese-exclusive VHS from Capcom in the ’90s that showed some in-development looks at their upcoming games at the time, which has thankfully been archived online.
And that’s certainly not all for the title that kicked off Street Fighter 3 either like a very much unfinished Hugo being playable if you dig through the code enough.
As for Second Impact, the most intriguing piece discovered in the data was unused character voice files for seemingly Makoto, whose design was apparently complete but not finished in time for release, though if so, she sounds fairly different from how she ended up in Third Strike.
There’s even more unused audio that’s cool to hear now too including some for Ken that apparently did appear in Marvel vs. Capcom.
Finally in 3S, Shin Akuma can be selected by simply changing a single value in the code though he seems to be an unfinished holdover from Second Impact that was kept in the files, and that goes doubly for Gill.
Unsurprisingly, the last game also contains a plethora of scrapped voice lines including ones for a transformed Twelve that can’t be heard during normal gameplay along with announcer quotes from Infinite.
You can check out the full video below, and if you’re in the mood for even more SF3, GuileWinQuote also recently took a closer look at what makes Third Strike so busted in all the best and worst ways that’s certainly worth a watch too.
