There is quite the hustle and bustle going on in the world of Street Fighter 6 news right now as fans are both enjoying the brand new DLC character M. Bison as well as looking forward to the unprecedented plans for welcoming guest characters into the franchise.
VG 24/7 was able to sit down with Street Fighter 6 Director and Producer, Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto, respectively, to talk about all this. We were particularly struck by Nakayama’s statements on the strategy behind guest characters, especially after his direct dropping of an iconic name from the Mortal Kombat franchise.
The idea of a Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat crossover has been floating around in fandom since the mid 1990’s as both franchises floated quickly to the top of the fighting game genre, and have remained there for the last three decades.
While Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon and his team at NetherRealm Studios have made crossovers and guest appearances an MK staple over the last ten years, Capcom has been much more particular about such practices.
We’ve seen Capcom make entire games devoted to crossovers (Capcom vs. SNK, Marvel vs. Capcom, Street Fighter X Tekken) but when it comes to mainline Street Fighter games, the most we’ve seen them do is port over characters from other Capcom properties like Final Fight and Rival Schools.
The announcement that Street Fighter 6’s second season of DLC will include both Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui from SNK’s Fatal Fury franchise is unprecedented, and opens up the door for all new potential.
This newly opened “can of worms” came up during the VG 24/7 interview as the interviewer noted how figures like Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero immediately started trending on social media after the big reveal, to which Nakayama responded with the following:
“I don’t see it as a negative!” he starts. “In fact, like you just mentioned… What about Sub-Zero? Well, there may well be Street Fighter 6 players who aren’t as familiar with the Mortal Kombat IP. So if the goal is to get more people interested in fighting games in general, and a crossover like that gets people talking about which characters should cross over…”
With the conversation about said crossover going on for so long, there are some established reasons for pushback on the idea, the most prominent of which has to be the fact that Mortal Kombat gets a lot more gory than Street Fighter.
You consistently see characters ripped apart, exploded, and otherwise utterly destroyed in Mortal Kombat, and so there’s a certain amount of expectation that at least some of that level of violence and gore will follow them. Developers like Capcom may not be too keen on having their characters portrayed in this manner, and so a harmony is naturally hard to come by.
That said, perhaps the times are a changin’ given Capcom’s coming crossover moves and Nakayama’s comments.
We recently heard him talk about motivations for new SF6 DLC characters being more along the lines of cultural backgrounds and fighting styles, and the game has yet to have much representation from Outworld or Edenia, for what that’s worth.
What’s more, the developers spoke on their motivations for crossover or guest characters in general being aimed primarily at the growth of the fighting game genre more generally, which resonates heavily with his next statement to VG 24/7.
“I mean, obviously I can’t make any promises,” he continues, “But the fact that we’re having this conversation just means that more and more people are getting interested. There is a chance for the fighting game community to reach a whole new audience – so we see it as a positive thing, and we encourage that kind of discussion and comments.”
We too encourage more discussion on this topic in the comments, so fire away at the idea of characters from Mortal Kombat and beyond joining Street Fighter in the future.