When people in the past talk about the inspirations behind Capcom's arcade fighting series Street Fighter, they typically default to discussing the role of Irem's Spartan X (better known as Kung Fu Master in North America) — and for pretty good reasons too.
Both games featured the involvement of the Street Fighter creator Takashi Nishiyama, with the Japanese developer previously namechecking the title in various interviews as one of the key factors in his decision to pitch the project.
But it appears that there was yet another lesser-known inspiration behind the game that many people have overlooked in the decades since — one that only recently came to our attention thanks to a Gamest magazine interview with Nishiyama from 1987, which has been newly translated by the folks over at Shmupulations.
In the past, our understanding of Street Fighter's origins was that Nishiyama was spacing one day in a work meeting one day when the developer began thinking about how interesting it would be to build a game based around Spartan X's boss fights and eventually scribbled some ideas on a notepad. This would then be used to create "a design document to convince the higher-ups at Capcom to greenlight the game", which would eventually set Capcom on the path to design and develop the arcade game, ahead of its 1987 release. However, in the Gamest Interview, Nishiyama offers a slightly different version of the tale, crediting an early electro-mechanical game with being the "genesis of the idea".
Speaking about how the game to be, Nishiyama told Gamest magazine:
"I was just zoning out, thinking about random game ideas. Back in the day, there was an electro-mechanical arcade machine where you did karate chops to break bricks. I was wondering if you could make that into a video game. That was the genesis of the idea for Street Fighter."
Looking online, one game we found that seems to match this description is the 1980 ESCO Trading Co. title The Karate, which featured pressure-sensitive pads that player could karate chop to test their strength and see how many blocks they could smash. It appears that Nishiyama ended up taking inspiration from this title, using it to come up with the control scheme for the deluxe version of Street Fighter's cabinet, which saw the player using two pressure-sensitive rubber pads to control the strength of their kicks and punches. It also seemingly inspired the inclusion of the block-breaking mini-games that could be used to earn bonus points.
Nishiyama told Gamest about the decision:
"I don't think there's been a video game yet that really captures the feeling of sports and athletics. Game centers often had this dark atmosphere where you're playing by yourself, but I was thinking it would be nice to have a game that's much brighter, something you could cathartically release your strength and power on. Also, I believe at that time Capcom had been thinking about making large-cabinet arcade games…"
You can read the rest of the translated interview here. It also includes Atari's involvement in designing this unique pneumatic-button-based version of the cabinet and some of the challenges they faced in bringing it to life, from swollen fists to disconnecting components.