Sirlin On SSFIITHDR Interview

23 Jul 2009 at 10:48:10 by Tim McDonald

David Sirlin is known as the lead designer of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and the man behind the balance changes, but he's also known for an unintentional furore over Street Fighter IV, his incredible prowess with fighting games, and his website - Sirlin.net - which contains a series of essays on game balance, playing to win, and a lot more. Currently focusing on his Yomi card game, we thought it was high time we caught up with Sirlin to ask a lot of questions.

This first part of our interview focuses on the history of Street Fighter and the vanishing arcade culture. Check back tomorrow for talk on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and a whole lot more.


You're perhaps best known as a fan of arcade games to the extent that you've taken part - and, on occasion, succeeded quite magnificently - a number of tournaments, but also as an expert on balance. Was there some sort of spark when you played Street Fighter for the first time?

Street Fighter 1, I liked it at the time even though it was clunky. I used to keep track of how many times I had beaten Sagat, the final boss. Street Fighter 2 was, of course, a huge jump in that it got people interested in playing against each other, and in learning more and more techniques and tricks and so forth. I remember thinking "Wow, they really let people do the special moves now. It was so hard to fireball in Street Fighter 1."

When I first discovered SF2, there was a cast of arcade "characters" immediately. A friend and I referred to one guy as "Dhalsim Master." How did he do it? He seemed so good! And then another guy actually looked like Guile in real life. He later went on to work at that arcade and had a name tag that said "Guile." At one point, my friend and I found ourselves in his car, on the way to some other arcade. We thought that was awkward because we weren't actually friends with him, so it seemed surreal. Then we noticed his car's sound system was labelled "Sonic Boom" and that's for real. He was one of the best Guile players in my area, too.


That's incredible. Did he try to make himself look like that, or...? The "Sonic Boom" makes me wonder.

It's just coincidence that his face looked a bit like Guile's but he seemed to try to make himself look even closer. (Laughs) And apparently, "Sonic Boom" is a brand of car stereo.


I'm pretty much rephrasing what I said before, but when it came to Street Fighter 2 - did you grow into the genre as time went on, or was it love at first sight?

I was into SF2 from the beginning. I had to figure out how to beat Dhalsim Master and The Zangief Guy, and so on; no other arcade game had a culture like that. Like, I met a guy who was pretty good at Gauntlet, and I learned I could unplug the game Gauntlet 2 and the first play through would always have an special powerup potion on level six - but that's about the extent of it. Nowhere near the instant culture that surrounded Street Fighter 2. Not to mention the game itself was good.


Which does tend to help. Considering all of this, then - do you think the decline in arcade culture is a real shame? I know it's still reasonably strong in Japan, but in the UK at least, arcades are nowhere near the level of popularity they used to have, and to the best of my knowledge it's the same in the US.

Japan is physically much smaller than the US, and that alone helps arcades there - you are never so far away from opponents as we are here - but arcades also did plenty to kill themselves. The business was based on having more and more expensive hardware that you can't have at home, but home consoles got better and better and starting having pretty amazing graphics themselves. Arcades should have realized they were marketing entirely the wrong thing. Their strength was that they are a social gathering place for gamers, not that they have expensive hardware, and I think it took far, far too many years for most to realize that. By then, their ship had sailed.

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