Street Fighter IV: A Random Walk Down Community Lane

Honoring A Legacy

15 years ago this past weekend, Street Fighter IV, which I led all marketing for, came out. Before The Lay Out , Street Fighter was my absolute favorite community-building experience. I left EA Sports, where I was Senior Brand Manager for the EA Sports label, after only 3 months for the opportunity to join Capcom as the Director of Marketing to lead the launch and comeback of one of the most iconic video game franchises on the planet. Street Fighter 3 was objectively a dumpster fire (sorry, not sorry) that most people don’t even realize came out, leaving an 18-year gap between SF2 (put your quarter up!) and SFIV. As Producer Yoshinori Ono said early on, SFIV was all about bringing back something that was even better than the community’s best memories. ?We knew that there was built up demand in the marketplace, but we were unsure of how big that demand actually was. In the time since Capcom had released a new Street Fighter title, Street Fighter remained a part of gaming and pop culture as fighting-game tournaments like EVO still featured older Street Fighter games and spoofs of the brand such as ‘Street Fighter: The Later Years’ continued to be produced. The community kept the brand alive and for those of us working on the title, the marketing campaign for SFIV was all about fun, quite a bit of nostalgia and rewarding the community that had kept the Street Fighter brand relevant.

A 15-Month Build Up

From the time we announced Street Fighter IV in October of 2007 to its launch in February 2009, over 15 months later, we knew that we had a lot to prove as we were aiming to get back to the kind of frenzy that Street Fighter II had created at the height of its popularity. From a development standpoint, this meant bringing back iconic characters such as Ryu and Chun-li and that the game must ‘feel’? like SFII so that new gamers would enjoy it while the people that had grown up with SFII would feel like they were back at their local 7-11 playing their favorite game. In order to show people how the game felt, we had to get the game in the hands of as many fans as possible and we popped up everywhere from industry events to cultural events lik Sneaker Pimps to the Magic Apparel show in Vegas. We even had our own events called ‘Fight Clubs',?these events, concepted by Capcom’s PR team and modeled after the movie by the same name, were all about getting gamers together in no frills/ unexpected locations to play SFIV long before the game’s release. From a warehouse in downtown LA to a bodega basement in Brooklyn, these underground events were sometimes only announced a day in advance yet would still draw crowds of hundreds.?

HADOUKEN!

As with the community platform that I founded in 2020, The Lay Out, the whole campaign was about community. The SFIV campaign culminated in a first-of-its-kind video game launch party which focused on over 2,500 actual fans (not C-list celebs who don’t actually play video games) in a 26k sq ft take over of the Geffen Contemporary at the MOCA in LA which was appropriately called a love letter to Street Fighter (get out of my head Destructoid!).? My team and I personally stuffed 2,500 gift bags for the community, Faith brought Christopher Wallace Jr (Biggie’s son) by (SF2 is being played in Notorious BIG’s first-ever video, Juicy), I brought together artists to customize original Street Fighter arcade cabinets and many other activities were available for fans to experience the universe of Street Fighter. While the second SF movie, timed to the release of SFIV, was as bad as the first one featuring Jean Claude Van Damme, this launch party led to it opening on an additional 500+ screens (sorry about that…).

The collective efforts of product development and marketing culminated in US sales of over 500,000 units within the first few days of release, ultimately beating sales expectations by ~200,000 units, and one of the highest Metacritic scores of 2009 and was called out in GameStop’s financial reports as having an outsized contribution to their earnings (alongside Resident Evil 6 which I also led the initial marketing campaign concept for).

A New Challenger Has Entered The Arena!

And then came Super Street Fighter IV, less than a year later… ?? We knew that we would face challenges. From a marketing communication standpoint, what would we say to the fans that would make them come back to the franchise again? I loved the advertising that was done for Street Fighter IV in early 2009. The ads featuring iconic character imagery along with a call to action of ‘Let’s Do This’ and lines such as ‘Hit It Again For The First Time’ and ‘Return Of The Beatdown’ had received such great fan reactions that I really wanted to raise the bar.

I conducted research that showed us that communicating the newest features of the game, while not making players feel like they were buying a massive patch to Street Fighter IV, and the lower price of $39.99 were critical to our success. One of the most interesting things that came out of the research was the confirmation of something that anyone who had attended a Street Fighter event has probably noticed. Unlike most games and franchises that have racial and ethnic breakdowns which roughly correspond to the U.S. population, Street Fighter IV significantly over-indexed within Black and Asian-American communities and significantly under-indexed with white consumers.?

Street Fighter x The Culture

Armed with the knowledge of what we had to say and who we were speaking to, we could have gone in many directions. Our ads could have featured players that looked like they had stepped out of a Benetton ad surrounded by dozens of bullet points and screenshots, but this would have been extremely lazy of us. We wanted to do something that would speak to all audiences but that would particularly resonate with our more multicultural-slanting audience. Ultimately we ended up in a much better place and with a campaign that is still one of the favorites of my career.

While the world is currently collab obsessed, that wasn’t the case 15 years ago. I had always loved collaborations and artist series. I loved things like the Mountain Dew Green Label Art Project as I like the idea of brands taking risks and letting other people tell the world how they interpret a brand. As mentioned previously, at the launch event for Street Fighter IV, I had eight different people from the art, gaming and fashion worlds redesign old school Street Fighter II arcade cabinets because art has always been integral to the world of Street Fighter. Following this arcade project, and as we started discussing what to do with this campaign, working with artists felt perfect and our artist-series campaign was born. We posed a classic character with a new character and brought in artists 123Klan, Dalek, Futura, Cody Hudson and Grotesk were brought in to communicate the new features, price and what they love about Street Fighter, all the things that research had showed us must be communicated. While these artists were unfamiliar to corporate types, at the time, for any Complex or Antenna magazine-reading, sneaker-collecting hipster, they likely owned or had coveted a piece of art, a vinyl toy, skateboard or article of clothing that was done in collaboration with one of these artists. Our agency did a fantastic job of expanding this concept to TV by using amazing animations which highlight the characters and features of the game and my friend Hawaii Mike, who had also done the Mountain Dew Green Label Art Project got hit record producer Just Blaze to do the music.?

More Than Just A Game?

With the launch of Super Street Fighter SFIV, I was also able to continue doing, one of my favorite things, meaningful collab. I personally worked with Simone Legno of Tokidoki to do a New Era hat, tracked down the right person at Nike (a decade before I worked for Nike) to make Ryu and Chun-Li themed dunks (you can grab a pair on StockX for the bargain price of $2,200) and even got Kid Robot to do their first-ever video game collaboration when they made a SF x Kid Robot blind box series (a collaboration that continues to this day). In the case of Nike and Kid Robot, I got my friend Erik Ko at Udon Entertainment, the creators of the Street Fighter comics, to design key elements of both collabs to add to the authenticity and storytelling..

The crazy thing is, I don’t even play Street Fighter. I consider myself a protector, steward and builder of communities and as such, I respect almost any community that loves anything like Street Fighter fans love their game. I’m honored to have been part of this moment in history. #Hadouken #StreetFighter #LetsDoThis