The internet is a marvelous tool for the retro
junkie.
I usually find myself unearthing items of curiosity which then leads to being up 5am,
researching further and further down the rabbit hole.
This is the very situation I was confronted with last week.
There I was, happily browsing through some retro forums when, this slapped me in the
face.
"Street Fighter II Turbo Beta for the Sega Mega Drive".
But wait, there wasn't a Street Fighter II Turbo for the Mega Drive.
So what's this?.... and so the journey begins.
After reading through several forum posts talking of, better animation, different backgrounds
and improved character sprites, I was hooked on discovering why this version of the game,
never made it onto Sega's finest platform.
My first port of call was to seek out this ROM file from 1994 and play it myself.
The ROM I found was 2 Mega Bytes in size, so equivalent to a 16 Mega Bit cartridge and
dated the 24th of December 1996.
But clearly it's more than possible for this date to change from the original purported
emergence date.
I then sat, and played, what appears to be a perfectly reasonable version of Street Fighter
II Champion edition, despite the logo claiming it's the turbo edition.
We have a Sega logo with misplaced TM lettering, but We've also got a menu, we have music,
we have a character selection screen, various stages, and all the other parts which make
up a completed game.
This is in fact, a fairly complete version of Street Fighter II Champion edition.
But other than the title, it has no features of the turbo, nor special champion edition.
So, let's go back and cover a bit of informal SFII history.
Developed by Capcom, Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior landed in arcades during Februrary
1991, a follow up to the more mundane Street Fighter from 1987.
Bringing 6 buttons, special moves, multiple characters, a combo system and competitive
multi-player combat, this was a game changer to the world of fighting games.
By this point, Nintendo already had a snug affiliation with Capcom, and so a home port
on the Super Nintendo was inevitable.
Arriving on June 10th 1992 in Japanese markets and developed in-house, by Capcom, it was
the first game to utilise a 16 Mega Bit cartridge for the platform, and paved the way for Nintendo
to claw back the Western gaming market from Sega's 16 bit machine, with the game arriving
in North America by August and Europe before the year was out.
Sega, however, weren't going to sit on their laurels and have the world chant "If you want
Street Fighter, you need Super Nintendo", and they duly approached Capcom who in turn
spoke to Capcom Japan and a deal was made, much to Nintendo's surprise and horror.
The exclusivity licencing agreement already in place with Nintendo meant Street Fighter
II couldn't be ported to another console, however, during March 1992 Capcom had released
a new arcade cabintet; Street Fighter 2: Champion edition, and being a different game, with
a different title, it was ripe for the picking.
Although games licenced from Capcom had been released for the Mega Drive before, they were
all developed internally by Sega.
This would be the first Mega Drive game to be published and developed by Capcom.....
although, to begin with, Capcom Japan actually outsourced the development to another company.
This other company remains unidentified, but perhaps there are clues as to who it is.
This was a normal procedure for Capcom, however it does suggest a certain degree of less care
shown towards the Sega release, from the outset.
But regardless, as 1993 came about, 2 things happened.
The first was, news spread to Sega that Nintendo had swiped up rights to Street Fighter II
Turbo.
The Mega Drive might have been destined for the Championship edition, allowing you the
play as the boss characters, or use the same character in a two player match, but the SNES
would trump them again with 15% faster gameplay and new character moves.
Again, subtle changes, which made a lot of difference.
Sega got wind of this, and made sure that the Mega Drive release would have these new
features as well.
The second was, by the spring, Capcom had an early build of the Mega Drive Champion
Edition back from their outsourced developers to demonstrate to their marketing guys at
Capcom in America, but the team in charge of development at Capcom Japan weren't happy
with results.
Joe Morici and the team in America were keen to get it polished up and released to meet
the June launch date, especially with Mortal Kombat on the horizon, but were outvoted by
Japan, which led to Capcom taking the game in house and developing it themselves.
Now this original version seems likely to have produced the screenshots which graced
the pages of Sega Power by June '93, bearing in mind it takes a month or so to edit the
article in and wait for the next issue, especially with distribution times, and as you can see,
it has a whopping black bar at the top of the screen, behind the energy bars.
Alone, this was enough to cause uproar and upset in the Sega fanbase.
Here was the Super Nintendo with it's larger screen and more polished look, and here was
our version, a year later, and looking half as good.
There was also this early advert preview, with the same black bars, same backgrounds,
and same sprites as we see in the Sega Power screen shots, although with the name "Branka"
rather than "Blanka", which we can assume was a pronunciation error lost in translation
and easily changed in subsequent builds.
So is this Street Fighter II Turbo Beta edition, the original version destined for the Mega
Drive.
Developed outside of Capcom, and then rejected in the Spring of 1993 in place of an in house
development?
Well, it certainly could be.
Let's look at the evidence.
1.
The most obvious difference is that this beta version doesn't have the same black bar at
the top.... which was the main gripe from those screen shots.
However, apart from that, everything else seems to match.
The sprites match, the backgrounds match, as does the character select screen, apart
from a few thumbnail tweaks.
If you compare these elements to the released game, they're all different - I mean, they're
pretty similar, as they're all based directly from the arcade graphics, but the differences
suggest the final version graphics have their own origins...
So maybe the outsourced developers got a bit further along with their programming, before
they were told to stop.
That would explain why the black bars are gone and also explain the Street Fighter II
Turbo logo, indicating changes were being made to bring the game up to the new Turbo
release.
2.
You might say, well maybe this Beta is just an early version of Capcom's in house development,
and they changed the art work.
But as well as not really fitting with the timeline, the coding for these two ROMs is
drastically different.
The beta is coded much more like a traditional Sega release, whereas the final Capcom version
follows very different conventions.
One obvious difference pointed out between this and the released version is the much
clearer speech in the beta, which uses a more traditional sound engine, compared to the
bespoke Capcom engine which produces compressed screeches in the final game, utilising split
sound channels.
Recent home-brew patches have managed to improve the Capcom engine drastically, without increasing
the size of the ROM to exceed the 24 Mega Bit size of the released version, suggesting
it was somewhat rushed.
The sound engine for the beta, is apparently the same sound engine used in Megaman: The
Wily Wars, which is a Capcom published title developed by Minakuchi Engineering....
So who knows, maybe this was the original developer of SF2 Beta.
3.
Most of the assets, including graphical assets in the final game, appear to be ported directly
from Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo.
Indicating that an internal Capcom team, simply ported their existing development over to
the Mega Drive hardware.
If you compare assets with the Beta version, they're different.. and it's not that they're
bad different, so there wouldn't be any reason to completely re-do them, unless this beta
ROM was abandoned.
In fact, some of the beta sprites, actually look more closely aligned with the arcade
sprites, whether you think they appear better because of this, or just un-enchanced for
the platform is subjective.
Take Ree-o or dew, however you wish to pronounce it.
Apart from palette differences the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive releases are identical.
However, the Turbo beta noticably has a slightly different posture, the belt hangs differently,
his left trouser leg opening is higher, as is his fist, along with various other alterations,
and this is taken from the same point of animation as the other versions.
Some also have a few extra frames of animation in them...
Such as Chun-Li's spinning bird kick.
4.
If the original was abandoned in the Spring, then it leaves time for Capcom to port over
their Super Nintendo version and make the additional changes for the Mega Drive release
on September 28th.
We're talking 6 months.
Which is tight, but do-able.
It also allows Capcom to covert code from the Turbo edition for the Super Nintendo,
released in July of '93, and incorporate all the additional features Sega required to turn
it into the Special Champion Edition, which allows players to use either Turbo: Hyper
Fighting or Championship edition game-play.
There are often rumors - and indeed pictures - of a prototype Champsion edition beta doing
the rounds as well, but from what I can tell from screenshots, this is just the Turbo beta
in an early stage of development.
Often with stretched screen shots distorting sprites and a slightly different colour palette.
So, if all this tallys, and this scenario is the reality, then I guess the question
is, why did they want to abandon this Turbo Beta?
I mean, it looks pretty good and it plays reasonably.
Well, the Capcom development team, apparently weren't happy with the coding under the hood.
It's hard to see this from a gaming point of view, but maybe adding the turbo speed
into this version, wouldn't have been feasible.
Maybe finishing up the game, with the additional features would have meant an even bigger cartridge
than 16 Mega Bit allocated for the development, and Capcom weren't happy with allowing 24
mega bits unless it was an in house creation.
So maybe pride in the Super Nintendo release meant they were keen to create a game to the
same standards as what is still Capcom's biggest selling home computer version, at 6.3 million
units on the original SNES incarnation.
Further to this, recall how I suggested the developer may have been Minakuchi Engineering.
Capcom Artist Keiji Inafune has actually claimed that their development of Mega Man: The Wily
Wars was slow going and described the debugging procedure as "an absolute nightmare".
Lending credence to the teams' view that the coding for the Street Fighter 2 beta, really
wasn't that great, and they were encountering the same issues.
What's clear is that feedback was poor, even apparently from a players perspective, and
although it looks good, upon playing this version myself, it feels, just a bit lifeless
and unresponsive.
Capcom's development team therefore probably thought the delay was worth it, in order to
retain their credibility and produce something at the very least, on par with the Super Nintendo
release, along with the added bonus of then being an in-house production.
After all, this was a 24 Mega bit cartridge, 8 more than the original Super Nintendo release!
Acknowledging it's a pretty reasonable beta there are still a lot of things which fall
short on the polish, in addition to what we've covered, we don't have the arcade attract
mode like the Special Championship edition does.
The speech samples sound better, but perhaps due to that, the sound is choppier and often
samples don't play at all.
The music is also a tad anemic on the beta release, and of course, importantly, despite
its name, it still lacks all the turbo features.
There are various differences all over, which lack the polish of the final game, and you
might suggest they could have been sorted, but, the question is, at what cost?
Now, peeking inside the ROM is just a tad outside my programming ability scope, but
it's actually interesting if you dig around in the ROM of the beta, because you can unearth
things like these names, which appear to be developers names - or pseudonyms at least
- none of which seem to be affiliated with the released version, and all of which appear
fairly elusive through internet searches.
You also examine the headers, indicating the game title is actually "Arm Wrestling", although
this doesn't help much with investigation, because it appears on a number of extracted
ROM files.
In any case, this has been an incredibly fun investigation for me, and of course, I may
be totally wrong.
But this feels like the best fit, given my humble knowledge.
I've actually fired off a few messages to the people involved to see if they can corroborate
any of this.
Of course, I could have waited for solid confirmation, but aside from the fact, I may never hear
back, that's really not the fun part for me.
I love these mysteries, I love discussing differences between screen shots and working
out what goes where.
It feels like being back in the playground in the early 90s and debating with friends
over early screen shots of the latest game in an issue of Mean Machines Sega.
As with life, it's about the journey rather than the destination....
So I hope you appreciated the journey at least, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Although if you disagree.
YOU ARE WRONG.
Oh, but there's one last mystery I want to clear up, and it's concerning Father Ted.
Viewers outside of the UK, you may have to bear with us.
So, issue 17 of GamesTM printed an article regarding a Street Fighter II game Father
Damien 'Damo' Lennon was playing with Father Dougal, and what version is it they're playing?
Hmmmm, well it looks a lot like the early Mega Drive version from the preview advert
and early screen shots, right?
This is what a lot of readers thought, perplexed about how they were playing this prototype,
because bearing in mind this episode aired in 1997***, it makes little sense.
The joysticks might indicate that it's one of the home computer version, but apparently
with several letters back and forth to GamesTM, the shows producer Graham Linehan, gave the
devastating news, that the joysticks weren't actually plugged in!
Anyway, this information appears on several current and archived web sites, with people
still umming and arring about it.
But here's the thing; looking at it from the off, to me, it's clearly Super Street Fighter
II on the Amiga.
The first give away is the screen is shunted to the right.
Common on Amiga games.
The second, and really the definitive proof is placing the two games side by side.
Everything matches perfectly.
The third is, YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE AMIGA 600, HERE.
And that's it.
There's nothing more to it.
Which brings this case to a close.
Ahhhhm, I love mysteries.
To be a *fictional* detective.
Everything would be so much simpler then.
Thanks for watching this investigation.
I appreciate you sticking to the end.
Please click, subscribe or contribute if you fancy it.
But in any case, have a great evening.