Development: Street Fighter III

From it’s polished frames to smooth animation, Street Fighter III is widely regarded as one of the best looking games to use pixel art. But just how much effort went into creating these beautiful characters?

Based on a variety of media and books, we’ve seen a plethora of Street Fighter III’s hand drawn frames, often strung together showcasing various animations. Rather than pixels on a screen, it seems the artists chose to use traditional drawings as their starting point.

From there, it’s assumed these images were digitized and the line art drawn over with pixels. We can see examples of this process in Hugo’s leftover prototype from Street Fighter III: New Generation, as well as other Capcom titles such as Street Fighter Alpha 2, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

Once these crude outlines were drawn and colours added, the final step would be to flesh out each frame with more detail and a tremendous amount of cleanup, culminating in the final image that you see in-game.

As a final note, the team behind this masterpiece is actually much smaller than you might assume, crediting 21 “object artists” in it’s first iteration. Just like Metal Slug, the raw talent of each artist is on full display! And if you find Capcom’s art interesting, I’d highly recommend checking out the recently released anatomy guide that was used by these teams around the time of Street Fighter Alpha and on.