At their base level, fighting game matches are centered around decision making similar to more traditional games like chess which Street Fighter's producer once sought to take extra inspiration from in a move that certainly would have turned the series on its head.

During his extensive interview at EGX 2019 this past weekend, Capcom's Yoshinori Ono revealed that he at one point had what he believed to potentially be a "revolutionary" idea to make Street Fighter's big return a turn-based simulation.

Martin Robinson from Eurogamer asked Ono whether his team had considered making any radical changes to bring Street Fighter back after such a long hiatus like turning the game to a first-person view or a gritty reboot.

Street Fighter's executive producer laughed when he heard first-person brought up though he did reveal the future of the series could have taken a more drastic turn.

"I did have an idea though that I thought may be revolutionary to turn the game into a turn-based simulation, so you would take the moves you wanted to do and put them together like blocks," said Ono during the interview. "Then they would run automatically, but obviously we didn't make that in the end."

Ironically, this idea of melding fighting game mechanics with turn-based gameplay would actually emerge later on with projects like the Yomi card game, Street Fighter's deck-building game and plenty of mobile titles out on the market.



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We'll never know how this alternate future of Street Fighter would have gone, but the actual concept may have been a bit ahead of its time considering this was years before things like smartphones became a ubiquitous product.

It was probably necessary to think outside of the box, however, as Ono also revealed that Capcom was originally 99.9 percent against making Street Fighter 4 though he was ultimately able to convince his bosses to give him a shot at reviving the franchise.