Stream the Free Street Fighter 2 Documentary: A Fresh Opponent Approaches

When you’ve devoted years of your life to covering Street Fighter 2 history, it’s nice knowing you’re not alone. So when I heard about the documentary Here Comes a New Challenger a few years ago, I was excited to see another take on the greatest game of all time.

Now available for free on Tubi, the movie takes a broad look at the game and its impact, featuring former Capcom staff such as Yoshiki Okamoto and Yoko Shimomura as well as those who were involved in the game’s broader cultural footprint, like Steven E. de Souza (who directed the 1994 live-action movie), Paul Davies (who wrote about the game in the media), and Mick McGinty (who drew the game’s Western box art).

In an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. We previously connected with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Games of a Lifetime, Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Name of the Game, and Lewis Packwood about his obscure game hardware book Curious Video Game Machines. Below, we have Here Comes a New Challenger director Oliver Harper discussing how the film came about, what he had to cut, and the challenges involved with putting game history on camera.

Polygon: How did the idea for this kick off originally?

Oliver Harper: The documentary In Search of the Last Action Heroes which had I directed before Here Comes a New Challenger had a section on Street Fighter the movie, and being a huge fan of Street Fighter 2 since it arrived in arcades I naturally really enjoyed covering the Van Damme film, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. So when it came time to think of what I would do next, I thought Street Fighter 2 would be a good direction to go. Having been a YouTuber for over a decade providing retrospectives on movies I grew up on and even video games, I was fully aware of the retro scene and knew the game still had a strong following.

There had been a couple of documentaries on Street Fighter 2 but they didn’t really appeal to me, as they focused more on the competitive side of things, which is very important to the history of Street Fighter but in reality it’s a very niche side of the game because I never knew anyone who played or competed professionally in tournaments. It wasn’t a thing unless you lived in London and visited arcades on a regular basis. So I wanted my documentary to focus its impact on the general gamer, who enjoyed it on their SNES and Mega Drive and read the gaming magazines to get their fix, got hyped for the live action movie and ended up disappointed and found joy in discovering the animated movie thus making it more accessible to a larger audience.

One of the challenges I ran into on the book was that people often had different memories — or different versions of stories — of what happened behind the scenes at Capcom. But we didn’t interview all the same people. Did you run into that much on the film?

During the early stages of writing the questions for the interviewees, I had read your articles for Polygon on the development of the games to cross check what was said historically about the making of Street Fighter 2 and the various updates. I also went through all the old video game magazines from the USA and UK to make sure things were matching up. Most of the errors we encountered [were] with interviewees remembering dates and names incorrectly so we had to work around that or remove a section entirely because it didn’t make sense or it was inaccurate with a few details.

I also found Capcom to be one of the pickier companies in what they were willing to participate in and how much they wanted to control what former employees said. Did you deal with Capcom much for the film?

We didn’t deal with Capcom at all during the making and marketing of the documentary. I was informed early on that they were aware of the crowdfunding for it through a colleague of mine, but I had no direct contact with the studio throughout the whole production. Once we had finished the documentary and were in talks with some distributors, one had reached out to Capcom and they surprised me by saying both Capcom USA and Japan had seen the documentary and loved it. So the distributor was free to do what they wanted with it. It would’ve been cool if Capcom had publicly supported it or told people that they enjoyed it, but as it was unofficial and not commissioned by Capcom I understood they couldn’t do that.

Favorite thing you had to cut from the film?

We had a section on video game magazines that dealt with comparisons between the USA and the UK and how they shared information. I was a big fan of Computer & Video Games magazine, which Paul Davies had edited during I think its best years, and they wanted to mimic what the Japanese magazines were doing. And Games Master [was] more in favour of copying the American publications, so you saw this bias towards different franchises. CVG were still in support of Street Fighter whereas Games Master had shifted to Mortal Kombat. It was an interesting discussion but we couldn’t really find a place for it to fit.

There was also a discussion on the drug taking on Street Fighter the movie. Troubled productions are often very interesting — people love some drama — but during the process of legal clearance it was suggested we remove those details to not upset anyone, and play it safe.

Final thoughts looking back?

I’m very happy with the documentary. I managed to cover everything I wanted to, we managed to achieve a lot on a small budget, [and] my crew did an amazing job shooting additional b-roll to provide a lot of variety visually to the documentary. I didn’t want to just do a talking head then a clip from the video game for its entire run time. I wanted people to be visually engaged with it along with the story.

Of course, we were restricted somewhat by a run time. I wanted the audience to be able watch it in one go and not have it be a 4-to-5 hour documentary that people struggle to watch and have to return to over a couple of days, as the pacing becomes clunky and you fall into the problem of people losing interest.

There [were] of course people I wanted to interview but things didn’t work out due to time or budget restrictions. There [were] some cases that people didn’t want to be on camera. It’s far easier for someone to commit to an interview if it’s via email and not having the stress of a camera team turn up around their house or office. Others had a bad experience with Street Fighter in the case of the arcade port of the live action movie, and they didn’t want to drum up the past. Which I felt was fair enough but more voices involved in that game would’ve been great.

I hope more fans of Street Fighter 2 check out the documentary. On release we didn’t have the marketing muscle to get it in front of the fans, so I do believe a lot of the fanbase [is] unaware of it so hopefully they will discover it and have a nice trip down memory lane.