I Can’t Believe Street Fighter Built a Life-Sized Arcade Machine With Real Fighters – Watch It Here — Gaming

IMAGE COURTESY OF CAPCOM

Unlike, say, professional wrestling, Street Fighter the game features special moves that simply aren’t possible to imitate. No kid is going to be able to summon a hadouken fireball from their chi. Brazilians in the Amazon basin can’t electrify themselves like eels. And while yoga might indeed make a person more flexible, it’s never going to stretch human limbs to twice their size while delivering a punch. Perhaps a highly skilled martial artist can do a great spinning kick, but it probably won’t briefly carry them like a helicopter the way Ryu and Ken’s do. The new Street Fighter movie will utilize the best of modern special effects, but can it convince us?

Perhaps. The signature moves may be physically impossible, but with the right performance, a simulation might at least look credible. After all, the two previous Street Fighter live-action films largely eschewed the fantasy blows in favor of more realistic maneuvers. And now we have a sense of what a “real” game of Street Fighter might look like, thanks to an elaborate Times Square display.

A Full-Sized Game With Real Human Performers

As a promotional event, Paramount had an extra-large Street Fighter set-up in New York City, where performers dressed as the movie/game characters reacted to audience members hitting giant buttons, “playing” the game for “real.” Obviously they aren’t actually trying to hurt each other — it’s improvised choreography, like a wrestling match. And it’s up to the performers to react to signals sent to them by the giant controls — this isn’t the dystopian world of Neveldine and Taylor’s Gamer yet, where humans can be moved involuntarily by joysticks. Like the Street Fighter games themselves, this is all in fun. A couple of the movie’s stars even showed up to congratulate the fighters dressed as them:

“Is it a game or is it real?” asked Matthew Broderick, decades ago, in WarGames. “What’s the difference?” responded Joshua, the AI with America’s nukes under its command. Joshua learned that his winning move was not to play; with life-sized Street Fighter, the reverse is true. When there are more players, everyone wins, including those of us watching online from a distance. It was cool that movie theaters are putting Street Fighter II consoles back in their lobbies to remind everyone why we loved the franchise in the beginning. We had no idea they’d go this crazily further, and we love it.

It does seem a shame, though, that we can’t get some of the cast members of prior movie iterations to participate. Who wouldn’t want to manipulate Jean-Claude Van Damme’s spin kicks, or hear Chris Klein yell “Nash out!” for no particular reason? Kylie Minogue may not want to remember her past role as Cammy, but gamers certainly do. And judging by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ming-Na Wen stayed in Chun-Li shape over the years. Neal McDonough and David Dastmalchian are both in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so they could conceivably have a “Bison-off” in that realm someday. (The late Raul Julia retired undefeated, but they can fight for second-place.)

There was a Street Fighter movie game that replaced the original game characters with digitized photo-animations of the 1994 actors — it offered a content warning about “selected scenes of human-like characters in combative activity” — but that’s the closest we’ve come to controlling the big-screen world warriors for real so far. We can’t all make it to Times Square to see this new, real-world one, but perhaps it’ll tour the country before the new movie’s run is done. In the meantime, here’s a blast from the past that offers a sense of just how wild ’90s adaptations could be (including a 7-foot Wes Studi):

Which character do you have in a real-life Street Fighter situation? Summon your chi to tell us below.

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