Street Fighter II Cover Painting (SNES)

Steve Hendershot’s book, Undisputed Street Fighter: The Art and Innovation Behind the Game Changing Series, is an investigation into the history and cultural impact of the Street Fighter series. The book notes that Street Fighter II established a new genre of player-versus-player gaming and gave new life to a floundering arcade industry at the time. [1] It has also influenced popular culture as the theme of a variety of media, from Hollywood films to comics. To create Street Fighter II’s marketing materials for the U.S., Capcom (creator of the Street Fighter franchise) hired the ad agency Moore & Price, who in turn hired artist Mick McGinty. McGinty implemented an Imaginative Realist approach to highlight the violence, intensity, and emotion of hand-to hand combat. In reference to the above Street Fighter II Super Nintendo cover painting, McGinty states, “That was the one I enjoyed the most, and I had all kinds of freedom to do whatever I wanted, recalls McGinty “I just started doing sketches, airbrushing and having a blast It was a real craft back then, in the analog days.” McGinty references the traditional airbrush painting technique he implemented. Before moving forward with each component, McGinty first faxed preliminary sketches to Moore & Price for review. Upon approval, McGinty’s process was to start with painting the figures, and then fill in the background. Collector Adam Harvey states, “These images are iconic. The Street Fighter II cover for Super Nintendo is one of the most widely see images among western gamers.” [1] When Street Fighter II was conceptualized, arcade owners and Capcom employees were concerned that the number of possible algorithmic outputs from the various of fighting moves was too complex to for the player to process. To their pleasant surprise, upon the game’s release, the opposite occurred: the positive response to the game’s complexity was historic. This foreshadowed a future effect: Today, 35 years later, gaming’s most successful game is also its most complex: Magic the Gathering is a game with over 20,000 possible interchangeable moving parts in operation. [2]

[1] Undisputed Street Fighter: The Art and Innovation Behind the Game Changing Series 2017 p. 60
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613489/magic-the-gathering-is-officially-the-worlds-most-complex-game/