I got the chance to speak with Street Fighter 6’s director and producer, Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto, about the surprising Fatal Fury characters coming to the Capcom fighting game and why they chose to collaborate with SNK for this unexpected crossover.
Summer Game Fest 2024 kicked off with a major announcement for Street Fighter fans, revealing four characters coming to Street Fighter 6 in Season 2.
While Bison and Elena are returning from previous Street Fighter titles, players were stunned to see Mai Shiranui and Terry Bogard making an entrance from SNK’s Fatal Fury IP.
This marks the very first time a mainline Street Fighter game has included guest characters from other franchises outside of Capcom — and while the two have collaborated in the past in the CvS series, it’s safe to say that no one expected them to ever link up again.
I quizzed Street Fighter 6’s Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto about why they chose to include Terry and Mai in Season 2, and the duo gave me the heartwarming backstory on how this collaboration came to pass.
“Two years ago, when EVO had their first live event after the global health issue, they were talking with folks at SNK to see what they could do to kind of celebrate this moment, which led to this exchange of unique posters that both Capcom illustrators and SNK had that involved both their characters and the other company’s characters,” Nakayama told me.
“And then from there, they talked about, ‘What else can we do to just get people more excited about fighting games in general?’ Which eventually led to the conversation of involving both Terry and Mai into Street Fighter 6. Hopefully, that helps get more people interested in fighting games, even if they aren’t necessarily very familiar with Street Fighter 6.”
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This brought up the inevitable question that had been bugging me since their reveal — does this mean that the Fatal Fury and Street Fighter universes are canonically connected?
I couldn’t get a solid answer out of them, but Nakayama did say that the two worlds are somewhat interlinked thanks to this character crossover.
“We can’t really speak too much about it since we’re Capcom, but our interpretation isn’t a very clear timeline. However, the Fatal Fury games, including this upcoming one, has a clear timeline. And then, that kind of universe is somewhat connected to Street Fighter 6 through this collaboration.
“The reason why we decided to work with SNK for the inclusion of Terry and Mai is because we see Fatal Fury and Street Fighter as brother and sister, like sibling IPs in the sense that we’ve had people at Capcom who’ve worked on both Street Fighter 1 and Fatal Fury back in the day. And even though they kind of ran in parallel, they were somewhat indirectly connected between those two titles.”
Terry is slated to join the fray in Fall 2024, while Mai will pick up the rear as the final Season 2 character in Spring 2025.
