Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono has revealed that developers Capcom and Namco are keeping their distance while working on their respective entries in the Street Fighter/Tekken collaboration project.
Speaking during a recent interview posted on Capcom’s website, beat-‘em-up maestro Ono-san said that both firms share little info with each other during development, and don’t even divulge which characters will appear in the games.
“We get in touch to share information prior to making an announcement, but for the most part we don’t share many of the details,” said Ono. “We’re reading the strategy guides and get some particular notes and advice about things to keep in mind, but we don’t share any of the character models or motion data. We don’t even exchange any information about which characters will actually appear in the game.
“Basically, there’s no point in developing a game separately if you’re constantly getting in each person’s way. For example, if we checked the work Namco had done on Ryu, we definitely want to tweak things ourselves. The same is true for Namco. There’s no point in mutually checking each other’s work, for it would diminish the individuality of each party. It has to be ‘Capcom does Tekken’ and ‘Namco does Street Fighter’.”
While both firms are technically rivals in the fighting game space, the Capcom producer was quick to point out that the collaboration is not about drawing comparisons between each project.
“The aim of this project is not to compare the two and get one up on the other, but to build a foundation for the next ten years of fighting games … To me, this project represents the ideal form of collaboration," he said.
Street Fighter x Tekken, developed by Capcom, will be released in March 2012 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Namco’s own effort, Tekken x Street Fighter, is still in the early stages of development and has yet to attract a release date.