Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation

» see daletto.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Capcom and Games Arena set up a Tokyo company called Daletto in the late 2000s to make online games for the Japanese PC market, and put Keiji Inafune in the president's chair. Inafune is the Mega Man man, later the Dead Rising man, and at this point he was running a browser-era venture whose flagship product was a Street Fighter you controlled with a mouse. Not a mouse as a fallback. A mouse as the entire input scheme.

Left click punched and right click kicked. Special moves came out of how you moved the pointer, with the scroll wheel doing work too, which means the quarter-circle that arcade players had been drilling since 1991 was now a gesture. The characters were rendered as jointed action figures, because the game was built as a tie-up with Kaiyodo's Revoltech line, and the posable-toy look was the point rather than a budget compromise. Free to play with item sales, and your avatar was customizable down to the body parts.

The roster is where it stops sounding like a Street Fighter game at all. Ryu, Chun-Li, Zangief and Guile were there at launch, with Ken arriving that October. Then it kept going: five characters out of Jin Yong's wuxia novels, a run of Cyborg 009 characters, Batsu and Akira from Rival Schools, Johannes Krauser II from Detroit Metal City, Space Sheriff Gavan, and for Valentine's Day 2009 a downloadable Barack Obama. One original character, Shin, was added in December 2008 alongside the wuxia cast.

It launched on Daletto's own portal on 9 July 2008 at five in the afternoon. On 18 December it also went up on Hangame, NHN Japan's enormous game portal, which should have been the distribution break that fixed everything. Daletto posted the closure notice on 1 June 2009. Top-ups through Hangame stopped on 2 July and paid items stopped on 6 August. At four in the afternoon on 31 August 2009 the Daletto version and the Hangame version went off together.

~ the dossier ~

~ various circumstances ~

The notice gives one reason for the closure, 諸般の事情, which translates to "various circumstances" and is the standard Japanese formula for declining to say. What the notice does admit is more interesting than any reason: the CPU battle mode and the tournament mode that had been promised were not going to be delivered. A shutdown notice that itemizes the roadmap it is canceling is rarer than one that explains itself. Nothing in any source says Capcom pulled the license, and it would be easy to assume that and wrong to print it. Daletto also closed its separate 3D community product that September, which suggests the company rather than the license was the problem.

~ what a mouse can and cannot do ~

Mouse-only fighting games are not a genre, and there is a reason for that. The inputs that make a 2D fighter deep are mostly about precision in time rather than in space, like a two-frame link or a reversal on wake-up. A pointer is excellent at space and poor at the kind of exact timing a stick and six buttons give you, so a mouse-driven Street Fighter is less a port than an argument that the series could be something else.

Japan in 2008 was a reasonable place to make that argument. The PC free-to-play market there was built on portals like Hangame, reaching people with no fight stick at home and no intention of buying one, and a Street Fighter that asked for nothing but the mouse already on the desk is a sensible read of that audience. It ran for fourteen months. Capcom went on to put Street Fighter IV in arcades and on consoles the same year, where the stick and the six buttons stayed exactly where they had always been.

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