Did you know YouTube Games—sorry, YouTube Playables—was a thing? Me neither. This perhaps explains why YouTube struck a deal with the upcoming Street Fighter movie, where the trailer is … also a game? Hosted on YouTube? Yeah.
The game itself is kinda fun—it’s basically a rhythm game in which you respond to prompts flashing across the screen by pressing the corresponding buttons, either onscreen or on your keyboard, which is wayyyy easier. At first, I thought the trailer was actually responding to my hits and misses, which would have been really cool. But after replaying it, I realized they had merely happened to line up with moments like Ken throwing Ryu through a wall or a scantily clad Chun-Li launching a pair of nunchaku through a photo of M. Bison.
Given Street Fighter’s origins as, well, a game, it’s as good a choice as any for a marketing stunt like this, although I will say that concentrating on the on-screen prompts makes it hard to focus on the actual trailer. This is a shame, because the movie looks… kind of awesome, to be honest.
As someone who grew up with Street Fighter II and never really got super into later instalments, it feels like this movie is aimed squarely at my demographic. The film seems to be set in 1993—the year Street Fighter II’s sort-of-sequel-but-not-really Super Street Fighter II was released—and the movie leans heavily on characters from this era of the series’ development. The trailer makes sure we see all the biggest characters: Ryu, Ken and Chun Li; there are brief appearances from Dhalsim, Sagat, Blanka, Zangief, Vega, and Balrog, all of whom will be familiar to casual fans. So too will E. Honda, who features in a spicy sauna scene, and Guile feat. Guile’s hair, which must have added a zero to the film’s budget in hair spray alone.
The series’ bewildering array of later games is represented, but sparingly—there’s Cammy from Super Street Fighter II, because of course, along with Akuma (Super Street Fighter II Turbo), Dan (Street Fighter Alpha) and Juli (Street Fighter Alpha 3). And finally, one for the real heads: Joe from the original Street Fighter. Oh, andthe trailer features a take on Street Fighter II’s iconic bonus stage, where you get to destroy a car (although sadly not a Cybertruck in this case).
Like 2021’s Mortal Kombat, the film looks like it walks a line between nostalgic silliness and some measure of seriousness, and does so with a measure of self-awareness that doesn’t appear to descend into obnoxious, arched-eyebrow “irony”—and being Street Fighter, it does so with less in the way of grittiness and more in the way of big, bold primary colors than its great franchise rival. (This more boisterous tone presumably also explains the presence of one Eric Andre, who we see momentarily hollering “Street fighting!” into a megaphone.) So yeah. It looks silly as hell, and a whole lot of fun.
You can watch the old-fashioned trailer embedded below, but if you want to “play” the trailer, you’ll have to head over to YouTube Playables.
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