Street Fighter Legacy's next step

11.05.2010
High quality short film Street Fighter: Legacy is tearing up YouTube at nearly 1 million hits as of this afternoon (the counter is stuck at 992,119 views at press time). With fan enthusiasm riding high, producer/director Joey Ansah already has his sights on the next step in what he hopes may turn into a series.

Speaking to GamePro this afternoon, said he was eager to sit down with Capcom and talk about plans for more Legacy -- either in a full movie format, or in a series installment.

"The plan was always to do more," he said. "I always wanted to do a series or a movie and this ended up being the best [method]. If the fans get behind it -- which they have -- it's going to make it all the more easy to get the real deal off the ground which is the next step. We would love to do a couple of movies, maybe a trilogy or a prologue series and then a movie."

Going the series route, Ansah and his producer, , said they'd want to do something on Xbox Live where they could get away with charging only a small amount for a series of short films to tell the whole story.

"Given how many fans there are, if you do new media [like] Xbox where you can get content full HD, with great sound, and most people have nice flat screens, I think that's the way to go," Ansah said. "So you could have maybe these 10 minute episodes that you pay maybe 50 Xbox Points or the equivalent of 50 cents. We would like to try something like that out."

"That way the fans get to support the movie," Quella added.

Assuming Capcom goes for it and a format deal is worked out, Ansah's already ready to tackle the next part of the story. His ambition is to tell the back story behind Street Fighter II (since that's where most fans discovered the series), which would require a lot of casting to get young Ken and young Ryu right -- not to mention finding someone to fill Chun-Li's epic thighs.

"Luckily, I have I would say 80 percent of all the characters already cast," he said. "You've seen my Ryu and Ken and me as [nightmare version] Akuma... I've got a lot of the other characters bookmarked. There's a couple that I would need to do quite a wide casting search for. Chun-Li's a tough one."

With fan support, however, Ansah and Quella are confident they can fully realize Ansah's vision beyond the little slice of awesome that is Street Fighter: Legacy.

"I want to level with the fans and speak to them face-to-face and say look, I?m one of you guys," Ansah said. "Yeah, I benefit from working in the film business but I'm still a little guy on my own compared to the massive machine that is Hollywood, but someone's got to do something about it. I've done the hard part with my team -- all you guys need to do is to get behind us, support it, drive it forward, and we can't fail."

Read the full text of GamePro's interview with Ansah and Quella tomorrow morning.