Capcom’s Red Earth gets a console release more than 25 years after its debut

Back in the ’90s, Golfland USA was a magical place. It looked just like every other miniature course, with its ticket counter and arcade, but there was something special about it.

Sunnyvale was home to many businesses involved in the U.S. arcade gaming industry. Sega was located approximately 20 miles from the center. Atari was approximately 10. Capcom was just one of the many. When those games were in development, companies would often drop them at Golfland. It wasn’t uncommon to walk in and see games that were not only unreleased, but hadn’t yet been announced.

This was a huge deal for a child obsessed with gaming news. Although I resided a good distance away from the region, I always tried to make it a habit of visiting when I was there. And frequently, I saw games that hadn’t yet been officially unveiled. X-Men vs. Street Fighter. San Francisco Rush 2049. I’d try to take photos for whatever amateur fanzine or website I was working on at the time, and the employees would yell at me to stop. This was a riskier job, but I always felt like I was looking at something secret.

On one of those trips, I was able to stumble onto Red Earth, a new game from Capcom that looked unlike anything I’d seen before. The game was fighting, with a story that revolved around boss fights. There was a mode called “versus”, but there were only four characters. This was set in strange fantasy, with excellent animations and character-sprite designs.

As I learned later, it was the first game for Capcom’s new CPS-3 arcade hardware, which allowed a level of detail unmatched by other 2D games at the time. It felt more like a game made for those like me who enjoyed fighting games but weren’t as invested in the competitive aspect that has made this genre so popular.

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Asked about the game’s origins now, more than 25 years after the initial release, producer Takashi Sado tells Polygon the idea behind it all came about due to a desire to level the playing field for different types of players.

“When I started working on the proposal for Red Earth in the mid-’90s, fighting games were enjoying a great deal of popularity,” he says. “As a matter of course, I followed this trend and planned the game as a fighting game, but at that time, I was feeling that the skill level [difference]The gap between players was widening. It wasn’t easy to bridge this skill gap, so we thought, Can’t we compensate for this to some extent by changing the parameters, equipment, etc.? This is why we decided to incorporate a character progression element.”

Sado cites early-’90s Capcom action games like Magic SwordAnd The King of DragonsThey share some loose connections to thematic fantasy with Red EarthAs inspirations for how to make that kind of progress, see the following: This allows players to level up characters and to use passwords in order to go back to where they were.

Golfland was only a half an hour long that day. I played what I could, and snapped photos on the way out, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was a great style, I enjoyed the way it worked and there were so many more things to discover. This was my final time seeing the game at an American arcade.

It is somewhat famous. Red EarthIt was then used to determine what qualifies as an arcade release in the United States. It was localized — Red EarthIt is the Western title. War-Zard in Japan — but given how few units even established brands like Street Fighter were selling at that point, the difference between an unknown quantity on expensive new hardware being officially released or not seems almost like a matter of opinion. Two former Capcom sales representatives were contacted by me to tell this story. Neither of them remembered that the game existed.

Despite the game’s limited reach in the West, it’s managed to stick around in various references and appearances over the years, and it continues to have fans at Capcom Japan. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Red EarthCharacters made it into Super Gem Fighter Mini MixAnd Capcom Fighting Evolution. In recent years, more Street Fighter 5Menat, a fortune-teller holds a named crystal ball. Red Earth’s half-man, half-lion king Leo. And there were many. Red EarthMonster Hunter Series director Kaname Fujioka (who also worked as an artist) thanks for the references in Monster Hunter. Red EarthNinja Kenji was younger in his career.

As it turned out, Red EarthCapcom was also motivated to create the next version of its game. Capcom Fighting Collection — a package due out June 24 that includes Red EarthIn its initial console release, Darkstalkers Series, CyberbotsStreet Fighter, Street Fighter spinoffs Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, Super Gem Fighter,And Hyper Street Fighter 2.

As Capcom Fighting Collection producer Shuhei Matsumoto tells it, the collection came about when longtime Capcom programmers, who go by Kobuta and Muumuu, approached him, saying, “Matz, it’s time to bring Red Earth to current-gen consoles!”

It was one thing that led to another and eventually the collection expanded with new games. But the team hasn’t let Red Earth get overshadowed. On the collection’s box art, for example, rather than established characters like Ryu appearing front and center, Red Earth’s Leo gets the majority of the real estate.

Many people find the appeal of Capcom Fighting CollectionThe Darkstalkers Series or Puzzle Fighter — games that reached a certain level of success the first time around and have proven commercial appeal, or at least enough to headline a collection of beloved leftovers.

But for some at Capcom, it’s a chance to revisit a game that was a victim of tough circumstances the first time around. And for me, it’s a perfect chance to finish what I started playing more than 25 years ago.