>>12129409
They were initially conceived as boss characters. Usually in games you can't play as bosses, and even in fighting games after SFII many would be unplayable or limited to secret or unlockable

They were a boss rush, only considered regular characters now since they became playable and remained that way

>>12129409
Why can't you play as goro in mk1?

>>12129438
Goro breaks the conventions of a regular fighter.
None of the hidden characters in Street Fighter II deviates from the base roster - except for Vega climbing the wall in his stage maybe.
They weren't even particularly strong to be considered cheating like Akuma was in the later revisions.

>>12129409
They're bosses in the original game dumbass.

>>12129409
>a very strange design choice considering playable characters are one of the main features of a fighting game.
Anon... this isn't a fighting game, it is thee fighting game, the one that put the genre on the goddamn map. In the original Street Fighter, it was just Ken and Ryu who were playable and every other character was an enemy. Street Fighter 2 gave you 8 fighters and in that it was revolutionary. Letting you play as the bosses was probably not something they even considered.
Obviously there was some demand since Champions Edition came out a year later but SF2 is the original blueprint that every fighting game for years after copied, you can't expect perfection on the first try.

>>12129453
It was the first game in the genre, there were no conventions yet

>>12129465
>It was the first game in the genre
Platinum bait.

>>12129409
Yeah they fixed that in the sequels you know.

>>12129472
Yeah it was. SF and Karate Champ don't count as vs fighters, Smash doesn't either

>>12129465

what >>12129453 probably meant is that in their mind Goro isn't actually a fighting character, its more just a monster. Every other playable character is basically the same. All normals are the same, all have a projectile and a movement derived special and the same hitbox.

but what they don't realise is SF2 bosses were somewhat similar. Vega can't block, but has perfect evade when on the ground, plus the cage. Balrog has no kicks. and none of them follow the light-medium-heavy configuration either.

>>12129409
>Dhalsim, Blanka, Honda and Zangief (yes, especially back then) feels so NPC coded. They surely weren't designed to look cool,

I don't follow you here. What's cooler than a monster? And a big huge wrestler guy is no less cool than "man in karate gi". A fat sumo wrestler is fat and dumb yes but he's also imposing and cool in his way, and his hundred hand slap was very impressive to a spectator who had never seen this game (or this kind of game) before; you'd want to play as him or as Chun-Li to try out that crazy thing, and if you didn't happen to feel comfortable playing as the pretty girl then he'd be your man. And Dhalsim is THE spectacle of the game. Yeah he looks freaky, but his amazing stretchy-limb gimmick is extremely inviting to the kid at the roller rink who wants to try out a crazy novelty that looks enormously overpowered. Source: I was that kid at the roller rink and Dhalsim was the first character I really paid any attention to in this game, and therefore in this genre. (He was probably also the first character I ever played as.)

>>12129713
Oh, and for perspective: As a kid in 1990 or whenever that was (don't feel like looking up the release date) I did not for a moment consider whether you could play as the bosses, because I did not know there were bosses. How many kids put money into that particular machine without ever learning exactly how many characters there were? Or rather, what percentage of the money going into that machine came from such kids? I bet it's more than 50%. I dunno, just an idea. Of course some arcades would have quickly developed informal competitive "scenes" around this kind of game, and so the players there would quickly explore at least that far into the depths of the game, but would that have happened in MOST arcades? I have no idea. You could easily just be dazzled at the eight selectable characters though, I know that. Eight is so many! I'd played Yie Ar Kung Fu or some such a few years earlier, and you couldn't choose a character at all in that. And now I had EIGHT! Adding four more would have meant nothing to a new, casual player like me. And how many times would I have had to go back to that place and spent a bunch more quarters to get tired of all eight and start wanting more? I'd be sick of the game by then. Wanting more than eight is a hardcore thing, and hardcore fighting game players surely weren't who Capcom was aiming at then, because... they didn't exist right?? I dunno. Feel free to go back in time and decide not to have read this message.

>>12129409
Check out Street Fighter 1. The vast majority of the cast wasn't playable.

What I think is interesting is the alternate history scenario in which all the characters from Street Fighter 1 were playable.

>muh pressure based buttons
They released both versions of the cabinet right from the beginning.

>>12129409
It followed the old rules, bosses were supposed to have this mystique going on. You werent supposed to play as them and understand them, you werent supposed to main them. They were supposed to be this unknown entity.
Like playing Castlevania and saying "but i wanna play as dracula!" well, you cant. He's the boss.

Unplayable bosses in fighting games ended when VS games exploded in popularity and they needed new characters quickly to keep the money flowing.

So not a strange design choice at all, thats what it was like before they changed it all to make more money.

World Warrior on arcade and snes were the only licensed ports where the bosses were entirely unplayable, right?

And by that I mean they had no movelists. So if you hack and forceably play as a boss, you won't be able to input any moves as you normally would. IIRC even Shin Akuma on snes sfa2 has a move list.

>>12130164
There aren't that many ports of World Warrior at all. I think only the SNES and possibly Gameboy ports would have had access to the original game's source code. The rest are scratch made licensed recreations by 3rd parties. Capcom only provided the sprites, and sound effects.

>>12129464
Only Ryu was playable in SF1 retard

>>12131548
>There aren't that many ports of World Warrior at all.

I just did research and only did the snes port themselves while the rest were third party jank. They did do the game boy port, but that one came out in 1995 and had ssf2 portraits and selectable bosses so not really world warrior.

>>12129732
Technically, not even Ken was playable unless you were Player 2 and defeated P1.

>>12129409
youre brown

>>12129409
This was still an improvement over the first game, where ryu and ken were the only playable characters.