Barack Obama Was In Street Fighter, Did You Know?

In today’s world, having special guest fighters in fighting games is an effective form of marketing. A friend, who’s also my business mentor, used Steve Harvey’s Think Like A Man as a solid example. The book received a film adaptation of the book, itself, which my friend explained was “cross-pollination.” This would entice people who have watched the film to buy the book and vice-versa.

Bandai Namco exercised cross-pollination with Tekken 7. The game’s first special guest character was Akuma from Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise, but Akuma played an integral part in the game’s story.

The second special guest character was Noctis who’s the main hero of Final Fantasy XV. He had no connected story but was a friend to Lars Alexandersson, the illegitimate son of Heihachi Mishima.

The third special guest character was Geese Howard who’s the main antagonist of Fatal Fury and a major antagonist in The King of Fighters. Geese, who is the criminal kingpin of Southtown, wants to take control of Heihachi’s empire.

The last special guest character, which was completely something out of the blue, was Negan from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead.

Arika’s Fighting EX Layer, the spiritual successor to the Street Fighter EX series, did the same thing by having Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury as a special guest character.

The PlayStation 3 & Vita ports of Street Fighter X Tekken featured Cole MacGrath from InFamous as a special guest character.

The latest installment of Samurai Shodown featured guest characters from For Honor and Guilty Gear.

The Mortal Kombat franchise, ever since Mortal Kombat 9, featured special guest characters.

Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise never really relied on the appearances of special guest characters but it did bring in characters from other games that share the same in-story universe, but there is one obscure title that featured special guest characters, Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation.

SFO: Mouse Generation was a PC title that was only available in Japan, where players control their characters with a mouse. The game was co-developed by Daletto (which was a subsidiary of Capcom) and Revoltech (a company that makes plastic figurines), which is why the character sprites were 3D digitized figurines.

The graphics weren’t that great, which was one of the many reasons SFO: Mouse Generation received poor reviews.

But this is NOT about the game, itself, this is about the special guest characters.

SFO: Mouse Generation is the only game in the franchise that used special guest characters from intellectual properties that do NOT belong to Capcom. This is also the only title in the franchise that only used a small number of actual Street Fighter characters.

Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken, Zangief, and Guile were the only fighters on the roster who are actually from Street Fighter.

The game’s roster also had Batsu Ichimonji and Akira Kazama, the latter officially added in Street Fighter V, from Rival Schools: United by Fate.

The game’s non-Capcom characters were from Space Sheriff Gavan (Gavan), Cyborg 009 (Cyborg 004, Cyborg 005, Cyborg 006, and Cyborg 009), Detroit Metal City (Johannes Krauser II), and the works of Louis Cha (Hu Fei, He Tieshou, Mei Chaofeng, Zhou Botong, and Linghu Chong).

SFO: Mouse Generation did have one original character, Shin, a Taekwondo user who is half-Japanese and half-Korean. This game was released years before Super Street Fighter IV and that makes him, not Juri Han, the first Korean character and the first TKD specialist in Street Fighter.

The game did a Valentine’s Day special by releasing Barack Obama, the actual former President of the United States, as a playable character. When the DLC was released, Obama was still the 44th POTUS.

Obama played like Ryu but was followed by a speech bubble with phrases such as “Yes we can!”

The game classifies Obama as an “original” character because he doesn’t have an origin story for the game. This is likely the one and only time that Obama will be in a fighting game but he is not the only U.S politician to be put in a fighting game.

An obscure 2D-animated title called BloodStorm was released at arcades in 1994 and it was supposed to be the “killer” of the popular Mortal Kombat franchise. If you entered the code “SENLIEB” (scroll down to “Shout-Out” in the link), you would get the character Hellhound but with an enlarged head of then-Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut who was part of the Democratic Party before switching his affiliation to Independent.

I doubt Lieberman will appear as a fighting game character again either.

SFO: Mouse Generation went out of service many years ago but the game is still worth mentioning for historical context.