On October 21st, gaming journalist Mollie L. Patterson posted the first video for her Restart Fanzine YouTube channel, and it’s a doozy. Back in 1994, DieHard GameFan Magazine received a VHS tape from Data East designed as media outreach for their then ongoing lawsuit against Capcom on the subject of whether Fighter’s History amounts to copyright infringement of Street Fighter II. Mollie L. Patterson acquired this tape while she was working for GameFan, and upon rediscovering it in storage, decided to share this peculiar piece of retro gaming history to the world.
That a YouTube video should exist about this lawsuit isn’t necessarily remarkable. You’ll find plenty more if you run a search yourself. What makes this particular video noteworthy is that unlike a modern YouTube equivalent, this video was not intended for distribution to wide audience. Data East only sent it to media publications in the hope and expectation that the arguments made in the video would inform reporting on the lawsuit. There’s no pretense of objectivity in the video. The lawyer in the video is obviously working for Data East and presenting a factual argument to the effect of overcoming the obvious bias in her position.
And what is that position? Well, the short of it is that Fighter’s History is not a copyright infringement of Street Fighter II. For those of you who don’t know your history on the topic- the courts agreed with Data East’s position that while Fighter’s History contained many similar elements, most obviously the visual style, these ideas were too generic for Capcom to reasonably assert copyright. It’s for the better of everyone that Capcom lost, in retrospect. A strict interpretation of copyright could have effectively strangled nearly any new fighting games from this era in the crib.
Nobody can reasonably argue that Fighter’s History wasn’t influenced by Street Fighter II, and maybe even a rip-off of it. Whether that really rises to the level of infringement is a pretty high standard though. Is a breakdancing British punk rocker really the same as an American soldier just because they both have green and yellow themed palettes and use sonic booms? Are all Thai kickboxers created equal when one’s a giant and the other isn’t? Is a mostly nude hairy Soviet man functionally equivalent to a modern Roman gladiator because they both wrestle? Is a Spanish cage fighter the same as a French gymnast because they’re both European acrobats? The closer is really the best one, though, with the lawyer stating, in a fully deadpan serious tone, that it’s absurd to say that an austere opera singer is the same as Chun-Li because Chun-Li has an infamously girlish and silly victory pose.
The lawyer also sticks to the facts of the case- focusing mainly on the Street Fighter II character art from the player’s guide because that was the only evidence Capcom submitted to trial for the original designs. Did Capcom have their own media outreach video? Someone probably knows, although whether we’ll see any evidence of it is another question entirely. While the video itself makes it clear that there’s another part entirely where she discusses the similarity of special moves, Mollie L. Patterson has confirmed that she does not appear to have this video but has promised to post the sequel as well if she ever finds it.
It’s strange to think that this lawyer, who doesn’t identify herself by name in the video has become a minor YouTube celebrity, with the upload having 418,702 hits as of this writing and counting. That was a sensible decision on her part, in retrospect, although she probably couldn’t have imagined that thirty years later so many people would be watching a simple video originally intended only for dozens of people in a strict business context. This media outreach video isn’t just fascinating for its direct vantage point on a major lawsuit in retro gaming history. Just as a matter of style, with YouTube content creators always going for maximum flash, the sheer simplicity of the presentation here is a retro gem in its own right.
