In 1996, Red Earth – one of the top 10 titles in the upcoming Capcom Fighting collection – first appeared on Japan’s currency-driven arcade cabinet. Featuring a fantasy setting and a cast of colorful characters, Red Earth was unique in providing a single player RPG-like experience called Quest Mode where players would choose one of four characters and take on a series of bosses.
After defeating each boss, players will gain experience points to spend on attacking, improving defenses, or acquiring entirely new moves. During combat, bosses may throw away food, which players can use to replenish their health. As common as it was in Japan, this classic game with the Capcom Fighting collection has not yet been officially released outside the arcade. In fact, Red Earth was the first game the team decided to include in the collection!
How did this unique take on combat games come about? Takashi Sado, one of Red Earth’s producers at the time – and still Capcom – began working on Red Earth’s proposal in the mid-90s. As war games became increasingly popular at the time, he followed this trend and initially planned to make Red Earth just a fighting game. However, he felt that the level of skill was increasing among the fighting game players where more casual players could not keep up with more top-level players. To bridge this skill gap, his team thought they could be creative and compensate for it by changing parameters, tools or other aspects of the genre.
Also during this time, Sado was attracted to fantasy action games such as Capcom-developed Magic Sword and The King of Dragons. Both of these beat-up games had a character advancement system that drives the player-controlled character. With the fantasy game in mind and the urge to bridge the growing skill gap between fighting game players, a unique RPG-like character progression system was created for Red Earth.
Red Earth was also the first game made with the CPS-3 arcade system board, which came with Capcom’s best technology at the time. Due to the success of the new hardware, the Street Fighter III series was also built on CPS-3 before it was discontinued as Capcom’s ultimate proprietary system board.
Although this is Red Earth’s first release outside of arcade, its legacy was part of other Capcom games, such as Dragon Dogma: Dark Arisen and Alex’s costume in Street Fighter V – both endorsing the Lion King, Leo.
Speaking of Easter eggs, some of the games in the Capcom Fighting Collection had secret characters that could only be unlocked under certain conditions. Although they can still be unlocked using authentic input or methods, you can now unlock these characters with a simple menu toggle in-game. Other secret characters in Hyper Street Fighter II include Akuma; Oboro Bishamon in The Vampire Sevier: The Lord of Vampire; And Hutzel and Pyron in Darkstockers. How you play these secret characters is up to you.
We hope you enjoyed this pic behind the Red Earth screen. The Capcom Fighting Collection arrives on the PlayStation 4 on June 24 and features 10 different games, including five Darkstocker, Red Earth, Cyberbot, Hyper Street Fighter II, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix.
