A little more than a month ago, I was talking about the latest batch of SSF2THDR screenshots and expressed my feeling that there were some fairly excellent behind the scenes stories about the game's development just waiting to be told. But because I can be just as disappointingly passive and any other member of the gaming press, I didn't make any serious effort to actually get that story.
[Sirlin] said: "I struggled almost every day with that whole project trying to get something done. A real critical hurdle for me was having the rebalanced mode at all. Backbone, they just didn't want to do it at all because it sounded like too much work. Who's going to pay for all this, it's hard enough to ship this game in the first place and, were they going to assign programmers to help me? They didn't want to do that. So they said, 'no, we're not going to do it'. Just flat out no. I pretty much ignored that. I started reading the source code myself, and I'm not a programmer, and I'm certainly not an assembly programmer, so it's complete gibberish to me."
What I especially love about this story so far - aside from Sirlin stickin' it to the man - is that his tweaks and finessing are arguably SSF2THDR's only unequivocal success. The redone visuals are generally mediocre and the remixed soundtrack uneven, but the dip switch controls and the rebalancing... well, as a devout SF fan I was nervous when such changes were first discussed (heresy!), but having played the final product I think what Sirlin has accomplished here is deeply impressive, a testament to his SF acumen.
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