Here Comes a New Challenger: Championship Edition

Everyone has a favorite game. Whether you’re a first person shooter fan, a platformer, or a fantasy RPG person, you’ve got a game you love. If you’re a fighter fan, you surely battled your way through the one-on-one action extravaganza that was Capcom's Street Fighter II - in whatever iteration you happened to be able to play. The game started as an arcade classic machine before it broke ground on the Super Nintendo and Genesis, allowing for frantic button-smashing tournaments at home with your friends. With Here Comes A New Challenger: Championship Edition, director Oliver Harper delivers an extensive, almost exhausting documentary dedicated to the rise of the game, the numerous home releases, films and beyond!

If you were a kid of the 80s and 90s, chances are pretty damn good that you played one of the many Street Fighter II games. Whether you went to the arcade and were a cabinet warrior or if you had a SNES or Genesis, you surely dropped a few weeks' worth of allowances on the game. If you miraculously didn’t play it, you had to be aware of it as the game was an unavoidable phenomenon. This documentary gives game fans a beat-for-beat chronological retelling of events surrounding this genre-defining game. Throughout the doc, we have game developers, music composers, project managers, game reviewers, and everyone in between to let us know how things came to be. 

But this doc doesn’t stop at just the games. It dives into the books and album singles and all of the wild swag that cropped up. Do you remember those terrible G.I. Joe tie-in action figures? This doc covers that too. As each new iteration of the game comes out with new playable characters and villains, the doc also comes up with whatever piece of tie-in merchandising was unleashed. And that includes a lot of time committed to a certain ill-fated film. 

As someone more of a film fan than a gamer, I find this part especially interesting. Not content with just giving us a rundown of well-known production details and trivia, the doc pulls in legendary writer/director Steven de Souza for his insights. In extensive detail, de Souza chronicles his trials and tribulations working with Capcom on developing the script and the chaotic filming schedule. His brutal, almost sardonic honesty is very refreshing considering everything that went on during that shoot. But that stretch comes in and there’s still about thirty minutes of interesting material left in the doc! 

I personally had a blast with Here Comes A New Challenger. This was a nostalgic hit of my childhood in extensive detail. I may be more of a film man today, but as a kid I spent more than a few afternoons burning my thumbs smashing my SNES controllers on this game. When my parents bought me and my sister a Super Nintendo for Christmas, Street Fighter II was one of the three games we got alongside Castlevania IV and Ultraman. Between single-player runs and two-player tournaments, this game got plenty of action at my house. Now I didn’t follow every iteration that would come out, but I always played it. While Mortal Kombat was incredibly popular and I enjoyed the hell out of those games too, there was something magical about the animation style and intensity of the Capcom fighters of that era. Here Comes A New Challenger is a fitting tribute to that nostalgic, almost feverish intensity that came with playing those games so many years ago. 

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Drop a quarter because Here Comes A New Challenger: Championship Edition comes home to Blu-ray from ETR and OCN Distribution. Pressed on a Region Free BD50 disc, the disc is housed in a clear case with artwork recreating a SNES cartridge or reversible more stylized art. If you order from Vinegar Syndrome you can snag a limited edition exclusive slipcover. The disc loads to a static image main menu with standard navigation options.

Here Comes A New Challenger comes home to Blu-ray with a fitting 1.78:1 1080p transfer. As a gaming documentary, the image is a mash of on-camera subjects discussing the games and so forth with a mix of interstitial game footage, advertisements, and so on. As the in-person interviews look terrific and modern, I was really impressed with how good the insert game and advertisement footage came through. Likewise, the clips from the feature film hold well, clearly sourced from an HD master without any quality loss there. All of that is to say that the presentation between elements is seamless and satisfying. It might not “wow” you, but visually it’s compelling and pulls you into the world of these classic games. 

On the audio side we have a strong DTS-HD MA 2.0 audio mix. The sound design of the film is pretty standard for a documentary of this sort and doesn’t call for a lot of wizbang surround activity. It’s a lot of talking heads discussing the relevant section of the game and its history. Audio elements from the game are given plenty of high-priority. Likewise, when the doc gets into the feature film, it gives priority to some of the film’s silliest lines. Front to back, this is a great mix that serves the film and its goals.

In keeping with other ETR game-focused docs, Here Comes A New Challenger offers up a fun bounty of bonus features. At the top of the pack for content “about the movie,” the two audio commentaries are well worth the time. The segments about making the very fun titles and the editing/cinematography are interesting. The deleted scenes are certainly worth a look as they’re the small sort of tangent lines that would have elongated an already long and complete-feeling documentary. The longest segment is dedicated to the various home ports of Steet Fighter games and it’s really cool to see these guys try to play through some of the less than reputable versions. 

• Audio Commentary featuring director Oliver Harper and the crew at Final Film, Chris Stratton, Rob James, 
• Audio Commentary featuring Audun Sorlie and John Linneman of Digital Foundry
• Behind The Scenes:
• Making the Title Sequence (HD 5:51)
• Meet the Cinematographer/Editor Christopher Stratton (HD 6:43)
• Deleted Scenes:
• EGM April Fools Gag (HD 2:22)
• Street Fighter II Movie: The Game (HD 1:20)
• Champion Edition of the PC Engine (HD 1:43)
• Merchandise for the Live Action Movie (HD 1:22)
• Educational Sequel to the Animated Movie (HD 2:35)
• The Korean Street Fighter TV Show (HD 4:08)
• Street Fighter Spoof (Future Cops) (HD 3:03)
• Hoey Ansah on Assassin’s Fist (HD 9:10)
• Featurette: The Home Ports (HD 1:09:23)
• Official Trailer

Here Comes A New Challenger: Championship Edition is another fun, insightful, and nostalgia-inducing video game documentary. A deep dive into the development and legacy of Street Fighter II, the doc covers everything from the initial arcade releases to the eventual various home game ports to the cult classic feature film in great detail. As with any good doc, it covers the high points of the series as well as the lowest of the low moments in detail. I found this to be a good bit of fun and was ready to yank out one of my Street Fighter collections. The Blu-ray from ETR offers up a solid A/V presentation along with a healthy assortment of extra features to devour. Get ready to dip a few toes in gloriously nostalgic waters - Recommended