Volume 3: What's in a pose? Street Fighter III: Third Strike

In a world that has so much going on at the same time, we often overlook certain details in life. To ease our minds from reality, most of us choose gaming as the form of therapy to relieve our everyday stress and problems. Because of this, we generally play the game for what it is, casually pounding away at the buttons, mindlessly going through the motions, simply, we just don't pay attention to the small ideas and concepts that was put into the game itself. Well, that maybe for the a good number of gamers out there.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have yourself the creature we call the 'meticulous analous.' Okay, it's a term we made up, which means to us 'someone who is so picky that pays attention to every single detail.' Just to play shrink for a moment, we'd say this disease (not really one, but it sounds good) comes from various factors, possibly boredom and more positively, just part of their character to be sharp at everything they see and hear. So before we give credit of this whole article to one particular species, let's get back on track about what this article is all about...the pose.

You asked yourself, how many times have you played Street Fighter 3, particularly, Third Strike? For those who have, you'll notice the quite obvious in terms of where Capcom's ideas came from with certain character traits. For example, the Dudley character, most would think is derived from M. Bison/Balrog (the boxer, name depends on either JP or English version of the game), who was then thought to be a Mike Tyson look-a-like. This isn't so far fetched in terms of what Capcom's thought process was, and if most of us were asked "What real life person does Dudley remind you of most" a good number of us would answer "Mike Tyson."

If you dig a little deeper into the game other details don't stand out as clear, but one of our members noticed a resemblance in a certain 'pose' that mimicked a real life event. When we say 'event' we're talking about something that happened about 18 years ago. So let's check out the pose in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike that we're referring to and see what the big deal is:

Following the history of the Final Fight characters, we know that the Andore character was a resemblance of Andre the Giant, which in the case of the Street Fighter III character, Hugo takes the place of Andore.

Hmm?? So if Hugo resembles Andre the Giant, who does Alex resemble? If this was based on a real life event, think of one of the most popular wrestler in the late 1980's. Okay, maybe some of you were still in your diapers at this time, but if you're a hard core wrestling fan you should see that character resembles Hulk Hogan.

We're here to just make an observation, you decide:

The Face Off

Hulk and Andre Face Off

Promotional Poster for Wrestlemania III

Special thanks to Hibikster for doing this research and tracking down the images.