Apex Legends art director Alisa Rastorgueva says developers pushed the limits of the game’s character models so far for its collaboration with Street Fighter 6 that its heroes became “thicker” than ever.
Street Fighter 6 is coming to Apex Legends with special character skins, a decked-out POI, an ambitious Wildcard Takover, weapon skins, and more on September 22.
To celebrate, a handful of Legends are getting the Street Fighter treatment, transforming them into characters from Capcom’s beloved fighting game franchise: Sparrow is Ryu; Alter is Chun-Li; Mirage is Luke; Caustic is Blanka; Wattson is Cammy; Gibraltar is Akuma; Bangalore is Elena; and Pathfinder is Dhalsim.
Each fighter in this delightful selection of characters boasts a striking silhouette with the muscles to match (they are martial artists, after all) — and that was something that challenged the art team when it came to literally breaking the mold of their Legends to make them look like their Street Fighter counterparts.
In a closed session with the media, Apex Legends art director Alisa Rastorgueva revealed that these Street Fighter skins were so muscular that the Legends now have the thickest thighs they’ve ever made for the game.
“There’s always a new challenge with every collab that we do, and it’s always different,” she told us. “With Gundam, it was trying to fit our Legends into these big mechs. For Street Fighter, a big challenge was trying to find a balance between pushing the body types, especially the muscle definition. All of us know that Street Fighter characters are muscular and their proportions are pushed a lot. We tried to do that, as well. Our legends have some of the thickest thighs we’ve ever done. To take an IP with that much history behind it and put it into Apex Legends — our game is semi-realistic, it definitely has a different visual style than Street Fighter has in a lot of their games, and for us, that was one of our biggest challenges. But it was a fun one.”
She also delved into the selection process for choosing these specific Street Fighter characters, explaining that there were many fighters the team considered bringing into the game, but only a few made sense to pair with their Legends.
“It’s just what worked best for this collaboration,” she said. “All of the pairings we do are a collaborative effort between our departments and the IP holder. We definitely wanted to have the Street Fighter characters represented well and be recognizable within the game, and this worked best with Alter and Sparrow. You can see characters like Chun-Li and Ryu very clearly when it’s designed on them versus other Legends. We do test characters for all the pairings, and we ended up working with [Sparrow and Alter] once again.”
Senior technical game designer Chris Ruvolo added that it wasn’t just a matter of physicality, but of gameplay, as well; putting a grappler like Zangief in a first-person shooter like Apex Legends wouldn’t really make sense for the type of game it is, despite how cool it’d be.
“There were a lot that we wanted to add that we couldn’t,” he admitted. “We really wanted to highlight characters from Street Fighter 6 specifically. Unfortunately, I wish we could do the full roster, but we weren’t able to. We highlighted some of the characters that worked best for us and our IP partner.
“Me and my manager played a lot of Street Fighter 6,” he continued. “We got all the fighter passes and played around with them to see what would work best for Apex. It was kinda tough figuring out what characters to bring in, since Apex is primarily a shooter. You can’t have a fighter who focuses on grapples like Zangief. We had to go with characters who were projectile-based or had area of effect attacks; those were at the top of our list. The creative process was, ‘What are some characters that players are gonna recognize? Which will fit well within Apex’s gameplay?’”
You can brawl it out in the new Wildcard Takeover, punch destructible cars, and even pull off a Hadouken when Street Fighter hurricane-kicks its way into Apex Legends on September 22.
Virginia Glaze
News Editor
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.
