Remember the 1991 Capcom video game Street Fighter II? Sure you do; it’s widely considered to be the Guernica of fighting games buy those who truly know and understand the medium. It’s also very well known for, in both the general automotive community and the Lexus LS400 abuse fetish community, being the only video game where you can virtually, in glorious, colorful, 16-bit realism, kick the absolute everloving pickles out of an innocent, inanimate, defenseless Lexus LS400.
You know what I’m talking about, right? There’s a bonus stage in the game that gives you 40 seconds to go absolute, clinically ham on this car that just seems to be innocently if perhaps illegally parked on a dock or a marina or something. And you get rewarded in points for doing so, unlike the real world, where you would get rewarded with some bloodied limbs and likely an arrest.
The car is quite nicely rendered, though, given the constraints of the hardware of the era; Street Fighter II ran on Capcom’s CPS-1 arcade system, which was capable of producing 4,096 colors at a screen resolution of 384×224. These restrictions give the car a very distinctive look:
That was back in 1991, of course. Today, the aching poignancy of Street Fighter II is still appreciated in the world, so much so that there is a Street Fighter movie coming out this year, and our poor, beleaguered Lexus has a cameo in the trailer. Look:
Neat! Now, as a tie-in to this upcoming movie, and perhaps as a result of the fact that this part of the game is so tied up with the concept of automotive damage, the insurance company The General has built a recreation of the Lexus from the game, complete with a pixellated look that matches the actual game extraordinarily well:
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Oh, damn. Los Angeles-based movie car customizer Vehicle Effects was commissioned to actually build the car, and I think they did a really remarkably good job capturing the banding of the color palette and the pixelation of the car, which they executed with three-dimensional cube pixels – do these count as voxels– adhered to the car and covering what appears to be the whole surface.
The license plate number is even the same as on the in-game car, and it was not easy to make out those pixellated numerals and letters:
The car was revealed at ComplexCon in Los Angeles, which I assume is some sort of convention for people with emotional complexes? I’m not certain. But, the cast of the upcoming movie was there, and they posed with the car:
I’m especially impressed with the way the headlamps were handled, which look to be nearly pixel-perfect to the game sprites.
You can see the original Lexus LS400 prior to the de-rezzing in this post from The General’s Instagram:
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You can enter a lottery to win not just the car, but $25,400.69 in what is being referred to as “gas money.” I suppose if you win, and you want to go all street fighter on your car, that’s your own business.
Is it street legal to drive? I’m not sure. Do those lights actually work? Will all those pixels stay on at speed? I guess there’s one way to find out! I mean, if you win it, of course. For the rest of us, I guess we’re at the mercy of whoever wins to reveal if it’s drivable/registrable or not.
Can’t say I played to much street fighter, but that trailer was pretty awesome.
Let’s give a shout-out to Final Fight, the original game that offered this as a bonus stage. And of course to poor Bred, whose car was never the same. Esp. if you were playing Mike Haggar, with his lead pipe. “Oh…my…God.”