Street Fighter Fan Theory: New Logo Sucks So Fans Will Work For Free

Street Fighter’s new logo is a huge departure from the series, in that it is absolute trash. The logos of Street Fighters one through five are iconic. Flashy orange and yellows; ragged, fluttering edged letters evoking the ripped off gee sleeves of a jacked Ryu ready to throw down. Logos that are what logos should be: instantly identifiable pieces of art that convey the vibe of the game you’re about to play. So when Street Fighter 6 revealed the lazy abomination that is its new logo, fans, as they say, were shooketh.

As soon as the trailer revealing the new logo dropped, and fans’ jaws dropped at how bad that logo was, people began toiling away to redesign it. They changed the colorways to match the series’ fiery legacy colors, they re-tooled the letters to look like the badass fonts Street Fighter fans know and love. Essentially, people put in hours of work to make a better logo, and the conspiracy theory posits that that’s exactly what Capcom wanted. Capcom is known to have a sneaky sense of humor about cheaters, so why not pull a cheeky trick like getting free design work?

The black and white simplicity of the new logo seems to be literally an altered piece of clipart available on Adobe. It looks like a spray painted ad for the city of San Francisco. Here’s where we leave Street Fighter facts and wade into speculative waters. SF because of Street Fighter obviously, and spray paint because… it’s cool? Spray paint is edgy? Spray paint is on the streets where we fight? Unless there’s a secret paint mode mini game in Street Fighter 6, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would such a major franchise get so lazy about a logo that they resort to pre-made clip art? Each game involves hundreds of hours of design work, no one thought to look at the logo?

The theory is pretty wild, but why pay a designer when you could get talented content creators to do it for free? Other than the decidedly murky moral waters this gets into regarding the role of the artist and IP owned by a massive corporation, it doesn’t seem totally implausible. If only the game could be as good as the fan made logos.