Capcom knows what the people want: Mecha Ryu punching a giant dino

Capcom has announced the first of what's clearly intended as a long series of collaborations between its titles of the moment, and it's kicking things off with Street Fighter 6 and ExoPrimal. Eschewing any notion of getting fancy about this stuff, the short trailer gets right into it: Specifically, an exosuit version of Ryu punching and fireballing big dinosaurs.

We also get some footage of a ludicrous looking Guile exosuit diving down into the jungle, whereupon he will presumably turtle in the corner and kick dinos in the shins.

The collaboration shows footage from both games, while Capcom's short official blurb says "from the Fighting Grounds to the war games, Exoprimal x Street Fighter 6 customizations have been authorized for deployment in Fall 2023". It looks like ExoPrimal gets various Street Fighter-themed exo suits that make the various characters look a bit like Iron Man (Mecha Akuma? Yes please.) Somewhat inevitably, perhaps, the shots of ExoPrimal's sleek suits in Street Fighter 6's more cartoonish and vibrant world feels a little less exciting.

But then that's why from Capcom's perspective this obviously makes sense. Street Fighter is one of its longest-running and most successful brands, which has just received a major new entry, while ExoPrimal is its first major original game in a long time. To me ExoPrimal looks like the continuation Dino Crisis was otherwise never going to get, and personally am quite down with the idea of a load of dinaosaurs popping out of a portal in front of me, wearing a mech suit with more ordnance than the SAS.

Street Fighter 6 released last week to highly positive reviews and, outside of grumbles about some of the microtransactions, has already sold 1 million (though Capcom wants 10 million!) ExoPrimal is out next week on 14 July. The collaboration between the games only has the nebulous date of fall this year, but hey: We get to punch dinosaurs as Ryu.

Rich Stanton

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."