"I think that if we want to take the fire we've started and really fan the flames, we need to up the number of opportunities people have to interact with fighters. That's why we made SFIV for the iPhone and are making Super SFIV for the Nintendo 3DS right now. Having it on lots of different platforms gives users more chances to interact with it, and it lets them enjoy fighting games in a light and easy kind of way." - SFIV producer Yoshinori Ono

"To be honest, I've been making fighters for a long time. Fighter fans tend to be pretty dedicated to start with, so I really haven't noticed if there's a boom going on or not. If there is, though, I'd say SFIV contributed a lot to it, as well as Daigo Umehara becoming a pro player. If we can see more star players like Daigo, I think that'll earn more popularity for the whole genre." - BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori

"There are two reasons why fighters are getting hotter. There are games that play much the same way as those which game out during the boom most players are familiar with, and online play has finally become easy and trouble-free. If we want to keep this going, I think it's important we keep providing fresh things for gamers to try out. With Virtua Fighter, we've provided a bunch of version upgrades with new features and extra items on a constant basis." - Virtua Fighter director Daichi Katagiri

"When people ask me if fighters are gaining steam, I want to say that, speaking strictly about Tekken, it's always been gaining steam. Tekken has a lot of support overseas, and it's always had a reliable userbase worldwide. Even in terms of arcade income, it's not shrinking at all. There was certainly something of a boom during the Tekken 3 era, but I think fighters have already established themselves as a genre and have become a very thick branch in the family tree of gaming." - Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada

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