Street Fighter III: Third Strike’s Elena has a small animation routine that might look familiar to old folks/Van Halen fans: it’s pretty much frame-for-frame taken from a 1985 David Lee Roth video.
deafidelity noticed it while watching the vid for Just a Gigolo, in which a backup dancer makes almost the exact same moves as Elena’s victory pose. Indeed they’re so close you can argue it was simply rotoscoped
All video game art, whether it’s character design, environment work or in this case animation, has its inspiration somewhere. And sometimes art can stand as much on its own as it can serve as a tribute to something else.
We see that all the time in video games, just not…for an old David Lee Roth song
And just in case you needed any further evidence that Street Fighter III was released in the late 90s, some of the game’s tributes date back even further:
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1036799339044192261
If you want to read a bit more on Street Fighter III’s animation—it’s one of the most beautiful pixel art games of all time—here’s a cool thread from last year on the process, with some gif examples
