I found a neat video examining Bean the Dynamite over the years, and whether or not he's actually a Duck, or a Woodpecker. It reminded me of the thread that was here a while back, where we collectively discovered that Nack/Fang was half-weaselWolf, and half-jerboa. Did the Fighters' team have a fascination with hybrid animals? And what does that say about Bark? Maybe he's half-Polar Bear and half-Husky?
I've seen the alternate intro to Dynamite Dux, he's a pecker all right... Spoiler: For context. VERY NSFW
"Anonymous developer" It was confirmed by Hiroshi Kataoka that Masahiro Sugiyama added Sonic and Tails into Fighting Vipers, and as we now know through debug mode, much of the development team made it into Fighting Vipers as well. "I think it's curious that Bean of all characters was included as opposed to Sonic." The whole thing is AM2, no? Fighters Megamix, Dynamite Dux, Virtua Striker 2, all AM2. It's been stated that AM2 created Bark and Bean, yet that's not specifically mentioned in this video. It's a decent video which covers a lot of info though, leaving the audience to drive their own conclusions, so it's not pushing any one species. EDIT: Ah it looks like someone a few days ago mentioned Sugiyama on the youtube comments.
There's an interview with Hiroshi Kataoka in the May 1996 issue of Sega Saturn Magazine (Japan): https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SSM_JP_19960322_1996-05.pdf&page=220 If someone could give it a proper translation, that would be great. According to Google Translate, he seems to say something along the lines of Bean being "not a woodpecker, but a creature called a dynamite duck". Regardless, his official character profile in Fighters Megamix Official Guide should probably take precedence. This information isn't on the wiki. Do we have a reference for this? In this interview it's mentioned that Honey's character designer was the one who put Sonic and Tails in Fighting Vipers. But do we have confirmation that Masahiro Sugiyama is Honey's character designer? Fighting Vipers has two credited character designers, Masahiro Sugiyama and Kazunori Oh, so are we certain that Kazunori Oh didn't design Fighting Vipers' Honey?
Skimming that Japanese interview there’s some interesting stuff. Like you said, Bean is a creature called a “dynamite duck,” a reference for old SEGA fans. To be clear, he’s not saying Bean’s an actual duck but a unique animal. He also says they wanted a heavy, powerful character and planned to make an Orangutan but it became a polar bear (that lives in Russia) named Bark. He also talks a bit about stuff they wanted to include but couldn’t, like more of Eggman’s robots appearing. I might translate part of it when I get a chance but probably not the whole thing, sorry.
Not just the videogames; Howard the Duck kissed a human first, and of course got the expected reaction to that first. At least Sonic had an actual mouth. EDIT: And remember you can still breed together Skitty and Wailord.
From your own post "Confirmation" is a strong word though, rather this is inferred to be correct based on our own research.
Sure, but this is why we need to be careful about what we state to be fact and what we state to be highly likely, so as not to spread misinformation. The fact that we don't have any hard proof just tells me that we need to do more research and seek out Fighting Vipers related interviews.
There's nothing stopping the character being a duck in one game, and a woodpecker in another. Or indeed a "dynamite". There's actually a few books on Fighters Megamix - I thought we might have scans of at least one, but apparently not, so that's a thing. As far as the naming goes, "Bin" is almost certainly named after Satoshi Mifune, the main programmer of Dynamite Dux and who would go on to be top dawg of Virtua Striker, which is why Bean makes an appearance. Why Bean and not Bin? I'm guessing they had the Sonic the Fighters model lying around, but who knows (although since Mifune is already in the game as part of FC Sega, maybe having him in the team twice was a bit awkward). It actually gets a bit messy with the special Virtua Striker teams, since there were five different versions of Virtua Striker 2 and nobody understands the games well enough to point out all the differences. Turns out the series has quite the story if you're interested. One day someone will be.
There's a whole book dedicated to Honey called "Fighting Vipers - My Sweet HONEY" , and I'm sure it probably could state the designer responsible specifically somewhere. It could be argued, as evidenced by the video, that Bean's inclusion as a duck in the Archie series could be a spread of misinformation, only to be changed for IDW's cameo. Sometimes we can only do so much. Honey, for a long time was seen as lacking pigtails and a tail for many years until updates to the emulator were implemented. Even then, for many many years until the PSN/XBL port of StF, Honey was primarily seen as that version. Hell, Kataoka's interview may be false information as well, if he remembered something incorrectly or even assumed that it was Honey's designer who threw in Sonic and Tails. The omission of the other AM2 employees also being in the game in any form of documentation is disconcerting.
This part of the video itself seems to be misinformation. I don't believe Bean's species was brought up at all in IDW's Sonic 30th Anniversary comic. I think we have to assume developer interviews to be correct, unless we have sufficient evidence to believe otherwise. The context is always important too. Kataoka said definitively that it was FV Honey's character designer who put Sonic and Tails into Fighting Vipers. But he only assumes that it was VF Honey's character designer who put Honey the Cat into Sonic the Fighters. And it's only us as fans making an educated guess that Sugiyama is FV Honey's character designer. So really we need to get all this information on the Retro wiki, with as many citations as possible. (Ideally with the relevant quote extract alongside the citation. I think Fandom wikis support this function, but I'm not sure if Retro currently does? @Black Squirrel)
Yes from what I've seen, later Archie comics are almost certainly based on "internet knowledge" rather than material passed down from Sega. They knew what they were doing.
The way I envisioned doing this was to mirror interviews and use {{intref|INTERVIEW PAGE NAME HERE}} Anything more complicated than that, you'll have to invent - we have the tools to achieve most things (well, on Sega Retro at least). I can assist where necessary.
The interview with Kataoka is rather long. I added it a couple of years ago to the wiki, however, it's impossible to cite where in the interview a piece of information may have come from. I don't suppose there's any easy solution to this? Also this is getting a little off topic so perhaps it might be worth continuing this conversation somewhere like site-affairs.
One solution would be to store line numbers, then you could say "I want 'this' interview, 'this' line"... though it would mean the text content could never change. I'll have to think about this - I'd just cite the while interview for now.
