you can thank Peter Moore (or someone at SoA) for that, apparently SoA passed on SoR4 because they didn't think it would sell due to the fact they had no idea of the franchise's history.
It wasn't Peter Moore. The way the original story went, I think, is that the guys they pitched Streets of Rage 4 to were so young they didn't even know what Streets of Rage was. It had been a good 6 or 7 years since the last one.
Which, I mean, makes sense, I guess? If you're looking at it from an investor perspective, franchises end for a reason, and this was before anyone had realized you could cash in wholesale on nostalgia.
So some guy comes to you, he's a real low-key kind of guy, he's not really famous like Yuji Naka or Yu Suzuki, and he's like "We made three Streets of Rage games two hardware generations ago, we'd like to make a fourth."
And, I mean, what was the market for 3D brawlers then? You had Fighting Force and...
...
Uh, Tekken Force...?
I think Yuzo Koshiro is a great guy, a great musician, I think Streets of Rage is a great game franchise, but looking at things from a purely business perspective, I think it makes sense any which way you slice it, even if it was supposedly pitched to a bunch of young newbies with no respect for the classics.
And I feel like Koshiro's time as a minor game dev celebrity also didn't come to pass until enough people on the internet got together and elevated his status. In 2001 or whenever he pitched this Streets of Rage game, I think he was probably largely a nobody to 80% of people who played videogames. I'm sure they liked his music, but they probably didn't necessarily know the guy by name like we do now
