Everybody making a Japanese fighting game in the 90s read the same ridiculous over-the-top martial arts manga, and saw the same Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies,

Everybody making a Japanese fighting game in the 90s read the same ridiculous over-the-top martial arts manga, and saw the same Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies, and everybody ripped those off, while adding a lawsuit-avoiding twist to create characters and moves for the games. There's a character in King of Fighters named Benimaru Nikaido. Nobody at SNK called him that internally. Some staffers may have forgotten he had that name. The developers called him Polnareff, the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character he was shamelessly based off of. Like, Guile may have had Polnareff's tall hair, but Benimaru had his whole vibe, including the tight-fitting effeminate tops that somehow made him even more masculine. The title ship of Space Battleship Yamato had a powerful main cannon called the "Wave Motion Gun" or hadouhou (波動砲). When designing moves for Street Fighter, Capcom doubtless drew inspiration from the coolness of this weapon, especially its much-copied "sucking in energy before unleashing a bright blue beam of fury" animation, and just changed the final character for "gun", 砲, to one for "fist", 拳, yielding the Wave Motion Fist or hadouken.