Apparently ‘William F. Guile’ Is Street Fighter Canon?
Among the many, many changes the 1994 live-action Street Fighter movie made to the video game series that inspired it was the fact that it reconceptualized Guile so that his first name was now his last name: Col. William F. Guile was played by actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, apparently because American audiences just couldn’t tolerate the idea of a lead character with such an odd name. They could tolerate the all-American hero having an unexplained Belgian accent, I guess, but this is not a post about the Street Fighter movie necessarily. It’s about this choice of name — why it’s linguistically interesting and how it’s made its way into the game canon despite its humble origins.
As I explain in my history of Street Fighter II names, Guile ended up with his name entirely by accident. When shown an early sketch of the character, someone on the Street Fighter II team noted that Guile looked like a character from the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure — but then mistakenly remembered that character’s name as J. Geil. That’s a different character, and the character that person was trying to name was actually Jean Pierre Polnareff, who has gravity-defying hair like the Street Fighter character does.
As is the case with many JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure characters, J. Geil takes his name from a pop music act — in this case, the J. Geils Band, which is known for songs like “(Angel Is the) Centerfold” and “Love Stinks” — so by extension the Street Fighter II character is named for this band as well. But Guile’s name also has meaning as is: guile is a common English noun, meaning either cleverness that verges on something dangerous or just something bad outright — “deceptiveness, fraud, dishonesty.” It’s less negative in the word beguile, which can still mean “to deceive” but is used today more in a flattering sense: a beguiling person is charming without necessarily trying to trick anyone. But the negative sense makes for an interesting framework for viewing this character because he’s a representative of the United States military in a game made by Japanese people at a time when the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t even fifty years in the past. I should clarify that this was not any sort of commentary on Capcom’s part, especially because they explained the actual way they arrived at Guile’s name. But the fact of the matter is that the name carries connotation and denotation on its own, especially for English-speaking gamers who didn’t know the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure backstory.
Officially, the only person credited with the script for the live-action Street Fighter movie is Steven de Souza, who also directed it, so I have to assume he’s responsible for naming the main character William F. Guile. Regardless of who made the call, however, it’s an interesting choice from an linguistic perspective to the point that I began this post looking into whether it might be redundant. It’s not, but it does suggest a little… lack of imagination on the part of whoever came up with it.
The word guile entered into English from Old French, where it meant basically what it means today, and that word goes back to a Proto-Germanic root with magic associations. But there’s this funny thing in English where we have pairs of words that entered from French at different points in time and mean almost the same thing but are spelled differently — one with a ‘g’ and one with a ‘w.’ Take warranty and guarantee, which mean very close to the same thing, but because they’re spelled differently, people tend not to clock them as being more or less the same word. Ditto guard and ward. I was guessing that another ‘g’/’w’ doublet might be guile and will, which would be interesting because the etymology of William goes back to the Germanic wilio, “will,” and helma “helmet.” And it’s not accidental that the versions of William in modern French and Spanish are Guillaume and Guillermo, again showing how much the ‘g’ and ‘w’ switch around when you’re jumping from one language to another. But guile and will are not related, it turns out, and the closest thing we have in English to the former is actually wile — as in Dr. Wily, I guess, but more commonly used today in the sense of something we today use to refer to an attractive person (usually a woman) who isn’t necessarily tricking anyone so much as just being charming.
All that said, however, there is an aspect to the name William F. Guile where it’s almost like they named him Guillermo F. Williams or Bill F. Guillaume or Guile F. Guileson or something. The name that was picked was so close to the character’s original name that it either shows the smallest possible thought was given to the matter or that the video game canon was held in such high regard that the adaptation hewed as closely as it could. Given how liberally the rest of the Street Fighter movie interprets the source material, I think it’s clear which of these is more likely. And because it’s widely considered a critical flop, I assumed all its inventions would have been disregarded by the series at large, but I was as surprised as anyone to learn that this is not the case.
No, William F. Guile is alive and well.
The first recurrence of Guile’s (alleged) full name happens in the 1995 American cartoon series, which is more or less based on the 1994 film. Chun-Li, for example, has the last name Xiang in the cartoon and Zang in the movie, and so far that’s not been incorporated into the game series canon. And this version of Blanka is Carlos “Charlie” Blanka — the version from the movie that fused together Blanka’s backstory with that of Guile’s dead army buddy Charlie. It’s also not exactly the same continuity, because M. Bison is very much not dead, but whatever.
But that’s basically where the name stops until 2016, when Street Fighter V offered a surprising clue: two alternate costumes give two different full names on his dogtags. His battle costume lists his name as William Guile, but his Halloween costume, which has him done up like a zombie, lists his name as Guile F. Williams.
I don’t know what to make of this, honestly. Obviously, his name has never been Guile F. Williams at any point before this, so maybe it’s a joke that this undead version of Guile isn’t “real,” hence the fake name. But the battle costume is also an alternate one, so maybe it’s also not true that neither name was supposed to be canonical.
This gets turned on its head in Street Fighter 6, however, because Guile’s new costume has him sporting a nameplate that just offers a single name: GUILE. Because it’s a military uniform, and because American military custom is to put the last name of the soldier on them, it really does seem to indicate that Guile is the character’s last name, which might mean that the movie has further wormed its way into the official canon, just thirty years after the fact.
Inset added for clarity!
Guile’s dogtags aren’t visible in his new look in Street Fighter 6, but they are in one of his throwback Street Fighter II alternate costumes. And in fact, you can see that he’s wearing Charlie’s and then his own, and though it’s slightly out of focus here, you can see that it lists his name “Guile, William.”
Again, inset added for clarity. This image was provided by Bluesky user @roto13.bsky.social, who responded to my request that someone zoom in on and check out Guile’s model.
Against all odds, this innovation by the movie that’s at best regarded as a camp classic seems to have been cemented as a part of the series as a whole. I’m shocked, frankly — not just that Capcom would seemingly admit that the film contributed to the series canon, but also because by and large, Street Fighter characters tend not to have official, canonical last names, which puts them at odds with, for example, the cast of SNK fighters, which largely do, which is made all the more apparent by the inclusion of Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui as DLC characters in Street Fighter 6. In fact, excluding the mysterious JP and A.K.I., all of the new characters introduced in Street Fighter 6 have first and last names — Jamie Siu, Kimberly Jackson, Manon Legrand, Marisa Rosetti, Lily Hawk and even Luke Sullivan, who debuted at the tail end of Street Fighter V. It makes me wonder if this was a conscious effort on Capcom’s part to give the cast last names, prompting them to remember that the movie kinda sorta already gave him one. How weird.
So long as he does not start speaking with a Belgian accent, I guess.
Miscellaneous Notes
So aside from the Street Fighter 6 newbies, who in Street Fighter has a last name? Whelp, not a lot of them. From Street Fighter II, there’s Edmond Honda, Ken Masters, Thunder Hawk, and technically M. Bison, but only in the sense of when that name was attached to the boxer character, it was obviously meant to stand for Mike Bison. For the life of me, I can’t figure out when a game referred to Cammy’s last name as White, but at the very least that comes from the 1994 Street Fighter anime. Street Fighter Alpha has Dan Hibiki, Sakura Kasugano, Rolento F. Schugerg, Cody Travers, Karin Kanzuki, “Rainbow” Mike Nanakawa and Maki Genryusai. This series accounted for the fact that Guile’s dead friend was named Charlie in North America but Nash in Japan by just making his name Charlie Nash. Also the Doll character Juli may or may not have the last name Hawk, like T. Hawk and Lily. Street Fighter III has Sean Matsuda, Hugo Andore, and Yun and Yang Lee. Unless I’m mistaken, the only Street Fighter IV character to have a last name is Juri Han, and that leaves us with Laura Matsuda, Lucia Morgan and Akira Kazama in Street Fighter V. That’s it — which is to say that a lot of the most popular Street Fighter characters have first names only.
I mentioned this in my post about the lawsuit between Capcom and Data East over whether Fighter’s History was ripping off Street Fighter, but it’s notable to me that Jean Pierre, the French gymnast character in Fighter’s History who I think of as being more reminiscent of Guile shares his name with the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure character Guile was supposed to be named for, Jean Pierre Polnareff. It’s probably just a coincidence. Jean Pierre is just what you name a character meant to be a French stereotype, after all.
Now that Fatal Fury seems to exist in the same universe as Street Fighter — or at the very least, a version of the Fatal Fury series exists in the Street Fighter universe, and potentially vice-versa — I feel like I need to remind the world (and maybe Capcom) that the Saturday Night Slam Masters series already takes place in the Street Fighter universe. We’ve overdue for any of these pro wrestlers to make an appearance in Street Fighter, and if it were going to be any one over another, I’d vote for Gunloc — and not just because I’d dig seeing him rendered in the Street Fighter 6 style.
According to the western localization of the game, at least, Gunloc is alleged to be Guile’s brother.
It should be said, however, that this rumor is specific to the English version. The bio given in the attract mode in the Japanese version is far less interesting.
The gist is that he’s the quickest fighter in the CWA (Capcom Wrestling Association) but he gets too excited in matches and loses often. Like most of the playable wrestlers in Saturday Night Slam Masters, Gunloc has a different name in the Japanese original: “ラッキー・コルト (Rakkī Koruto) — or Lucky Colt.
Oddly enough, the relationship between Gulie and Gunloc gets made explicit in Street Fighter: The Movie (the game) of all places, where Blade — an original character purported to be one of Bison’s goons — is revealed to have been Gunloc the entire time. He was undercover, and once Bison is defeated, he’s reunited with Guile.
Considering that Guile is also Ken’s brother-in-law, because Ken’s wife, Eliza, and Guile’s wife, Julia, are sisters, there is potentially a lot of blond beefcake at the Williams family barbecues. Make that game, Capcom.
As a gay man, I must admit to one big point in favor of the Street Fighter movie is the fact that it resulted in the confusingly titled arcade game, Street Fighter: The Movie. Many of the film’s cast members had their likeness digitally captured for the game, and this includes Kylie Minogue, who played Cammy. This makes Street Fighter: The Movie one of the only opportunities we currently have to play as Kylie Minogue in a video game, and I’m thankful for that.
