Capcom sorta already had a fighting game character named Luke so what's up with that?

Capcom pretty much took everyone by surprise when they introduced Luke to the world this month as the final character coming to Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition.

Fans with a good memory, however, were more confused initially with Luke's similar appearance and name to another Capcom fighting game character that made some wonder at first if they were meant to be one in the same.

The mysterious man in question actually hails from the canceled title Capcom Fighting All-Stars as one of the three main Code Holders, so he's technically never been included in a completed title — although Ingrid from All-Stars has.

Street Fighter 5's Luke and this character both have blond hair with distinct, individual locks as well as tattoos depicting wings, but that's about where the similarities stop.

Following the Summer Update event, SF5 Director Takayuki Nakayama took to Twitter to confirm this new Luke "is a completely different person from the Luke of All-Stars' world" with an accompanying screenshot of the canceled title that ironically featured Akira too.

The original character, whose name can technically be read as Luke (which we'll get into more in a little bit), is said and shown to fight using almost exclusively kicks.

Street Fighter's hint to the future, on the other hand, was seen in his trailer focusing mostly on punches with only a few kicks included here and there.

If you think the "old Luke" looks more like someone ripped out of The King of Fighters, that's probably because Capcom Fighting All-Stars was being worked on by a bunch of former SNK developers following its initial bankruptcy.

You may be confused after looking at the screenshots provided by Nakayama considering they refer to the fighter as Rook, and here's where I'll need to bust out some Japanese linguistics to explain that discrepancy.

The short of it is essentially that due to Japan's phonetic system, both Luke and Rook are read the exact same way.

Since they are foreign words / names, they are written in Katakana as ルーク (Rūku) because Japanese doesn't have a natural distinction between L and R sounds, which has led to numerous and humorous translation errors in video games and anime for the past 40+ years.

While we believe that the Code Holder's name was probably supposed to be Rook, the last time he's been officially acknowledged says otherwise.

Although he's not directly connected to the Street Fighter story, Capcom still gave the All-Star a character profile on the Shadaloo CRI website where he's listed as Luke in English alongside new artwork.

Since they are foreign words / names, they are written in Katakana as ルーク (Rūku) because Japanese doesn't have a natural distinction between L and R sounds, which has led to numerous and humorous translation errors in video games and anime for the past 40+ years.

While we believe that the Code Holder's name was probably supposed to be Rook, the last time he's been officially acknowledged says otherwise.

Although he's not directly connected to the Street Fighter story, Capcom still gave the All-Star a character profile on the Shadaloo CRI website where he's listed as Luke in English alongside new artwork.

Along with Akira Kazama, was hoping to see Rook introduced into the world of Street Fighter as one of the cool underutilized designs out of Capcom, so even I was confused when they first started discussing Luke on the stream — though it became quickly apparent they were different once the trailer started.

Now that we've got a character with close to the same name the canon, it feels like Rook's chances of ever really showing back up have dropped to near zero, so if anything does return from the ashes of the Capcom vs. Capcom fighting game, it's probably going to be Ingrid again.

If you're curious about what went wrong in the development of Capcom Fighting All-Stars, you can find out just about everything you need to know here.

And while he may not be actually connected to Rook, Luke does appear to have ties to even more Capcom characters for other reasons, but we'll get more into those theories at a different time.

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