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In the original Japanese version of Street Fighter II, Balrog is a claw-wielding Spanish ninja/assassin. When the game was localized for the US, this character's name was changed to Vega.

Balrog / Vega Balrog / Vega

In the US version of Street Fighter II, Balrog refers to a different character: a professional boxer based on Mike Tyson. In the Japanese version, this boxer was originally named "M. Bison."

M. Bison / Balrog M. Bison / Balrog

In Tolkien's legendarium, Balrogs are demonic beings corrupted by Morgoth, shrouded in shadow and flame, wielding whips and swords. However, neither of the Street Fighter characters named Balrog seem to share any obvious traits with these creatures.

(Though I'd wager that both of them would also have a tough time passing Gandalf on a bridge in Moria—or anywhere else, for that matter.) 😉

Balrog vs. Balrog

While some online discussions, like this Reddit post, claim the name was inspired by The Lord of the Rings, they don't offer any evidence to support this theory.

Is there any statement from the Street Fighter developers confirming whether the Balrog name was indeed inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's Balrogs? If not, what was the actual inspiration behind the name?

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  • I think the chance it is a coincidence is in the order of magnitude of 26^6 ;-). Commented Oct 2, 2024 at 15:11
  • I once named a cat Balrog in allusion to a line in Bored of the Rings Commented Oct 2, 2024 at 18:45

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According to a tweet (screenshot) by Akira Nishitani, Street Fighter 2's designer, the character Balrog is indeed named after the monster -

いえ、怪物の方のバルログですねw
なんか「爪」のイメージが重なったもので。

Machine translation translates that to:

No, it's the Balrog monster lol
The image of "claws" overlaps with mine.

(He was replying to someone who brought up a book that claimed Balrog was named after a certain battleship.) As mentioned in Buzz's answer, Balrog was a common name for videogame monsters at the time, and one particularly well-known Japanese one would be the Balrog from Dragon Warrior III:

Balrog from Dragon Warrior III

So it's not entirely clear if he was specifically thinking of Tolkien's Balrog or, more likely, a typical Balrog monster from the familiar games. It seems like the idea of Balrog's claws matched with the idea of the monster's claws, hence why the name came to mind.

There's also a 1991 interview in the October 1991 special issue of Gamest Magazine with the Street Fighter 2 devs where they say why Balrog's name was chosen: "Balrog seemed really strong, so we gave him that name."

During another 1991 interview with Nishitani, he explains how the Street Fighter characters started with a design, and then names were chosen later on. Balrog started with the in-development name of "Spanish Ninja", with his concept art:

Balrog concept art

Top: Balrog was born from the concept of a ninja+matador.
Left: Our original image for him as a crusader was abandoned in deference to Western religious sensibilities.

The Japanese wiki article on Balrog further states:

According to KATURAGI, who was in charge of Balrog in Street Fighter II, art director Akiman told him , "Draw a Spanish ninja. A Thai ninja would be fine too," and he started to design him as a Thai ninja, but was told, "I want Spain after all. Like the guy who appears at the beginning of Shura Country in Fist of the North Star."

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Insofar as balrog was a word Tolkien invented, the name (used for the two boss characters in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior) almost certainly goes back ultimately to Tolkien.* However, as a generic name for a powerful monster, it had already passed into common use by the 1980s. Street Fighter II was at least the fourth video game I had played that used "balrog" as a monster name. The most powerful enemy in the original Ultima was a balron (changed, along with other explicit Tolkien references from "balrog" in Lord British's previous game Akalabeth: World of Doom).

Akalabeth: World of Doom poster

Balron wireframe

Garriot's balrogs were very clearly influenced by Tolkien, as was the frequently-renamed balrog, type VI demon, balor, roaring demon that appeared in Dungeons & Dragons. See how it carries the same "whip of many thongs" as Durin's Bane.

Type VI Demon

Another example, pointed out by MartianInvader in the comments, was the Chaos gargoyle figurine from the Hero Quest game, which is a winged bipedal monster wielding a whip and a jagged sword.

Hero Quest Chaos gargoyle

However, well before Street Fighter II, there were also instances where the name had moved far from its roots in The Lord of the Rings. There was this as-yet-unidentified game, that was probably a homebrew creation of someone associated with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The goal there was to kill the balrog. Balrogs also appeared in (fixed, but not random) encounters in the hardest dungeon of The Bard's Tale.

Bard's Tale balrog

So, whether or not some or all of the game creators at Capcom were aware that balrog was Tolkien's coinage, the name was already "out there" in the tabletop and video game communities—with the connection to The Lord of the Rings sometimes completely bleached away.

*The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for balrog. (If it were an Old English word that Tolkien had resurrected, the OED ought to include it. Their lexicographers are not perfect, but they seem pretty good about words used by Tolkien.) However, the name does appear once in the OED's citations—in a 1994 quote from The Nation about the boxer character from Street Fighter II itself!

On the video screen, a plug-ugly named Balrog had just cut loose with a series of side-kicks and elbow blows.

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    That quote is definitely referring to the Street Fighter character. Calling him "plug-ugly" is pretty harsh, though. Commented Sep 30, 2024 at 15:25
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    @rartorata I tracked down the full text, and it's a really weird article—Stuart Klawans describing the discussion he had with his rabbi about Natural Born Killers while playing Street Fighter II at an arcade. Commented Sep 30, 2024 at 16:44
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    That Tolkein was responsible for introducing the word to modern English does not necessarily mean he coined it. Tolkein was a scholar in ancient languages and most of his names and created languages borrowed heavily from them (which is why they tend to feel more "real" than many other later fictional languages). It is possible that "balrog" comes from Anglo-Saxon or another ancient language, or it may be a modified version of such a word. Commented Sep 30, 2024 at 17:05
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    The Wikipedia article on balrogs mentions an Old Norse epithet for Odin, Báleygr, as possibly being connected to the word balrog, but I think that might be speculation on the part of whoever added that to the article, rather than anything definitely intended by Tolkien. tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs mentions a more convincing real-word source citing Christopher Tolkien. Commented Sep 30, 2024 at 20:35
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    You know, looking through your list of Balrog homages suddenly made me realize that in the original Hero Quest board game, the big bad Gargoyle wields a whip and a sword, and has an eerily familiar winged form... Commented Sep 30, 2024 at 22:57

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