If there's a Strider 3 in the works, this is the place to look for it. As far as I know, the only rumors date back to this Spong article from 2002 saying Capcom was thinking about doing a 3D Strider for Xbox.

In the article, Koji Nakajima said, "We would like to see Strider made in 3D. [Yoshihiro Sudo] would like to see the game on Xbox. It has not gone into development yet, but it might do at some point in the future."

Now, as well as helming Strider 2, Yoshihiro Sudo was part of Capcom's Production Studio 6, the same studio that put out Chaos Legion. Unfortunately, due to Chaos Legion's immense failure, Production Studio 6 closed down in 2004.

Here's the press release regarding that:

Capcom Closes Tokyo Development Studios
By David Smith
3/25/2004

Capcom is closing down the majority of its Tokyo-based development studios, multiple sources at the Game Developers Conference report.

While that isn't as much of a blow as one might assume, since the bulk of Capcom's development efforts are based in Osaka rather than Tokyo, most of the publisher's in-house PC development section is gone, as well as the Production Studio 6 team responsible for Chaos Legion. The remaining studios that were once directly overlooked by senior managing director Yoshiki Okamoto, like Capcom's Nagoya studio, have also been dissolved, although many of their staff already reportedly left the company to join Okamoto at his new company.

Capcom still has a substantial development base at its Osaka headquarters, so this news isn't quite as bad as it may seem. However, we'll continue to follow more developments in the story as E3 approaches, and Capcom prepares to debut a new round of games for the coming year.

And there the trail ends.

They hadn't started working on Strider 3 at the time of the interview, so I doubt there was anything left over when the studio closed. It would be cool to see how far the development team got, though. I don't think they got anywhere near done, but I would like to see concept sketches, storyboards, and stuff like that. If they had any.

And if, on the off-chance that someone at Capcom is reading this, here's what I'd like to see in a future Strider 3:

• Preserve the solid controls and in-game mechanics. Strider 2's gameplay was damn near perfect, as far as the control scheme, hit detection, physics, and other mechanics were concerned. Its predecessor's weren't bad either, by all accounts. Preserve this as much as possible.

• Don't misplace the series' energy. Strider is mostly known for its frantic pace and momentum. All-out action is the name of the game. Look to the PS2 Shinobi for how to do this in 3D.

• Use more flowing gameplay. One of the things Strider 2 lacked was the fluid structure of its predecessor. The level design was noticeably lacking; sections of each level often completely failed to correlate to one another. Compare the Kazakh stage to Neo Hong Kong in Strider 2. How does Hiryu get from the abandoned subway to the highway with the flying cars? How does he get up in the air, to ride and fight the Emperor Dragon? Contrasting with this, the Kazakh level flowed from one section to another, going from the city streets to the council chamber without cutting away. Strider 2 tried to link everything together with wireframe mission paths at the start of each level, but this completely failed to unify the game's structure.

• Design with the home conversion in mind. The biggest complaint people have about Strider 2 is the infinite continues. I understand that the programmers were trying to keep the arcade audience in mind. I do. And in the arcade, the continues that drop you right where you die really worked, because you had to actually pay to continue. It would have taken all of two seconds to write a line of code for the home version that sent you back to the beginning of the scene. Since that line had to be modified to disregard coin insertion anyway, the fact that it wasn't altered further is inexcusable.

• Write a story with an ending that makes sense. If you could make sense of the previous two games' endings, that would be great too. That would also be a bit of a tall order. Riding on whales and "2000 years ago", indeed. This is a Strider game, so don't go Metal Gear Solid with the story, but at least tell a decent one.