While previous
Street Fighter titles relied almost solely on Capcom's Research and Development branch, the development team instead allowed other branches of the company to give input on the design of new characters, due to the influx of fan requests from outside Japan.
[8] C. Viper was designed based upon marketing research on what sorts of characters an American audience would enjoy playing,
[9] and tailored her towards Western tastes as an experiment to see how audiences would receive the character.
[10] Street Fighter IV executive producer
Yoshinori Ono has described her as the most "unorthodox" of the four new characters introduced in the title, emphasizing this aspect as one he felt would appeal to American players,
[11] and was his favorite character when the game was early in development.
[12]