On the official Japanese Super Street Fighter 4 blog, Director Takashi Tsukamoto has told how bonus stages came to be included in Super SFIV, instead of its predecessor. Apparenty there was originally some talk about including the stages in the arcade version Street Fighter IV. However, back then it was unclear how much demand there would actually be for this, both amongst players and arcade operators. In the end the decision was to use the development time to generate good game balance, so they passed on the idea. The development staff also considered putting the bonus stages in the original home release of SFIV, but "various circumstances" kept it out. Producer Yoshinori Ono did of course give the go sign for Super. after realising it was something fans worldwide really wanted to see.
A few points from the blog:
Super's car and barrel stages are as you may already know new versions of older bonus stages found since Street Fighter 2. But there was initially a plan to include completely new stages also, including one which resembled a rhythm game. Taisaku Okada (Battle Director) recalled one idea which had Guile jumping between fighter planes in mid air : /
After surveying all the development staff, the team was compelled to do the car and barrel stages. When asked about Street Fighter bonus stages, 10 out of 10 staffers surveyed mentioned the car destruction bonus stage. This was the first stage decided for inclusion.
For the second stage, there were a number of opinions for such things as barrels and drum cans. Since they were making a second stage anyway, they decided that it should be something different from the car stage, leaving still objects like drum cans out of it.
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