Guests

ROUND 1: Akira Yasuda Part 1

Akira Yasuda

Our first interviewee will be Akira Yasuda, AKA Akiman, one of the original creators of Street Fighter I, and the designer who brought Chun-Li into this world.

Akira was working in the States when I first joined Capcom, I still remember going to meet him when he returned to Japan and asking for a signature. I've been lucky enough to be able to listen to a lot of his stories over the years.

I visited his office about 1 month after Street Fighter V was released. As I opened the door I was shocked to see Akira out for the count on the floor, and immediately rushed over to his side. It turns out he was feeling sleepy and decided to sit next to the door in case he really did fall asleep and didn't notice me coming in. I felt pretty humble that he'd be worried about something like that.

I was seriously worried for a moment there...

From the first days at Capcom to Forgotten Worlds

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Sorry to bother you.

akiman_icon.jpg

Not at all.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

I'd like to ask you a few things for our site (SCRI). Let's start off with how you joined Capcom.

akiman_icon.jpg

Haha way back then?

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

If you don't mind!

akiman_icon.jpg

I was interviewed three days before my 21st birthday, as it was a Friday they asked me to start three days later.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

What was it like to work at Capcom back then?

akiman_icon.jpg

I hated filling in my punch card, so often I'd just sleep over. At the time if you worked late you'd get 700 yen (500 for Osaka) towards food as well, so I'd do overtime just for that. I used to try out weird combos like ordering curry rice and rice together.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Curry rice....and rice. What was work like when you started?

akiman_icon.jpg

I started out as the background man2 for Side Arms1.

1Side Arms

sidearms.jpg

A shoot-'em-up released in 1986. It featured buttons for shooting forwards and backwards, and had a power up that allowed the 1P and 2P ships to merge!

2Positions at Capcom used to have the "-man" suffix

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

No way, I started out as a background man too!

akiman_icon.jpg

Some coincidence eh? Back then the dev hierarchy was Planning > Character Design > Backgrounds.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Interesting, for my generation the character designers were on top.

akiman_icon.jpg

I really didn't like being limited to one thing, so I made the ship sprites and even made the opening on my own.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

That must have been how you were noticed and changed department.

akiman_icon.jpg

Well there was that, but I also kept an eye on my boss, and whenever he took a toilet break I'd go and bug him about moving me to another department.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Wow!

akiman_icon.jpg

Eventually I was told to work as Nishitani's3 right hand, which meant I would be going over planning and creating the foundations for various games.

3The current CEO of Arika, Akira Nishitani.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Nowadays we'd call that directing.

akiman_icon.jpg

Exactly. I really enjoy drafting plans, mostly because it's where character and overall design are the most important elements.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Yeah.

akiman_icon.jpg

I had a lot of liberty to do things the way I wanted to, and Nishitani was good at tweaking everything.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

What was the first title you made together?

akiman_icon.jpg

Forgotten Worlds4. At first it was a regular side scroller, but our boss5 told us to be more imaginative, that's when we started over and added things like the roll switch.

It was the first game for the CP-16 and we were told that it had to be smash hit in order to showcase the hardware, so we really went all out in the art department. We even added things like the shop system, and each stage had its own specific enemies.

4Forgotten worlds

lost.PNG

A shoot 'em up released in 1988. Infamous for lines such as "My date with Cleopatra's ruined". Defeating enemies earns you Zenny, which can be used in the shop to buy powerups.

5 Yoshiki Okamoto

6 CP System, Capcom's own arcade board

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Oh yeah, that was one gorgeous game!

akiman_icon.jpg

I really didn't know what I was doing, so I concentrated on making it look good.

It didn't sell well at all in the end.

The game didn't generate much income7, the shooter market was already saturated and one credit went a really long way. It also took 2 years to develop, which was a long time back then.

I gave the game a really artistic, organic kind of theme. Kenzo Tsujimoto, the current chairman of Capcom, then said to me:

Yasuda, your design is excellent, but I can't understand what's going on. Add some buildings. People always prefer things they are familiar with rather than the unknown.

His words made perfect sense to me.

Of course, when he told me this the game was already almost complete (laughs).

7 Income: Refers to the number of 100 yen coins customers spend in an arcade.
icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Yeah, that happens a lot (laughs).

akiman_icon.jpg

I was only able to do things the way I knew.

Income wasn't the only issue that had an impact on the game's success. We were using a 1 meg rom chip, but at the time the yield was really low for that size and we couldn't get our hands on enough chips, meaning we could only make so many machines.

According to my boss the game didn't sell well because of my design decisions, and he told me to apologize.

During the final three months of development he personally made some adjustments which I'm really grateful for.

It felt like he wasn't going to let me work on my own again in the future however. Up until then I believed that if I gave it all I had then I'd be rewarded.

But it didn't pan out in the end. It was that experience that made me appreciate how important simplicity is in design.



Space and Final Fight

akiman_icon.jpg

Right after Forgotten Worlds, the boss was going over the planned title list and asked me

"Hey Yasuda, want to work on Street Fighter II?"

"Sure thing!" I answered.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Now we're talking!

akiman_icon.jpg

I was stoked, until I learned that the space allocated for graphics was going to be about half that of Forgotten Worlds.

It was only about two thirds of the original Street Fighter, really not much at all.

I thought it was a bad idea to have a sequel with worse specs than its predecessor, I didn't think it would sell.

We decided to put it on hold for a while, and make a different game instead.

That game was Final Fight.

ffight.png

That's how we bought time.

I was sent to a game show in LA, and told to find out which games were popular.

It turned out that belt floor action8 games were hot.

8Belt floor action: also know as belt scroll action games, or side-scrollers in the West. They feature a long horizontal stage with waves of enemies that scroll into view.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

I see.

akiman_icon.jpg

And that's how Final Fight was born. My plan this time was to do the exact opposite of Forgotten Worlds.

I initially planned Final Fight to have 3 rows along which you could move, but Nishitani told me it looked dated so we decided to allow free movement into the screen.

Nishitani worked on programming things like hit detection, whereas I designed the controls and characters. Unlike with Forgotten Worlds, we made sure to keep tabs on the amount of character data and the development time.

The result was an efficient use of the available space. We also dropped the idea of using different enemy designs for each stage like we had with Forgotten Worlds, which allowed the enemy designs to better convey their own strength.9

In arcade games, it's annoying when you come across an enemy for the first time and he turns out to be unexpectedly powerful right? Although I guess you can just continue if the game's being played on a home console.

Weak

J.jpg

Strong

andre.jpg

9J is always weak, Andre is strong, no matter the stage

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Makes sense, we are talking about 100 yen a pop after all.

akiman_icon.jpg

After what the chairman told me about buildings when I was working on Forgotten Worlds, I made sure to put them in every single stage (laughs).

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Haha, now it all makes sense!

akiman_icon.jpg

That's really all there was to that decision. Also, the chairman really likes movies, and he told us

"Get your inspiration from movies."

I remember stitching together a few movies to make a presentation.

"Streets of Fire" and Charles Bronson's "Hard Times" were the ones I used back then.

Basically movies about fighting. I really took the chairman's words to heart - "Use movies!" he said, so I took that to mean we should just openly plagiarize them (laughs).

icon_naka_twitter.jpg
Plagarize them (laughs). I think you did a great job in portraying the feel and universe of those movies.

akiman_icon.jpg

Thanks!

For the controls I tried to do the opposite of what other scrollers were doing. I thought people would like to repeatedly press the attack button to perform combos, and I added a life gauge which was all the rage in PC games.

Final Fight had a lot of asset reuse, but it allowed us to cram it into half the memory of Forgotten Worlds.

And right before we finished, the boss told me

"If you're tight for space, you can use the same amount as Forgotten Worlds if you want to."

Too late now, I thought, so I just told him "Nah we're good, thanks!"

Just after that we hit a little crisis due to the item space (healing items etc.) being full up.

Luckily, and completely by coincidence, I found an empty memory chart10 just lying under my desk.

10A sheet of paper used to allocate the available memory.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Under your desk! (laughs)

akiman_icon.jpg

That's right! (laughs) Thanks to that small miracle we were able to add the final items.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg
Yeah, back then you really had to pack the sprites in tight11 if you wanted everything to fit.

11Sprite packing: Splitting up the in-game sprites into regular amounts such as 8x8 pixels in order to maximize the available memory. The game is programmed using coordinates to recreate the original sprite.

akiman_icon.jpg

Definitely. Speaking of which, Cody's walking animation is 32 pixels wide.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

It looks like he's stretching his back

The walking animation is clearly narrower!

cody.jpg
akiman_icon.jpg
Exactly, and making it that thin saved a crucial amount of data, and I was able to squeeze in 12 frames of animation instead.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Haggar's sprite was only half-animated wasn't it, only his legs moved.

Look at the torso!

haggar.jpg
akiman_icon.jpg

Yeah. He moves up and down a little so it looks like he's walking right? I always tried to stay ahead of the game by using tons of these little details.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Final fight is an amazing game to play to this day, there's so many little details like this! Things like the enemy layout, the stage lengths. The music is all amazing too.

akiman_icon.jpg

Yeah the music is really awesome. Something just came back to me (laughs), you know how the first stage is really short? These days we'd call that a tutorial.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Right when you go to fight downstairs, and the screen changes completely, there's so much going on in that stage, it doesn't feel short at all. I love how the lights flicker!

akiman_icon.jpg
Yeah, I really wanted that effect in the game.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg
On a different note, was Haggar based on anyone in particular?

akiman_icon.jpg

No, I don't think so. We just needed a big dude for one of the player characters.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

He really works well with the theme.

akiman_icon.jpg

Yeah he does. It might be normal nowadays, but back then big sprites = lots of memory so they stood out because they were so rare. No one was as stunning as he was, big was beautiful. That's not the case anymore though.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

I love big characters too. That's actually why Birdie was so huge, I'm a fan of the "big = strong" philosophy.

akiman_icon.jpg

You are? That's awesome. Come to think of it Birdie really is big isn't he, and he can stretch. Truly the enemy of a generation (laughs).

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

No one's ever heard this tale before have they?


akiman_icon.jpg

That's because no one ever asked! (laughs).


icon_naka_twitter.jpg

And that brings us to Street Fighter II!

akiman_icon.jpg

Yeah.

icon_naka_twitter.jpg

You and Nishitani worked together again didn't you, like with Final Fight?

akiman_icon.jpg

Exactly


icon_naka_twitter.jpg

You must have been best buddies back then!

akiman_icon.jpg
Back then, sure (laughs).
icon_naka_twitter.jpg

Huh??



To be continued...

 

Interviewer
Nakayama
nakayama_tw.jpg
Interviewee
Akiman
akiman_tw.jpg

【 音量を調整してお楽しみください 】

※メッセージは1件のみ保存できます。

Use Twitter to communicate with other Dojo members, and challenge other fighters to a battle! A great way to sharpen your skills!

CLOSE

The Dojo is a place where like-minded SFV fans can join forces.
All you need to do is to log in to the C.R.I. to join!

  • With detailed search settings, you can find groups of all sorts of players, from casuals, to serious players, and more! Join forces with people who use the same character, or are in the same league, and work together to improve your skills!

  • Can be linked with your Fighters ID and Twitter account, giving you quick ways to communicate!

  • You can use the Dojo stage simply by joining a Dojo! Note: The Dojo stage in-game can contain aspects customized by the individual player. An individual's Dojo stage cannot be customized by anyone else, including the Dojo Master and other Dojo members.

  • The Dojo stage can be customized with items obtained in-game, and through Menat's Fighting Chance! Surprise your opponent with your own personalized stage, start the mind games before the round even begins!

  • You will accumulate Dojo Points as you regularly play SFV! * Dojo Points can be obtained from playing the Arcade, Survival, Extra Battle, Ranked Match, Casual Match, and Battle Lounge game modes.
    * In one day, DP can only be obtained a maximum of 10 times for the Battle Lounge, per each difficulty in Arcade and Survival Modes, and by the total calculation of draws/losses in Ranked and Casual Matches.

  • The Dojo Ranking is calculated from the total Dojo Points from all the Dojo members. Work together with your friends to increase your Dojo ranking!

  • Dojos that earn the top ranking spot will get special Dojo items! Display them in the Dojo and show off to your opponents! Dojo Rankings will begin from October, 2018!

You must log in in order to utilize this Dojo.

In the basic settings, set the Join Authorization to "Not Needed," Join Requests to "Accepting," and the Maximum No. of Members to "100," and you can get a wide range of members! The more members, the bigger the chance you have to get a lot of Dojo Points!

Be strict with your desired league and LP ranking settings to gather similar members, and work together to polish your skills! A direct path to realizing your dreams!

An excellent method to increase communication opportunities. Speaking with your fists isn't the only way get your point across!