Not at all.

Haha way back then?

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

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.

I started out as the background man² for Side Arms¹.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

Yeah.

Exactly