For fighting games, I only worked on the Street Fighter III series. I also worked on Saturday Night Slam Masters. That game where you could slam people straight into the mat.

My first game was Section Z※1. I did the pixel art, just for the bosses. Then I did the designs for Trojan※2.

That would be Led Storm※3 more commonly known in America as Mad Gear.
It didn't really sell in Japan (lol), but Mr. Nishitani*4 changed it into Mad Gear※5 for the west.

And that's how we ended up with the name of the enemy gang in Final Fight.

I wonder if Mad Gear was Mr. Nishitani's first game...

The original Street Fighter was in development together with Mad Gear. I wasn't a part of it, but I did get to see where it was being developed.

The guy who made the original Street Fighter was also the guy who made Kung Fu Master. At Capcom he then made Trojan, and then would go on to make Street Fighter.

Then after that, he made Avenger※6.

I guess you could call it a tetralogy. lol

As for me, I made Dragons※7.

Yes. The young kids were working on it, so I served a support role for the designers. I didn't do any pixel art. Negotiating capacity, serving as an advisor, etc.

Right. Then after that it was Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom. Mr. Kataoka*9 worked on Shadow over Mystara.

Then after that, I went to work on Street Fighter III.

Yeah. We first started talking about it in 1994. But we couldn't get people to work on it. I think everyone was working on Darkstalkers※11 at the time. I think we got started with just 2 programmers, about 2 planners, and a certain designer※12. We used that time to start narrowing down what we wanted to do. We got started for real in 1995.

We wanted to do parries※13 and the Super Arts Select system※14. Those were our major two pillars.

We thought of parries as a fundamental part of the game system, we didn't think of it as the game's selling point.

Right. But the impact was really strong, so it stood out.

It's a basic aspect of fighting, isn't it? We felt it was something within authentic martial arts moves that we wanted to recreate.

You see it often in kung-fu, or Jackie Chan fights, someone receiving the attack, right? We thought we wanted to have something where they received or reflected the attack. That really focused the gameplay. But we didn't want to make it into a system, so we just called it "blocking" (in Japan, parrying is called blocking).

And then, we wanted to do something about wakeup and corner pressure, that people were saying was difficult to deal with. That was one of the issues in our plan. But at first, both seemed like a tall order. lol

So part of our thoughts for parries was that we wanted to do something about people just getting relentlessly pressured offensively.

For example, even a random parry could help to turn the tide, something that the players could experience. For that reason we decided to make it so that performing a parry didn't cost any sort of meter.

Funny you should mention that... lol

At first, the command for parry was to push the joystick backwards. lol

But the young guys around and the fighting gamers internally were extremely against that idea. "That's way too easy!" they said. Do it quickly and you get the parry, drag it out and you get a block. There was no risk involved.

I thought, for beginners to enjoy the game as well, even if their response time wasn't good then they could still be able to do parries, but there was fierce opposition to that.

I said, "then what should we do?" and they responded with "we'll try it if the input is forward. Let us make it by forward input." So I said - "Okay, but if it turns out to be difficult, then make it backwards." and with that promise, they made it for forward input.

I thought that it'd ultimately end up being backwards input. lol

But then when it was finished, the staff said, "this is good!" and no one listened to me. lol

I said "C'mon, just try the backwards input, even just once!" ...But no one responded to that.

Hahahahahaha. lol

Ultimately, I never got to see the backwards input parry. lol I thought I'd hold onto the idea, and at some point before the game's release we could work on it during the adjustment period, but it never came to be.

Sounds like it was quite the process. But the end result was good!