Akira Yasuda – 2003 Developer Interview

—This year you quit Capcom and went completely independent.

Yasuda: I quit Capcom and went freelance on June 28th, so I think it’s been about 5 months now?

—It sounds like you’ve been doing a lot—in fact, right after quitting you went and drew that Kunoichi poster for Sega. What are some of the differences in working freelance, compared with being a full-time employee?

Yasuda: Ultimately, I’m a lot more happy working freelance. I did have some anxiety about it before I quit though. I was worried about money, whether my colleagues would think I betrayed them, whether any work would come my way… As it turns out, now that I’m actually working this way, most of those fears were unfounded. Well, I haven’t really solved the whole money thing yet.

—And you’ve still continued to do a lot of work for Capcom, too.

Yasuda: When I was employed at Capcom, I was a very expensive designer for them to use. My salary was high, so Capcom couldn’t afford to use me on any non-game projects. For example, Tokyo Capcom’s character rights department wanted to use me for some illustrations, but my costs were too high so I couldn’t do it. But now that I’m freelance I can offer much more affordable rates, so I’ve been getting a lot of work from Capcom.

—That’s amazing… you’re doing MORE work for Capcom now as an independent than when you were their own full-time employee! Which surprises me, because I had heard that you were Capcom’s busiest designer, and that no one’s pulled as many overnighters as you.

—Hmm, yeah, I guess it just surprises me that someone so acclimated to life at Capcom would then quit and go freelance. But let’s put that aside for now. Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. I’d like to cover your whole career today, from the time you joined Capcom, all the way up to your decision to go freelance. To start things off, did you want to be a designer since you were a kid?

Yasuda: Ever since I was a child, I’ve always taken great pride in what I drew. In my second or third year of grade school, my homeroom teacher Mr. Kimura praised my drawings, which gave me a huge boost of confidence. I can still remember it today—we were doing a drawing exercise in class, drawing water insects. I was drawing a gengoro (a diving beetle) with my pencil, adding gradations and highlights. Mr. Kimura saw it and exclaimed, “Amazing! Hey, everyone, look at this!” All the students gathered around me and went “woooow”, and I became something of a popular kid after that. Since that day, I became completely focused on art and art alone—it felt like my own personal treasure, and I kept working to refine and improve it.

—When did you practice drawing?

Yasuda: When I got home from school, I would go straight to my room and draw for the rest of the day. If my friends invited me out to baseball or something, I’d say “sure”, but then I’d flake out to stay home and draw. The key to getting better as an artist is to break all your promises. (laughs)

I didn’t do any clubs in middle school, so I could focus unhindered on drawing and my other passion at the time, which was radio. I spent many afternoons listening to the BCL (shortwave) radio and poring over my “Make Your Own Radio Book”, trying to build my own. Maybe my parents felt guilty because they worked in the night entertainment industry and were busy a lot, but they always bought me whatever I needed to help me pursue my interests. After I saw a tv program showcasing illustrator Shusei Nagaoka’s art, they bought me an airbrush and several fine-point brushes. Likewise, when I saw Hajime Sorayama’s illustrations, they went and bought me liquitex acrylics.

—Did you major in the arts in high school?

Yasuda: The local high school I attended in Kushiro had a really strong art club, which I joined. One of the older students had won the Ministry of Education Award and the Prime Minister Award, and the walls of the art club room were adorned with many of his humongous canvases. It was nothing but dark oil paintings: abandoned fishing boats, desolate and lonely shopping areas… they were powerful enough, but all that gloomy imagery did absolutely nothing for me personally, and I didn’t get on with the club. As a result, I never learned oil painting, but instead focused on graphic design. In fact, in my first year I won the design award for the Hokkaido contest, and the following year I won the design, illustration, and photography awards. That boosted my pride. If I could be the best in Hokkaido, I thought, maybe I could be the best anywhere in the world.

—With such artistic skill, weren’t you very popular in school?

Yasuda: Well, I got the sense people thought I was cool maybe, but… the truth is, I was pretty slovenly, often not showering for days, so I wasn’t one of the popular kids among my immediate classmates. I did receive a lot of presents and attention from younger students though. They gave me a Gundam cushion once, stuff like that.

—Are you “coming out” as a lifelong Gundam fan today?

Yasuda: Yup. I even once wrote an essay for class titled “Why Gundam is Cool”. I had a lot of the model kits too.

—I understand you headed straight to Tokyo after graduating high school.

Yasuda: Me, the head of the art club, and another friend from art club all decided we would go to Tokyo to try and make it as artists. A friend of mine was paying his way through design school by delivering newspapers, so I copied him and did the same.

—So you’d start each morning with paper delivery, then have the rest of the day to work on your art.

Yasuda: It was actually a very difficult time for me. I was not suited for the paper delivery work. I was always late, I was bad at collecting the payments, and I didn’t follow-up on re-subscriptions with customers. My boss hated me. On top of that, I quit design school after a year, and then I spent a whole year where all I did was focus on the paper delivery job.

—It sounds like you completely lost sight of your goals. A wasted year.

Yasuda: Yeah, I just loafed around all day. Around that time one of my senpais at the newspaper delivery job bought himself a new computer. It was a PC-6001, the “Papikon” as it’s called. I thought it looked interesting, so he let me use it and I tried writing a program for it. I wrote a very simple program that would draw lines if you entered coordinates. I thought to myself, “Hey, with this, I could draw on the computer…”

I tried drawing a picture of Lum from Urusei Yastura. However, as soon as I drew her outline, I got a memory overrun error. I investigated and discovered I had run out of “video ram.” I didn’t know what “video ram” meant, but I gathered that this computer wasn’t very powerful. After that experience I wanted a computer of my own, so I rushed out and bought the highest-spec model on the market then, a Toshiba Pasopia 7. I had so much fun with that computer. It could handle detailed line coordinates, and I used it to draw anime characters on-screen. To get a good skin-tone, I would alternate orange and white lines. I saved my drawings on a cassette tape recorder storage.

—So this was your first taste of the joy of computer graphics.

Yasuda: I really had no idea drawing on the computer would be this much fun. I then started reading Maikon Basic Magazine and learned to program. It was there that I saw the pixel art for Xevious, and learned about the beauty of pixel art.

—Was that when you decided to try joining Capcom?

Yasuda: No, after the newspaper delivery job, I kept working on a couple part-time jobs for awhile: as an animator, and organizing freight in a warehouse. But I had no money and the work was sporadic, so for a long time I lived at my girlfriend’s place. Occasionally I saw job ads Capcom put out, looking for people to design posters or make commercials. I actually thought they were an advertising company when I first applied to them.

—What was their hiring test like?

Yasuda: I was interviewed by Yoshiki Okamoto. He had that popular Checkers haircut with the uneven bangs, and a nice deep tan. He was like your cooler older brother or something. Anyway, after a very short interview he asked me if I could start the day after tomorrow.

—There’s a legend I’ve heard about you, that you came to the Capcom interview wearing your pajamas…

Yasuda: That could be true, but I don’t remember! It is true that I used to wear pajamas to the office, so I bet I did wear them to the interview too. My girlfriend’s pajamas had a collar that I thought looked more professional than my t-shirts.

—Did Capcom have a game development team in Tokyo at the time, too?

Yasuda: They did. And I worked at the Tokyo office. I had no money for the commute from my girlfriend’s place to the office, though, so I asked Okamoto for commute expenses and Capcom paid them. That's how I started working there.

Okamoto was a pro when it came to delegating work. It wasn’t the kind of workplace where you could be helpless and ask how things were done; you had to figure it out yourself.

—It would appear then that your foundation in computer graphics work came from two sources: the drawings you made on your computer of Lum-chan, and Okamoto’s tutelage.

Yasuda: Hmm, well, the computer I did the Lum-chan drawings on had a high resolution, so I drew with lines on that. But pixel art is a low-resolution style that doesn’t use lines. So if I had to say, I think I mainly studied on my own by watching my senior colleagues at Capcom draw pixel art. One characteristic of pixel art is that brighter pixels appear closer, and darker pixels appear further away. One of my techniques was to use darker pixels on the characters’ edges/margins, and to give them a greater sense of depth, I would color the pixels in such a way as to make it appear like a light source was hitting then.

—Were the backgrounds your only contribution to Side Arms?

Yasuda: Working on the backgrounds alone would have been boring, so I also drew the player character and enemy sprites.

—Now that you mention it, the designs do resemble Z Gundam.

Yasuda: Yeah, because I was watching Z Gundam while I drew them! (laughs) Okamoto liked to come over and talk Gundam with me. “Yasuda, Z Gundam is great. But Quattro Bajeena is actually Char Aznable, don’t you think?” He was always calling him “Quattro Vagina!!!”

—Sounds like the kind of joke an old man would make.

Yasuda: He was still pretty young back then though. Anyway, as I completed more of the backgrounds for Side Arms, I started wanting to do something new, and I thought it would be fun to create an opening animation for Side Arms. The other team was still working on Gunsmoke then. Okamoto complained that it would take too much time, but I pointed out how Makaimura (Ghosts and Goblins) had an 8-second opening intro, and that was enough to persuade him.

Do you know the Side Arms opening? The Earth appears, and changes color from blue to red, while fighter ships warp in one-by-one, twinkling against the background of space. I used about 20 animation frames in total, it was really fun.

—How long did Side Arms take to develop?

Yasuda: About a year, I think. In the middle we moved the development to Osaka, and I moved into the company dorm there too, and began my “Osaka bachelor life”. Gunsmoke was finished shortly thereafter. It was very popular. After that it was like, ok, now we’ve really got to finish Side Arms, but we just weren’t making any progress on our own. Ultimately Okamoto had to join the development and then we finished it up in three months.

—That’s not surprising though, as Side Arms was like a crash course for you in designing backgrounds, pixel art, and animation all at once. How many pcbs did Capcom ship?

Yasuda: Around 5000, if I recall.

—Wow, that sounds like a hit. Did the success of Side Arms finally put you on a solid financial footing, then?

Yasuda: Yeah, I got two raises that year. In the beginning I wasn’t a full-time employee so my wages were low, but it shot up after that. Plus I didn’t really go out much so it was easy to save. I rather preferred being at the office to going out.

—Did you take vacation days?

Yasuda: We had them, but Okamoto would get mad if you took the day off. A lot of people got yelled at by him for that, “Hey, why weren’t you here on Sunday?!”

—Wow, that’s pretty strict… The next game you worked on was Forgotten Worlds.

Yasuda: With Forgotten Worlds, I had decided I wanted to try being a planner. I asked Okamoto about it, and after going to the bathroom he came back and was like, “Sure.” He put me on the team that had been working on the predecessor to Forgotten Worlds.

—Forgotten Worlds was a unique game, with its rotary controls and 2-player co-op.

Yasuda: Half of those ideas came from Okamoto. He had his own individual theories and notions about what made a game good. He thought games were better with two players, that scoring with two players was more fun, that the game should include a really powerful attack, and so on. The original idea for Forgotten Worlds, in fact, came from Okamoto wanting to make a gameplay system where players could work together to purchase things.

—And then you inherited those plans, and developed them further?

Yasuda: Not exactly. Unfortunately Okamoto’s original plans weren’t working out too well, so they brought Capcom’s first “pure” game planner on-board, Akira Nishitani. Up to then, a “planner” was just someone who had been promoted from their position as a programmer or designer, but Nishitani was the very first person to be hired as a planner from the start. Okamoto approved of my participation on condition that I support Nishitani.

—What kind of person was Nishitani?

Yasuda: He had worked as a game magazine writer since high school, and he used to write the strategy guide sections for Gamest. He was an incredible person. He had his own uniques theories and ideas too. Compared to him, my ideas looked like a hodgepodge of gimmicks, with lots of stuff that didn’t make sense.

—But this same Nishitani-Yasuda team would later give birth to the masterpiece Street Fighter II.

Yasuda: That’s right. But during Forgotten Worlds, we found ourselves in the midst of a serious ROM production crisis and our production capacity dropped to 20%.

—Yes, I remember very few Forgotten Worlds pcbs were shipped.

Yasuda: Also, for some reason during the Forgotten Worlds development, we also created this hentai mahjong game called “Mahjong Gakuen” (mahjong academy). Ultimately it ended up not being released by Capcom, but it was planned and designed by Okamoto. That was a very fortuitious project. The art I drew wasn’t too explicit, more of a winking-and-hinting kind of hentai… the game was a huge hit and I got a big bonus thanks to it. Okamoto gave me a 1.08 million yen bonus (roughly 10.8k USD).

—It’s amazing how THAT is the game that got you a bonus. How many pcbs of Mahjong Gakuen were shipped?

The masterpiece I loved, Gradius, made no money at all, and Capcom’s Son Son and Gunsmoke were also not doing very well. Super Real Mahjong PII was there too, but it wasn’t faring well either.

—You got to witness first-hand the difference between Japanese and American tastes.

Yasuda: I asked one of the Capcom USA employees, and another Japanese person who was living in America, what the reason for this was. What I learned was that, in America, it appeared that game centers used a token system, where people would buy a bunch of tokens and then use them in a flurry all at once. In other words, while Japanese people would treat an arcade game as something you spent 100 yen on for each play, in contrast Americans would buy all their tokens up front and then buy multiple credits for a game in one go. They weren’t trying to clear the stages on one coin; they just wanted to have a good time punching and beating stuff up.

I realized then that if Capcom wanted to succeed in America, we were going to have to make an about-face and create a game like Double Dragon or Datsugoku. With those thoughts in my head I returned to Japan, and the new game I thought up was Final Fight.

—That makes sense. A belt-scrolling fighter.

Yasuda: I was really aggressive about my ideas when I got back. Nishitani had not been to America, so I was the only one insisting that we had to change course. But Nishitani was very smart, and he soon grasped the situation, and he helped me out on the planning for Final Fight.

The first and most important thing was that I wanted to make an action game with better movement than Double Dragon or P.O.W. To that end I added a jump button, plus the ability to do different attacks depending on how many times you hit the attack button.

I also wanted to improve the efficiency of our development process. With Mahjong Gakuen, I had experienced how adding more people could speed up the development: we used about 20 people to make Mahjong Gakuen and muscled through it in a month. I was excited to see what amazing feats we could pull off with a properly organized development, and I was very eager to put that experience to use on Final Fight.

—You were moving on from a time-intensive, craftsman approach to game development, towards a more efficient, factory-like development.

Yasuda: On a good day I could draw 8 animation patterns. At the same time, two graphics designers could be working on pixel art, and two designers could work on backgrounds. In this way we established an assembly-line style division of labor. As a result, amazingly we managed to finish Final Fight in half a year!

—Nice!

Yasuda: Of course, there were lots of issues. There was a sheet of paper on my desk that had all the calculations for how much memory we were allocating to each part, and that paper got lost at some point, so we inadvertently ran out of memory for the items… we barely found some space just before the deadline, and just managed to squeeze everything in. Everyone was super excited, people were going around yelling “It’s a miracle!!” And we ended up selling 30,000 pcbs.

—A new record.

Yasuda: Yeah, it kind of gave me a big head. “Why aren’t we doing this for all our developments???” I was riding high. Okamoto praised me too. Even Noritaka Funamizu, the senior colleague I was most intimidated by then, said “Hey, this is pretty fun.” And so, as time went on, the organization and administrative aspects of our developments at Capcom improved, and we also solved the ROM supply problem we were having.

—At last we come to Street Fighter II. A joint effort between you and Akira Nishitani, how did this project get underway?

Yasuda: Nishitani really came into his own then, it was amazing. It was like seeing the birth of a leader, you know? All of his communication with the staff became commanding and confident: “This should be like this here”, “This part would be better this way”, that kind of thing. He was like a god at Capcom.

—Nishitani had the confidence that only success can bring.

Yasuda: His planning documents were extremely simple. He used to write his comments in these big, childish handwriting on the documents, so big it made you laugh: “THIS PERSON IS FAST, THEIR SPECIALTY IS MID-AIR FIGHTING. THROWS ARE LIKE THIS. MID-DISTANCE ATTACK IS A SLAP. HURRICANE KICK LOOKS LIKE THIS.” And his notes were intentionally vague, so that every department had to flesh out the details on their own. That’s how the character creation process went in Street Fighter II.

—Were the “weird” characters like Dhalsim and Blanka also Nishitani’s idea?

Yasuda: The characters for SFII were checked by three people: myself, Nishitani, and another developer. We’d go through the moves one-by-one and approve them. There was this unspoken rule we operated by, where “It wasn’t good until it made us laugh.” Take Dhalsim’s punch, for example. In the actual planning documents, we set a limit on punches, that they couldn’t extend further than 128 pixels. But in that process of reviewing the characters, we decided to extend it a little further, then a little further, then a little further more… until one day we saw how long his arms came out and everyone cracked up. That was the moment we knew it was good.

That attitude transformed the atmosphere of the development. Joking around and laughing became the rule of the day. Blanka, too, started out with normal skin color, but as we were flipping through the pallete and trying out different colors, green came up, and everyone burst out laughing. It was like, “What?! Why would this human have green skin..!?” We thought it was hilarious.

—Balrog (Vega overseas) was another crazy character.

Yasuda: Balrog’s creation was really something. Looking back at it, it’s hard to convey how impressed I was. When Nishitani was imagining the characters for SFII, he divided them into different nationalities and their respective fighting styles. First he would choose their country (India, Japan, USA etc), then he would figure out a fighting style that matched it, like sumo or boxing. After matching all those up, the only ones that were leftover were “Spain” and “Ninja”. He had wanted to use ninjas for Japan, but Japan already had karate and sumo. So he just combined what he had leftover and came up with the “Spanish Ninja”.

—A spaniard who can use the Izuna Drop technique!

Yasuda: Indeed. I remember being pretty uncomfortable with the idea at first. “Would someone like that really exist…?” But he ended up becoming one of the most original characters of the cast. I learned a lot from Balrog actually. Just because a designer pours his love into the character he’s created, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be an amazing or memorable character. It took the somewhat insane and audacious vision of the planner to realize something truly original.

—Chun-Li was the character you supervised, I believe.

Yasuda: The truth is, I had almost no time to come up with Chun-Li. I had to review the animation patterns for all the different characters, you see. Plus some characters ended up having too many patterns and we couldn’t fit it all into the memory… shaving that down and making cuts took us about half a year.

—How did you go about that process, of trimming the animation down?

Yasuda: Normal walking used six frames of animation, but we also made characters who used only four frames. Dhalsim’s weird way of walking was done with four frames.

—And all that side work took away from your time to focus on Chun-Li’s design, then.

Yasuda: Looking after the development and supervising everything took up all my time, as you’d expect, and before I knew it there was only a month and a half till the deadline. On top of that, I had more work pushed on me—I had to draw the Magic Sword poster and take part in kacho (section chief) training. So I ended up only having 5 weeks to design Chun-Li, it just got crazier and crazier for me.

—Kacho training?

Yasuda: I had just been promoted to Managing Section Chief. I had to do an overnight retreat with all the section chiefs where we practiced conflict resolution and other interpersonal skills.

—I’m surprised they made you do that, given the time pressure you were under for SFII.

Yasuda: Yeah, tell me about it! I’m also a naturally quiet person so people at the retreat complained I wasn’t participating.

—How did you manage to come up with Chun-Li in such a short period, then?

Yasuda: I knew that I had to do things as efficiently and quickly as possible or I wasn’t going to make it in time. So I first created all of her unique and flashy moves, and for her normal punches/kicks, I re-used the animation from other characters. When we created our animation patterns, those patterns already contained about 50-60% of the pixel art we’d end up using. So I copied those patterns and then adapted the art to Chun-Li. It was extremely repetitive and tedious work, but if I didn’t do it, everyone else’s work would go to waste, so I just pushed through.

—How did you come up with the design for Chun-Li?

Yasuda: My first idea resembled the Chinese character Tao from the Genma Taisen (Genma Wars) animated movie, with big wide-legged pants. She would also have that front and back apron. The character wasn’t very sexy though, and my design lacked visual impact and personality. So at the 11th hour, I experimented and made a bunch of frantic changes to the pixel art. First I tried giving her bare legs and a bodycon dress. That made her look like a female pro-wrestler, a sort of “fake” kung-fu fighter. It’s a little bit hard to describe in words, but it had a lot of impact, and I decided to go with it and release her to the world this way. She became far more popular than I had imagined, I was shocked. I guess part of it was that she was the only female character in the game.

—Her audacious “fashion sense” also made a big impact: the big spiked gauntlets, white boots, and her hair buns.

Yasuda: When I got down to drawing the pixel art for Chun-Li, her arms and legs were a little hard to make out. The area around her legs was dark so I had to make her boots white, and the hair buns also had to be white or they wouldn’t stand out visually. As far as I know that fashion didn’t exist in China before, but since Chun-Li came out, it seems like it’s become an accepted thing.

—How many SFII pcbs did Capcom ship?

Yasuda: The first printing was somewhere between 70 to 80 thousand. Soon after the pirated knock-offs started going around. I heard that eventually we had something like 800,000 Street Fighter II pcbs circulating worldwide. I remember how amazing that seemed for a non-console game. The game struck a chord in people around the world… it’s one of the amazing things about video games. There are fans in Mexico, fans in Africa. The name “AKIMAN” would end up being known the world round.

Part II – Crisis, Gundam, and Red Dead Revolver

—Where did the name “AKIMAN” originally come from?

Yasuda: You know how in Dragon Quest, you only have 4 characters to write your name, right? Okamoto used to use “Yo-chi-ya-n”, and I was using “Ak-i-ra”, but I didn’t like the way that rolled off my tongue. So, in the spirit of Ultraman, I went for something heroic and added “man” to it, hence Akiman. I loved Dragon Quest so much, that after that I just kept using AKIMAN. Ever since moving to Osaka (which coincided with the Forgotten Worlds development) I’ve been using the AKIMAN name.

—I see. Returning to your career, it seems that Street Fighter II was a real turning point for you.

Yasuda: Yes, it was. I had originally just wanted to be an artist, and I joined Capcom with that intent. Just as I was thinking, “The game industry is great! I can draw all the time!”, Street Fighter II became an overnight success, and my status and reputation at suddenly Capcom shot up. Then I got assigned to be the guy who oversees and manages all the character design work in Yoshiki Okamoto’s department. In other words, for all major Capcom games, there was now a “Yasuda Juku School”.1 New character designers at Capcom would first go through a training period with me, then they’d be placed in their roles. It was fun, but gradually it became this thing where my bosses were telling me “Yasuda, your time is too important, you can’t be doing pixel art.”

—Less time in the trenches, more time managing, in other words.

Yasuda: Around that time, Nishitani told me, “I know this developer at a certain game company who once released a huge hit game. He doesn’t do much at the company now, but because of his past success, they can’t fire him, so they just keep him around as a desk worker.” Nishitani didn’t want them to happen to him, so he said, “I’m going to take my bonus now while I can”, and then he quit Capcom to found Arika.

I myself had seen a similar fate befall other senior colleagues, where they ceased to be used by the company, but were kept on, unable to quit now. I wanted to be a graphic artist, not a desk jockey—so I was determined to forge a path for myself at Capcom, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to find one. Every day was spent teaching new employees, while at night, I’d spend my entire evening doodling and sketching. Even though I was occasionally told to stop by my superiors, I still managed to carve out a bit of pixel art work, and I kept on drawing even through this period.

—What developments did you take part in after Street Fighter II?

Yasuda: The Vampire (Darkstalkers) series. Though I guess, during this period, my involvement in the actual game developments was very minor. By the time we got to Quiz Naniro Dreams, I was pretty much just helping out with minor requests from the younger employees. I went to meetings not really knowing what projects were coming down the pipeline, or what work I’d be doing. I felt like a machine, where people just came to me if they had a question about something art-related. On top of that, Capcom hired Kinu Nishimura, and people were saying she was an even better illustrator than me, and that hurt my pride a lot.

—Did you also work on X-MEN?

Yasuda: Yeah. I was in charge of Wolverine. I was anxious about it though, because I wasn’t sure I still had the chops to create good pixel art. At that point, I was still good enough. However, as time went on, it took me longer and longer to create pixel art, so that by the time we got to Street Fighter III, it took me 2 years to do Chun Li.

—Two years?!

Yasuda: And what’s worse, I only finished about 70-80% of the art for her within that time. People were wondering about me… “What’s up with Yasuda? What has he been doing all this time?” Honestly, I don’t think I would have finished it no matter how much extra time I had. I was completely defeated. I would finish one part of the pixel art, then I’d have to check a bunch of other people’s work… it was just a mess. Even Noritaka Funamizu told me, “Yasuda, you’ve got other real work to do. No more pixel art.”

While I labored away in that condition, 3D graphics eventually hit the scene. I guess they figured I could get something going there, so I ended up helping out with Star Gladiator.

—Your first 3D game.

Yasuda: Star Gladiator had started out as a training project for a group that was ostensibly created to research 3D graphics. After two years of such research, however, they were told to now try and make it into a real game. They had thought all along that this was just a research group, so they became very suspicious after this plan was announced. So I was sent in by Capcom as the “company man” to try and smooth things over with everyone.

—That’s rough.

Yasuda: I brought a lot of 2D graphic artists on board the project, but of course with only several months to study up on 3D, there wasn’t a lot I could do. I think the original team felt like they were being made fools of. It injured their pride.

—And your knowledge lied in a completely different realm.

Yasuda: If it were today, I think I’d know a way to go about it, but at that time, it was a disaster. We couldn’t even get the characters to crouch correctly. I did end up doing a lot of 3D work though: character design, texturing, modeling.

—I remember Katsuya Terada praised your character designs.

Yasuda: He did! His praise really saved me. There’s actually a lot that I wasn’t satsified with in terms of the gameplay too, for Star Gladiator. I look back on it now though and feel like there’s nothing I could personally have done.

—It was around this time you temporarily withdrew from game development, and worked on the Turn A Gundam anime as a character designer.

Yasuda: Okamoto introduced me to Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino. He brought me on board for Turn A Gundam, and I decided I would work for Sunrise in Tokyo. I hadn’t finished the animation patterns yet for Chun Li for Street Fighter III, though, so someone from Capcom took a business trip out to Tokyo and met with me. I saw it as Capcom hounding me though, and for awhile, I felt pretty neurotic about the whole situation. It hurts to get kicked when you’re down. And I couldn’t complain to anyone either. It was a depressing time for me.

—What kind of person was Tomino?

Yasuda: Tomino was also going through a dark time himself then, so we could sympathize with and support each other. Nevertheless, he was making Gundam, and I trusted him 100 percent. When it came to his working style, Tomino was very good at knowing where he needed to invest his energy, and where he could be more relaxed. For example, when designing characters, he took his time in the beginning, but later there might be a bunch of rush work to finish all by yourself in one week. That pacing sometimes led to me having work I couldn’t finish, but Tomino never scolded me. Instead he gave me detailed directions on how to draw the characters he wanted. And it wasn’t an order from on high either, but more like, “hey, if you don’t like these ideas, go ahead and draw it your own way.”

Here’s another example of Tomino’s work process. I had drawn a rough concept illustration of Sochie Helm, and I then spent three days re-drawing and cleaning it up in a more finished style. When Tomino heard about that, he went off. “What are you doing! You’re supposed to be the character designer, don’t do stuff like that. Cleaning up your lines is the animator’s job, so don’t be too fussy about how rough your sketches are. Anyway, your ideas are good ideas! Don’t think, when you’re drawing, that you always have to make everything better than everyone else. A designer contends in the world of ideas; it’s the task of the animation director and the animators to follow your vision.”

—I see he had a very bottom-up style of management.

Yasuda: Yes. Another thing I realized is that the drawings done by people less skilled than me would gradually become OK as the animation process went on. That was really exciting to see! Drawings that I thought looked pretty bad at first—once you colored and animated them, they actually didn’t look bad at all, and they fit the Turn A world perfectly.

—That makes sense. Everyone was shocked when they first saw Syd Mead’s designs for Turn A Gundam, but as the story progressed, that initial negative reaction completely disappeared.

Yasuda: Yeah, exactly. They became very popular. Even in those magazines which said early on that Turn A Gundam looked ugly, it ended up being very popular. As I learned, drawings and animation are different beasts.

—At this time when everything seemed to be going wrong in your life, it sounds like Turn A Gundam really saved you.

—After your stint in anime, you went to America and finally made your grand return to games with the spaghetti western Red Dead Revolver.

Yasuda: It crashed and burned.

—Ahh, yes. The development was halted this year (2003). There’s a lot I’d like to ask about there. Why did you go to America in the first place, to make Red Dead Revolver?

Yasuda: Director K3-kun (Tsujita Keizou) was in America, and it started out as his game over there. He had these new plans for an online survival game, but there were communication problems and he was having problems getting it off the ground. I had also been thinking about going to America after Turn A Gundam, and he was waiting for me. When I arrived and saw his original plans, they were really interesting. So I decided I’d move here and work on the game with him. My goals were twofold: first, to once again reignite my passion and make another proper game; and second, by working together with K3-kun I hoped to reform my masochistic personality.

—How was developing a game in America different from developing a game in Japan?

Yasuda: Of the staff at Angel Studio (the developers based in San Diego), only a few had any experience developing games. Normally when you make a game, it’s an iterative process of repeated tweaks and improvements until you approach something “complete”; however, the producer at Angel Studio treated tweaks and refinements as unnecessary, extra work that wasn’t budgeted for. That was very annoying. The more adjustments we made the more the cost ballooned, so we couldn’t do anything. It’s a real shame—the programmers were skilled, and I had a good working relationship with the graphics artists too. It was just incredibly frustrating.

—Did people in America recognize you as the Akiman from Capcom?

Yasuda: Well, at first no one noticed, but then some Chinese and Korean staff came on board, and I started getting some stares. Eventually they came over to politely ask, “Are you Akiman…?”

—I understand Red Dead Revolver featured music from Ennio Morricone.

Yasuda: Morricone is awesome. The music he made for Compañeros, a lesser known Western film, is really great. It has all these people shouting in it. We used it as-is for Red Dead Revolver. Besides the Morricone tracks, Zuntata composed the rest of the music. It had a perfect Western vibe. Unfortunately, we were never able to announce their involvement.

—How close to completion was Red Dead Revolver?

Yasuda: The basic ingredients of the game were all finished, and we were beginning to see the finish line. It was around that level I think. We revealed a demo at last year’s E3 (2002), but the truth is we had been scrambling to finish it the day before the expo. It had a lot of problems but the reception was good, and the mood among the developers was positive: everyone was like, “Alright, let’s do this!” It was then, however, that the issue of director K3’s working visa came up. It was expiring and he had to go back to Japan. Capcom might have been able to quickly procure a renewal, but there was no time. When K3 returned a month later to America, the passion and excitement we felt after E3 had somehow dissipated, and we were all kind of middling our way through the development.

—What awful timing. You have to strike while the iron’s hot, as they say. How did the decision get made to halt the development?

Yasuda: At some point I was told to come back to Japan for a meeting. I was vaguely aware of what was going on, but I was also busy with work and had been sick before that, so I had absolutely no plans to return to Japan. I also felt that if they just wanted to tell me the development was cancelled, they should send someone over here, not the other way around. They wouldn’t budge though, so K3 and the rest of the Japanese staff went back to Japan, while I stayed in America. Then the development was cancelled.

—What did you do after that?

Yasuda: I didn’t go back to Japan for another month. The Americans on the development didn’t know the project had been cancelled, you see. They were still continuing to work at it vigorously, and I was friends with all the graphics artists… so, as wrong as it was, I couldn’t face them and tell them the truth. I think they knew something was up though.

—Does that mean there’s still a chance the development is going on right now, then…?

Yasuda: Only Capcom pulled out. Angel Studios did not.

—And Angel Studios became a subsidiary of Rockstar Games after this.

Yasuda: I don’t know what Rockstar is doing with Red Dead Revolver, unfortunately.

—Did you meet up with everyone at Capcom after you got back to Japan?

Yasuda: When I returned, Okamoto (who had then quit Capcom himself) told me “I’m sorry how things turned out. I know you did your best.” When I went back to Capcom, everyone expressed their sympathies. For the first time I realized that everyone back at Capcom Japan had been rooting for and looking forward to Red Dead Revolver. I was really surprised.

—Why did you quit Capcom?

Yasuda: Well, I had actually quit Capcom awhile back. Okamoto had helped me set up a corporation, “Akiman Corp.” However, for reasons related to my work visa, I contracted with Capcom USA for the Red Dead Revolver development. But when I got back to Japan and the question of renewing that employment contract came up, Okamoto had already left, so there was no department for me to re-contract with.

—Red Dead Revolver was meant to be your re-entry into the world of game development. It’s a real shame it ended in a misfire as it did. What kind of feelings do you have about the experience now?

Yasuda: The thing I look back on with happiness about Red Dead Revolver, was the staff that I really enjoyed working with. They would tell me with confidence how good this game was going to be. Darren Vader, the art director at Angel Studio, really respected me as an artist, and actually quit the project he had been working on midway to join Red Dead Revolver and work with me. The development took a huge upturn in quality after that. I’m very thankful for that encounter, and others like it which I had there.

—Do you still feel like making games?

Yasuda: I still sometimes dream about making games, even now. But it’s very easy to burn out when you dedicate yourself to game development, so I’m waiting until I feel recovered. At the moment I’m limiting myself to projects where I can work as an illustrator only. Lately I’ve been thinking about making a game for my homepage. I could, for example, take one of my drawings of Chun Li and letting users control her movements with a keyboard. PC resolution is much higher than game consoles, so it should be possible to do some high quality pixel art and animation. If I can create animation frames like this, the way I used to for our old 2D fighting games, then a game should be possible. Something simple: character transformations as you get strong, a lot of kicking and punching, destroying barrels or something. That would be a fun game to make.

—You’d like to return to the days of making games on your own, rather than working in big groups, in other words.

Yasuda: Yeah. The Red Dead Revolver development had so many ambiguities and uncertainties. It was a big group project, it was in America, there were communication problems, there were problems with my own abilities… given all these issues, I honestly don’t know what the real reason was that it never got completed. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me like it was a composite of all those things. Not knowing exactly what went wrong is really painful. That’s why I’ve chose to work freelance now, and make a living off my drawing skills alone. If I end up going hungry, I’ll know the fault was my own; likewise, if there’s a problem, I’ll know I was probably cause of it. Everything is clearer this way. It’s so refreshing to be working this way now, it feels really good.

—What are your future goals, now that you’re freelance?

Yasuda: First is to get in the black, financially. I had to buy a lot of things to start my own business like this, it really set me back.

—What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?

Yasuda: I couldn’t tell you that right now, but one thing I’d like to do is get back to being focused on my art, improving my fundamentals. I’ve sort of gotten away from that. When it comes to the game industry, I’m the guy who made Street Fighter II, a fact which swelled my pride. But now that I’m working independently like this, it’s like going back to square one as an illustrator. If I were a normal illustrator I’d long since have built a portfolio and a whole body of work to share, but I’ve got nothing like that. So it’s tough right now. At this moment I’m just focused on creating some great work and getting my finances back on track.

—The journey goes on.

Yasuda: Yeah, but you know—this is maybe the happiest or second happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I really mean that!

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