The Samurai Craftsmen of SNK (2020)

The late 1980s is often called SNK's first golden age. Many of the developers who were there during that era (who would also go on to support the company's second golden age in the 90s) are now gathered at the game development studio Engines. We sat down with two of those developers, Yasushi Adachi and Tomoaki Fukui, to talk about what it was like on the floor at SNK back in the day and the creation of the Samurai Shodown series.

—In this interview, we'd like to look back at your time at SNK from the 80s into the 90s, including your involvement in launching the Samurai Shodown series, and ask about the atmosphere inside the company back then. First, could you give us a brief intro regarding when each of you joined SNK?

Adachi: I joined in 1986.

Fukui: I came in three years later, in 1989.

Adachi: We should probably explain how we got hired. The catalyst for me joining SNK was a job listing flyer posted at the design vocational school I was attending at the time. A classmate said to me, "I'm going to apply here," so I replied, "Alright, I'll go with you." Back then, SNK had set up shop on the second floor of a prefabricated building right in the middle of the rice fields in Esaka. The first floor was rented by a company that manufactured magnetic tape, so SNK was just subletting the space upstairs.

—Ah, that was right after SNK moved to Esaka.

Adachi: The moment you opened the entrance door, game sounds came blaring out at you. SNK was working on Dogou Souken (Victory Road) at the time. As an arcade-obsessed kid, seeing that made me explode with excitement: "Whoa, they've got an Ikari cabinet in here!" After that, I handed over my resume and had a brief interview. Then out of nowhere, they just casually told me, "Alright, you're hired." By the way, the friend who went with me passed as well, and he later went on to work as a director on titles like Art of Fighting.

—That sounds like an incredibly informal hiring process.

Adachi: It really was. In fact, senior co-workers teased me about it for years afterward, because I actually showed up to the interview wearing a Mao suit and a Mao cap.

—That's certainly a unique fashion choice...

Adachi: I was completely obsessed with YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) at the time. (laughs) But that was the atmosphere of the gaming industry back then: it was open enough to let a crazy guy like that right through the door.

—A true reflection of the industry's early boom era.

Adachi: There is one thing I give my younger self credit for, though. (laughs) I had actually brought a game proposal document I wrote myself. Of course, I had no clue how to properly write a game design document back then, so it was just a handwritten binder filled with whatever I imagined a game proposal ought to look like.

—Design documents weren't really something people saw out in the open back then. What kind of work did you do after you were hired?

Adachi: I was assigned to the development team working on arcade titles like Ikari. The whole team was only about five people back then. I spent a lot of time debugging Victory Road.

—That marks what you could call SNK's first golden age, a period when titles like ASO (Alpha Mission) came out and boosted SNK's reputation among gamers.

Adachi: That's right. Alpha Mission was a groundbreaking title. Kazuto Kohno (currently at Dimps), who created that game, also worked on games like Athena, and he possessed an RPG sensibility that was rare at SNK at the time.

—Alpha Mission is a shooter and Athena is an action game, but both contain clear RPG elements.

Adachi: Gameplay-wise, they really are RPGs. Kohno went on to work on actual RPGs like Satomi Hakkenden and God Slayer (Crystalis). Around that time, SNK was bringing in more and more people with an arcade action background. If we had brought in more developers from the home console RPG side instead, the SNK of today might look completely different.

—That's an interesting timeline to imagine: SNK as an RPG developer. Speaking of Alpha Mission, I remember being surprised by how carefully tuned each weapon's performance was. In most shooting games back then, even if there was a wide variety of weapons, usually one or two were so overpowered that you could clear the whole game using just those.

Adachi: You're right, every weapon in that game had its specific use case.

—Today that might seem standard, but it was very impressive back then. Around that time, SNK's titles were ramping up in quality at a frightening speed, and games like HAL 21 and T.A.N.K (T.N.K. III) felt exceptionally well-crafted.

Adachi: T.N.K. III was a fantastic game across the board, music included. The programmer on T.N.K. III was also heavily involved in Ikari, and he wasn't just a programmer--he composed music too. Later on, he handled the programming for games like Art of Fighting as well.

—Fukui, we'd love to hear about the period when you joined.

Fukui: I joined right when SNK had constructed a brand-new development building and moved out of the prefab setup. I first found out about SNK from a job flyer I saw at the art university I was attending. At the time, the games industry wasn't even widely recognized as an actual "industry." There were job postings for Nintendo on campus too, but among my peers no one really knew anything about them. It was like, "Nintendo? Who's that? Oh, I guess working in games is a thing." It's crazy when you look back on it now. Actually, I knew about Nintendo and wanted to apply, but by the time I noticed the posting, the application window had already closed... a lot of my college friends received job offers from Nintendo, but almost none of them ended up going there. They chose design firms instead.

Adachi: I bet those people are looking back today thinking, "Man, I should have taken that offer!". (laughs) But anyway, that's just the kind of era it was.

Fukui: So, with the Nintendo applications closed, I was wondering what to do next when that SNK job posting caught my eye. I didn't know anything about SNK at the time, but I grabbed a portfolio of my artwork and went in for an interview.

—And you were hired right on the spot?

Fukui: Well, I had gotten married while still a student and already had a child. When I mentioned that during the interview, they just said, "Oh, you've got a kid? That must be tough." After the interview, I walked home, and my wife said, "A company called SNK called and said you're hired!" I was totally shocked: "Wait, already?!" (laughs) After a brief, bewildering wait, the official offer letter arrived, and I officially joined the company.

Learning Game Design by Trial and Error

—Adachi, what titles did you work on after joining?

Adachi: I was initially hired as a graphic artist, and the first project where I got deeply involved in development was Psycho Soldier, the sequel to Athena. I worked on characters and objects, what SNK called "front-end" graphics back then. Athena was a side-scrolling action game, but Kohno initially said, "I want to make this an overhead view game." Drawing characters from a top-down perspective is an absolute nightmare, so I remember seriously begging him: "Please, anything but that!"

—So that's why Psycho Soldier ended up sticking with the side-scrolling format.

Adachi: After that, I was told, "Go design your own project," which led to ASO II (Alpha Mission II). That was the very first project I worked on in a planning capacity. At first, I had zero clue what a planner was actually supposed to do, so I just fumbled through writing a design document by mimicking what I saw others doing.

—So there weren't standard document templates at the company back then? Some companies in the 80s had rigid formats for design docs, even if only a few.

Adachi: SNK had nothing like that at all. Everyone was just flying by the seat of their pants.

Fukui: It was mostly word-of-mouth back then. Knowledge wasn't written down; it was passed along orally.

—Was your first planning experience pretty rough?

Adachi: Alpha Mission II was a shooter, but no matter how much work we put into it, the game just wasn't turning out fun at all. I had no idea how to fix it. There's an episode from that time I'll never forget. As I was sitting there lost, someone from the Ikari team walked up to me and said, "Get out of that chair for three days."

—Meaning, "Let me handle this"?

Adachi: Exactly. For three full days, I wasn't allowed to touch the game at all. That person spent those three days working directly with the programmer, and as a result, the game's quality shot up drastically. I was so frustrated and furious with myself. I spent every spare moment desperately analyzing the documents he left behind, trying to figure out what actually made a game fun. You could say that experience was my true starting point as a game designer. The tricks I picked up then are still useful to me today.

—Are there any other moments where work by other staff members left a deep impression on you?

Adachi: The stories around Bermuda Triangle are really memorable to me. Bermuda Triangle, The Super Spy, and Guerrilla War were all made by the same director, and I loved the bold, wild energy of that team. As you know, in Bermuda Triangle, your craft is huge, and as you collect items to power up, by the end of the game you become absurdly overpowered.

—Enemies could barely touch you at that point.

Adachi: When we first put that game out for location testing, the skilled players could play indefinitely, and the game just wouldn't end. So, the dev team tried to rebalance it by making the player's ship weaker. But the company president at the time stepped in and yelled at the team: "Nonsense! Weakening the player is the wrong approach. Don't make the player weaker--make the enemies stronger!" When I heard that, it hit me: "He's completely right!" That mindset became the foundation of my own design philosophy. Bermuda Triangle was aggressive in both its visual design and its balance, and it's a game I love dearly. The vehicle designs were so cool too, all covered in spikes. (laughs)

—Games from that era had a sensibility that felt like it would be even more popular overseas than in Japan. And I hear it was indeed quite popular abroad.

Heated Debates in the Trenches

—Fukui, what kind of work were you given after joining?

Fukui: When I joined in 1989, the team was working on Prehistoric Isle. My very first job was test-playing that game. As a new hire, I wasn't yet assigned to any specific team during my training period. Right as the game was approaching its master submission deadline, the president suddenly summoned me out of nowhere. I walked over to where I was told to go, and there was an arcade cabinet set up, with the president and Adachi sitting next to it with grim expressions on their faces. Then they told me: "Test play this game right now."

—Without any explanation whatsoever?

Fukui: Adachi didn't say a single word. I thought to myself, "Why does everybody look so intense?" and started playing. Shortly after starting, my ship crashed into a tree leaf on screen and got destroyed. Without thinking, I gasped, "Ah!" The president immediately seized on that and asked: "You just said 'Ah!' Why did you say 'Ah!'?"

—Wow, what was really going on here?

Fukui: I had no idea what was happening, so I just answered, "It's a tree leaf, so I assumed my ship wouldn't break if I hit it." Later on, I found out that Adachi and the president had been arguing about that exact detail. Adachi argued it should break, the president insisted it shouldn't, and neither side would yield an inch. So they decided, "Let's get someone who knows nothing about the game to play it and see what happens," which is how I got dragged into it.

—Ah, I see. (laughs)

Fukui: I don't know if that was the reason, but after that, I got singled out (or maybe noticed?) and started getting called in constantly for test-playing.

Adachi: We made you test-play Mechanized Attack too, which ran on the same board.

Fukui: Mechanized Attack was a light-gun shooter. The system was designed so that when you ran out of ammo, it would play a quick click sound and automatically reload. Right when that click sounded on screen, I accidentally let out another "Huh?" Immediately, they pressed me again: "Why did you just say 'Huh?'" (laughs)

—An automatic reload system is user-friendly, but for a first-time player, it's hard to instantly grasp what just happened. You end up wondering what that sound was.

Fukui: In modern games, the word "RELOAD" would flash on screen the instant it happens, but back then there was no visual indicator, just a momentary pause. Because of incidents like that, the Mechanized Attack team labeled me as "that rookie who doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut".... (laughs) Shortly after, I was assigned to Adachi's team.

—What was the first project you were officially involved in developing?

Fukui: The first project I worked on from a development standpoint was NAM-1975, the very first Neo Geo title. Early in development, it wasn't being made for the Neo Geo; it was just a standard arcade board project. Midway through, we were told, "SNK is building something called the Neo Geo, and this is going to be its launch title." But the specs for the board were completely different!

Adachi: The thing that caused a panic initially was the "line sprite" rendering system. The Neo Geo was marketed as having a massively higher sprite count than our previous hardware, but the line sprite system had a major quirk: there was a hard limit on how many sprites could overlap within a 16-pixel vertical strip. If you exceeded that limit, objects would simply flicker out of existence.

Fukui: You'd sometimes see the screen flicker in Neo Geo games. That was the cause. You could display a massive total number of sprites, but you couldn't stack them arbitrarily. For instance, if a character at the bottom of the screen aligned vertically with a character at the top, graphics would disappear even if the two characters weren't touching each other.

Adachi: The Neo Geo hardware was incredibly peculiar.

Fukui: At first we were thrilled to hear the sprite count was going up, but when we tried running NAM-1975 on Neo Geo hardware, bullets were disappearing, enemy soldiers were vanishing.... (laughs)

—It definitely had its quirks.

Fukui: Everyone struggled with it, but by the latter half of the development, we'd learned how to handle it.

Adachi: Before NAM-1975, were you helping out with anything else?

Fukui: Before that, it was pure test-playing. On NAM-1975, I did the background graphics. Oh, and voice acting too. (laughs) I remember voicing one of the bosses.

—I imagine that was common across most studios back then: development staff doing voice work.

Fukui: Was Fatal Fury the first SNK game to use professional voice actors?

Adachi: Was it? I honestly don't remember.

Fukui: I recall a bit of buzz around the office with people saying, "Hey, the staff isn't doing the voices this time!"

—Let's talk about the Neo Geo era. From the outside, it looked like a project where the company was betting its entire future.

Fukui: As a new hire, I didn't understand what risks or benefits were involved. I would listen to the senior devs chatter around me while I worked. I heard the arcade operators were concerned about the commercial risks of the MVS system and its multiple game cartridges hosted in a single cabinet.

—Because operators might buy fewer complete cabinets.

Fukui: Listening to those discussions, I remember realizing for the first time that there was this whole business perspective to game development. What personally baffled me was the price gap: home console software was around 40,000 yen, while arcade boards were around 200,000 yen, even though the actual content inside was identical! Why was there such a huge price difference? (laughs) Now I understand the various industry factors behind it, but back then, I thought, "Aren't these literally identical except for the pin count on the edge connector?" (laughs)

—That was around 1990. How did the internal company dynamic evolve after that?

Adachi: SNK had three main development departments back then, and there was very little cross-department communication. The department heads might talk to each other, but rank-and-file staff rarely wandered over to see what other teams were doing, and development information was almost never shared. It wasn't that people got along poorly, though.

—Was that just SNK's corporate culture?

Adachi: Probably. I don't know if management intentionally structured things that way, but it felt more like an organic result than a deliberate corporate policy.

Fukui: The Samurai Shodown team was on the same floor as the KOF team, so individual staff members chatted casually all the time. But we rarely dove deep into discussions about actual game design. The First Development Division—the team making Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and The Last Blade—was on a completely different floor, so we had almost no contact with them.

Adachi: It was completely routine for us to learn about games being made inside our own company for the first time by reading game magazines! But in a way, that was part of the fun. (laughs)

Fukui: This was a bit later, but I remember the absolute shock I felt when I first saw Metal Slug. As a fellow designer, I thought, "They're doing this with pixel art?!" There's an explosion effect that looks rainbow-colored, but if you look closely, it's actually just a black dithering pattern. Because of the phosphor bleed on CRT monitors, though, it renders as a rainbow. I was blown away: "They calculated the CRT display behavior to draw this?! That's insane!"

Adachi: The Metal Slug team was a total mystery team to us. They were housed in a completely separate building from main SNK.

—I've heard the Metal Slug designers would skip writing design specs altogether when an idea hit them and just start drawing sprites immediately, because drawing sprites was faster than writing documentation.

Adachi: It was a much more relaxed, generous era where nobody was obsessed with production costs. (laughs)

The Winding Road to Samurai Shodown's Creation

—We'd love to hear about Samurai Shodown, a project both of you were involved in launching. It wasn't originally conceived as a fighting game, correct?

Adachi: Right. I loved monsters and splatter horror, so I was writing a proposal for a monster-themed action game where you played as the monster. Right around then, I was called in by one of the company executives who declared: "From now on, we're going to make fighting games." Capcom's Street Fighter II (hereafter SFII) had taken the industry by storm, and there was a massive surge of momentum toward competitive fighting games.

—So you reworked the monster concept into a fighting game?

Fukui: At first, Adachi resisted: "I am absolutely NOT turning this into a fighting game!" But the higher-ups talked him down, and one day he just came in and said, "Alright, we're making a fighting game." I was amazed at the sudden turn.

—SFII was a miraculous, revolutionary title that completely reshaped the industry. Back then, there was an overarching atmosphere of "if it's not a fighting game, it doesn't matter." But your team had zero prior experience making fighting games.

Adachi: Exactly. Once we actually sat down to make a fighting game, we realized we couldn't even touch SFII. But I honestly believe our team studied SFII more rigorously than anyone else in the industry at the time.

Fukui: We played it every single day.

Adachi: We went frame-by-frame through SFII footage, analyzing every single move, studying hitboxes and hitstop to figure out how it was built and what made it feel so good to play.

—You were analyzing the core mechanics of action game feel. SFII is unarmed combat while Samurai Shodown is weapon combat, so the play feel is completely different. Yet both games deliver an incredible sense of impact and satisfaction when a move hits. Games with sloppy hitboxes or awkward hitstop feel jarring to play, but Samurai Shodown completely avoided that awkwardness.

Adachi: We had time back then, that's why. Schedules and budgets weren't nearly as strict as they are today; it's not much of an exaggeration to say the concept of a schedule barely existed. (laughs) The company let us work with a lot of freedom, and that helped immensely. There was virtually no concept of "marketing" back then either.

—When Samurai Shodown debuted, it felt remarkably stylish. It had a different vector of coolness compared to the gritty, masculine tone of Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting.

Adachi: A big reason for that was that we were unabashed otaku at heart. Myself included, the team was packed with anime fans.

—While Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting leaned into hardboiled manga and action cinema tropes, Samurai Shodown had a distinct anime-culture aura to it.

Adachi: Pure, graceful characters like Nakoruru were tailor-made for what otaku loved at the time, right? (laughs) When Mai Shiranui exploded in popularity in Fatal Fury 2, we were sitting there saying, "For the next Samurai Shodown, let's bundle Nakoruru up in even thicker clothes!" (laughs) It's not like I consciously set out to design characters that way—it just naturally turned out like that because the development floor was full of otaku.

—Why did you choose a period-drama (jidaigeki) setting?

Fukui: We didn't start out trying to make a period drama. The core idea of "let's make a game focused on weapon combat" came first. The original monster project had characters wielding weapons, so we thought using weapons would be a great way to differentiate ourselves from other studios' games. From there, someone said, "Well, if we're using weapons, it's gotta be swords," which naturally led into a period setting.

Adachi: My personal tastes probably influenced the final decision too. (laughs) Though my memory is a bit hazy.

—During development, Haohmaru was named "Musashi" and Ukyo Tachibana was "Kojiro." I recall seeing early screenshots of the two fighting on Ganryu Island.

Adachi: Our original motif was the duel at Ganryu Island, which eventually turned into Gairyu Isle in the final game. Wanting to target the overseas market was another reason we went with a Japanese historical theme, though.

Fukui: Though once we started throwing in tons of ninjas because of their popularity overseas, the actual samurai proportion shrank quite a bit. (laughs)

—The global perspective makes total sense.

Adachi: We kept the market in mind, but ultimately we just shoved in everything we personally liked. (laughs) Honestly, the worldbuilding of Samurai Shodown only came together late in development. Early on, we focused far more on game systems and visual impact than lore.

—Could you elaborate on what you mean by "visual impact"?

Adachi: When I saw Art of Fighting, the camera zoom-in/zoom-out effect looked incredible, and I wanted to bring that into our game. I wanted striking visual frames, characters colliding in mid-air while the camera dynamically zoomed in and out. The worldbuilding was retrofitted to match those visual goals.

Fukui: I'm pretty sure we only fleshed out the story near the very end of development.

—In the original Samurai Shodown, ground-based anti-air attacks were generally weak, so jumping air-to-air attacks were heavily utilized to intercept incoming opponents.

Adachi: Right. We specifically wanted the visual of characters slashing each other mid-air, so we intentionally tuned the balance to encourage that.

—For a fighting game at the time, that was quite an unconventional approach.

Adachi: Developers at other companies gave us a lot of praise for that later on. (laughs)

—Speaking of visual impact, Haohmaru's heavy slash (his far standing heavy slash, officially named zantetsusen) was mind-blowing to see for the first time. It's a massive diagonal slash with significant startup; if guarded, the blade repels with a sharp clatter, yet leaves very little disadvantage. On hit, Haohmaru steps deep into the blow while the opponent reels back dramatically. It feels amazing whether hit or guarded, without breaking the game's competitive balance.

Fukui: Originally, Haohmaru's heavy slash shared the exact same recovery motion on block as it did on hit. But we wanted to capture that authentic sword-fighting feel, so we added a recoil animation where the blade gets knocked back with a loud clank. However, if blocking it gave the opponent a guaranteed heavy punish, players would stop throwing out heavy slashes altogether. That wouldn't feel satisfying for the player, so we minimized the frame disadvantage on block.

—Prioritizing the player's feeling of satisfaction, then.

Fukui: As Adachi mentioned earlier, we avoided the mindset of "this move is too strong, so let's make it weak." Instead, we thought, "This move feels incredible, so we have to preserve it," and carefully dialed in the tuning to find the right balance.

Adachi: Fukui and the rest of the original Samurai Shodown team were a fantastic crew. Everyone on the dev team shared a unified sense of what felt good in combat.

—So because your sensibilities aligned, you were able to refine the mechanics deeply without your design direction drifting off course.

Adachi: We didn't calculate all of that game feel up front, though. It was built up through painstaking, incremental iteration over time.

Fukui: For hitstun duration, we initially assigned standardized values across moves, but it didn't feel satisfying, so we went through tweaking data for every single attack individually.

Adachi: We could only pull that off because, as I said, schedules basically didn't exist. (laughs) Every single day was spent asking ourselves how we could make the game better.

Fukui: If we had been pressed for time, it never would have happened. After the game became playable end-to-end, we spent roughly six months just on fine-tuning.

—Beyond Haohmaru's heavy slash, many other moves prioritized visual flare and game feel. For example, Senpūretsuzan (Cyclone Slash) dealt damage in two distinct hits: once when the tornado connected, and once when the launched opponent hit the ground.

Adachi: That was spot where we prioritized visual impact. An otaku's obsession. (laughs)

The Unforgettable Characters of Samurai Shodown

—The villain Genan Shiranui possessed an abundance of moves designed to irritate the opponent, like long command grabs and extended poison spray animations. (laughs)

Fukui: Genan was Adachi's creation. (laughs)

Adachi: He was the sole survivor from that original monster game concept, so that origin showed through loud and clear. I've always loved dark anti-heroes. Giving him moves that annoy the player was 100% intentional. (laughs) The team was very deliberate about assigning distinct personality traits to every character. Like Earthquakes's fart command grab. (laughs)

Fukui: After Earthquake farts, he lets out this "Khehe" laugh, and the animator drew that expression with absolute glee, despite how little sprite memory we had to work with! (laughs)

Adachi: Earthquake was a huge struggle, wasn't he? We built him focusing heavily on visual scale, and he gave us the most trouble by far.

—Did you intend to include a giant character like that from the start?

Adachi: We said we wanted to make a huge character from early on, but deciding just how big he should be involved a lot of back-and-forth between Fukui and me.

Fukui: If I recall correctly, we built a custom tool specifically to scale graphics up and down, and we sat right in front of each other adjusting his size in real time while arguing about it.

Adachi: I just kept shouting, "Bigger! Make him bigger!" so he kept growing. (laughs) Wrapping up his design was probably our hardest task. Getting that character functional and balanced was all thanks to Fukui's brilliant work. (laughs)

Fukui: I was in charge of the weirdo cast: Wan-Fu, Earthquake, Kyoshiro Senryo... Memory allocation per character was identical regardless of whether a character was large or small, so compressing the data was a nightmare. The designers would come to me asking, "How are we supposed to fit this?" so I had to invent tricks like reusing frames from one animation for another move. Yet despite all that aggressive compression, we still went out of our way to draw custom frames for a fart expression! (laughs)

—Balancing match-ups must have been equally chaotic.

Fukui: During our first location test, a player went on an 80-game win streak using Earthquake. Word reached the office, and Adachi came barging in shouting at me: "Fukui! Is Earthquake broken?!" (laughs)

Adachi: I did not shout like that! (laughs)

Fukui: I said he wasn't actually that strong, but Adachi insisted: "He's on an 80-win streak right now!" So we went down to the arcade to check it out. When we arrived, there was barely anyone lined up on the opposite side of Earthquake's cabinet. There was a huge crowd of spectators, but nobody wanted to step up to challenge him. So I stepped in to play against him myself.

—Were you able to win?

Fukui: Yeah. I had been watching him play beforehand, and all he was doing was spamming the Fat Chainsaw move. That move leaves you wide open if blocked, so you can easily punish it for a win. But none of the local players had realized that yet. They were just holding guard and freezing up.

Adachi: Fighting game literacy was still primitive back then, and on top of that, a lot of players were intimidated by his sheer size on screen.

—Earthquake couldn't be thrown in that initial version either, which must have confused a lot of players.

Fukui: We didn't even realize that while making him. The designers only noticed it later. "Wait, you can't throw this guy!" (laughs)

—The roster had so many character traits that defied conventional fighting game design of the era. Hattori Hanzo's shadow clones and substitution techniques were mind-blowing.

Adachi: That was another case of visual impact taking priority. We figured, "He's a ninja, of course he should vanish!" (laughs)

Fukui: I wasn't handling Hanzo, but watching from the side I kept thinking, "How on earth are they going to turn this into a functional game mechanic?" (laughs) Implementing it was a mess too. The move splits him into four clones so the opponent doesn't know which is real, but initially, the opponent's character would automatically face toward the real Hanzo! (laughs) We realized, "Wait, this completely gives it away!" so we went to the engineer and asked him to turn off automatic target tracking during the move. He snapped back: "Think about these things before you ask me to code them!" (laughs)

Adachi: Animal companions were tough to implement too. Another visual-first idea.

Fukui: Poppy and Mamahaha caused us endless headaches.

—Controlling an external companion character as an option existed in shooters, but it was virtually unheard of in fighting games.

Fukui: Back then, our ideas just kept snowballing without any sense of whether they were actually viable. We'd implement things, all the while wondering, "Can we really use this?"

Adachi: Looking back, I think our deep study of earlier fighting games allowed us to build a solid mechanical foundation, which is why all those wild ideas worked out. If the core foundation had been shaky when we stacked those "visual-first" ideas on top, the game might have collapsed entirely. Building a sound underlying system was what saved us... at least, that's how I view it now. (laughs)

—Samurai Shodown wasn't just a hit gameplay-wise; the characters exploded in popularity, too. It felt distinct even within SNK's lineup at the time.

Adachi: Samurai Shodown and KOF had a unique character appeal that ultimately expanded SNK's character licensing business. The KOF team had a very similar vibe to ours, just a bunch of otaku hanging out together.

—Did the massive commercial success of the original Samurai Shodown change your standing within the company?

Adachi: The working conditions inside the office improved, and we were allowed to make Shin Samurai Spirits (Samurai Shodown II) with complete freedom. Though we might have pushed that freedom a bit too far in some questionable directions. (laughs) Silly jokes like turning characters into plush dolls... (laughs)

—Speaking of hidden elements, Haohmaru's Tenha Fuujin Zan secret move comes to mind.

Adachi: The truth is a programmer coded and implemented that move entirely on his own without telling anyone! He kept it secret from the planners and designers, recycled existing graphic frames, and quietly snuck a secret move into the code for just Haohmaru and Nakoruru.

Fukui: I remember other staff members getting furious: "Don't just sneak stuff into the build!" I thought, "Adachi is the director, so he probably knew about it in advance," but when I looked over, he was right there getting mad alongside everyone else. (laughs)

Adachi: I was furious! (laughs) But since it was already made, we decided to leave it in. The programmer said he saw the Ryūko Ranbu in Art of Fighting and wanted to try making a move like that. So during development, the working title for Tenha Fuujin Zan was actually "Haohmaru Ranbu."

—The Ryūko Ranbu was very dramatic despite reusing existing sprites. Even though every single motion frame was something players had seen before, it felt like a completely new technique.

Adachi: When I first saw the Ryūko Ranbu, I was blown away: "Man, this is incredible!"

—Many fans probably assumed Tenha Fuujin Zan was created as a tie-in for the anime TV special Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture.

Adachi: It definitely wasn't designed as an anime tie-in from the start.

—You can really feel how free-spirited the studio culture was back then.

Adachi: I don't know what management thought of us, but we were given tremendous freedom. Our development team started calling ourselves "Samurai-Gumi" (The Samurai Team) and operating like our own internal brand, but that was never an official corporate designation. Management just tolerated it.

—Oh, you gave that name to yourselves? Didn't you even build an elaborate website for it?

Adachi: We did it completely without company permission. (laughs) That's just how things were back then.

The Fierce Struggle of Samurai Shodown III

—The original Samurai Shodown and Samurai Shodown II achieved a miraculous balance, even if defensive play was exceptionally strong.

Fukui: Speaking of which, I recently saw footage of players who are still playing Samurai Shodown II today. The way they play, it's like they're playing a completely different game from the one we knew. (laughs)

Adachi: Among fans, there seems to be a school of thought that Samurai Shodown III is the pinnacle. To us, that's a bit surprising... maybe people just love how wildly unhinged it is. (laughs)

—When that game came out, it sent shockwaves through the editorial department at Gamest magazine.... (laughs) The massive overhaul of the game mechanics was surprising, and the overall balance tuning felt entirely different from previous titles. It was almost as if a completely different department had made it.

Adachi: The development schedule was extremely brutal, for one thing. Plus, losing key team members had a big impact. But a major reason the core systems changed so drastically was simply that I got bored of the systems we used up through Samurai Shodown II. I just always want to change things up. Looking at the KOF team in the 90s, the thing I respected most about them was how carefully they preserved the elements fans didn't want changed. Me, I get restless too easily, so I'm terrible at that...

—The mechanics and move concepts in Samurai Shodown III were certainly fascinating, though.

Adachi: The core concept for that game was: "Let's create a more tense, life-or-death battle." I don't think the idea was bad in itself. If we'd had more time to properly polish it, it would have turned out much better.

Fukui: We had virtually zero time for balance tuning.

Adachi: We were fixing hitboxes right up until the literal minute of master submission.

Fukui: To be honest, ten minutes before the master ROM was submitted, the character I was in charge of was still completely bugged. (laughs) The bug got fixed right before master submission. It was total chaos.

—Could you share what happened there?

Fukui: There was a bug where hitboxes set in the dev tools would render in unintended ways in-game. I assumed the bug wasn't going to get fixed in time, so I assigned hitboxes while accounting for the bug's distortion. But then, ten minutes before deadline, I realized the bug had suddenly been patched.... (laughs) When I checked my character, the fixed engine caused the hitboxes to go completely haywire, making the move properties utterly insane. (laughs) Panic set in: "Oh no no no, this is a catastrophe!" I had to fix every single hitbox across the entire character in ten minutes flat.

—That's an incredible clutch save!

Adachi: Didn't you also unilaterally change rage gauge values right before submission? That turned out to be a great call in the end, too.

Fukui: Oh yeah, that happened too!

Samurai Spirit: Forever Burning

—To close things out, could you leave a message for our readers? Let's start with Fukui.

Fukui: Looking back, it feels like we made those games purely out of raw passion and momentum. We were completely absorbed in the work. While game development requires precise calculations, for us, maintaining momentum was what mattered most. We were fortunate that users embraced that energy. The fact that we built games the way we did back then is what connects directly to where I am today, so I want to keep creating games for a long time to come.

Adachi: Wait, Fukui... weren't you saying "I want to quit my job soon and open a model kit shop"? (everyone laughs)

Fukui: That's a separate topic altogether! (laughs)

Adachi: He's actually a huge plastic model enthusiast, skilled enough that he used to write for hobby magazines.

Fukui: That's my retirement plan! Eventually, I want to open an izakaya aimed at model kit hobbyists. A place where guys who can't build plamo at home can gather and build together.

Adachi: Can a shop like that actually make money?

Fukui: Profit is secondary. I'll make my living first, then run it as a passion project.

—Adachi, your closing thoughts?

Adachi: Honestly, it's only recently that I've felt able to talk comfortably about those days. I don't remember much of the specific details or sensory memories from back then, simply because, as Fukui said, we were sprinting forward with blinders on. There was no internet back then, and we had zero communication with creators at other companies. We only knew what others were up to by reading magazine interviews.

Yet strangely, there was a collective sense of unity, like the entire industry was running a race together. Whenever another team or company put out a new title, it brought this intense, thrilling tension. I hope the unique atmosphere and frantic pace of that era comes through to readers of this book. I hope the games industry keeps that same creative energy alive and burning, and I want to remain a part of it myself. It's far too early for me to settle down, so I'm going to keep sprinting forward with everything I've got!

—Thank you both so much for sharing these wonderful, valuable stories with us today!

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