SNK’s clear rival in the fighting genre stakes was, of course, Capcom. Also, I joined SNK because I was a big fan of Art of Fighting, so you can imagine how excited I was to hear that they were developing Art Of Fighting 2 right next to my office.” RIVAL SCHOOLS It was a gruelling process, but as Fatal Fury Special was a really fun game, and I got along well with my co-workers, I actually enjoyed myself quite a bit. Us newbies were debugging 24 hours a day on alternating shifts. “When I joined, SNK was deep in development of Fatal Fury Special,” Kuroki tells us, “so it was literally the busiest time for us ever. The pace of work was fast, and, he remembers, the hours were sometimes brutally long. Nobuyuki Kuroki – who joined SNK around the same time as Oda and most recently served as project supervisor on The King Of Fighters XV – recalls that teams commonly comprised around 10–15 people. There was always this pressure to make something better than the other teams, but it never came down to rivalry. “The developers back then were all young – I’m pretty sure the oldest was in their early thirties. “If you had talent and drive, you could take on really crucial work,” Oda says. Yasuyuki Oda, producer of such series as The King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, and Art of Fighting, joined SNK in 1993 at the age of 20, and remembers the excitement and camaraderie at the time, with teams sectioned off and working on their own separate projects. More were added to the development line, and each dev team really fed into and received a ton of positive stimulation.” You could feel the company growing in your bones. “The Neo Geo first went on sale in 1990, and SNK was blessed with multiple hit fighting games. “Working at SNK in the nineties was so surreal,” recalls Naoto Abe, an artist and character designer who worked on such games as Metal Slug, The King Of Fighters XIV, and 2019’s Samurai Shodown. As head of development, Nishiyama personally oversaw the likes of The King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown, while Hiroshi Matsumoto created Art of Fighting, released in 1992 – all games that received multiple sequels as the decade wore on. ROUND ONEįrom there, SNK’s roster of fighting games ballooned as the broader company’s success grew through the early nineties. There were the bold character designs and fluid animation the taut combat, which required precise timing to master and its two-lane battle arena, which allowed opponents to move between the foreground and the background to evade attacks. That game not only introduced a number of familiar characters that would continue to pop up in both Fatal Fury sequels and elsewhere – Terry Bogard and villain Geese Howard, to name but two – but also SNK’s approach to the fighting genre. The first wave of games developed for the Neo Geo had military and sports themes ( NAM-1975, Baseball Stars Professional, Top Player’s Golf), but Nishiyama still had unfinished business in the fighting genre, and soon brought his expertise to bear on SNK’s first one-on-one brawler for the Neo Geo, Fatal Fury: King of Fighters. The result was the Neo Geo: a system that brought cutting-edge gaming hardware to both arcade owners and – if they could afford it – gamers at home. “By creating a hardware system with cheap software, we were able to sell a lot of games even in pirate-heavy markets, and I think that was one of the main factors that led to SNK’s success.” “Until, arcade operators would have to purchase a machine for each game,” Nishiyama explained in a rare 2011 interview with 1up.com. Having been hunted by SNK shortly after Street Fighter’s release in 1987, Nishiyama soon had another revolutionary idea: cartridge-based arcade hardware. At Irem, Nishiyama created the groundbreaking brawler,* Kung-Fu Master, in 1984 moving over to Capcom, he revolutionised one-on-one combat with the original *Street Fighter – the game that first introduced the idea of a six-button layout for punches, kicks, and combos. For these, we partly have Takashi Nishiyama to thank – one of the key figures working at SNK in the early nineties, and a developer who’d helped transform the fighting genre in the previous decade.
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