First and Second pages from this post
Title: Yu Suzuki Makes games about what he likes.
(The second detailed interview to western press, Strana Igr(Gameland) Exclusive.
We avoid the obvious questions, and trying to find out things that game designer never told anyone before!)
...Yu Suzuki glad, relaxes and ready to answer frankly to our questions, not how Japanese developers usually speaking with western press
I'm asking, how development of Virtua Fighter started, and how was it, to make first world 3D fighting game?
Yu Suzuki answering: Back then, 2D-fightings, like Street Fighter 2 was popular. 3D graphic in games was very primitive. You could only make models from triangles, that doesn't even had textures. And because of that 3D-characters resembled robots. There's wasn't opportunity to make graphics really beautiful, and because of that I decided to spend all my efforts to make character movements correct and realistic. Street Fighter had nice sprites, but we had very smooth movements and 60 frames per second. To make all animation looks right, I made all my designers take lessons of martial arts. Cause if they can't imagine how it's looks like in real life, they won't be able to draw and model it ! And it's important not only for designers. We gathered all our workers at office and created a real martial arts tournament. We gave a job to people who showed themselves at good side , and others was left with paperwork. I myself went to China, to learn martial arts, and tried all these punches and kicks myself. And because Street Fighter was very beautiful game, I decided to concentrate all my efforts on realism.
The answer probably will wonder a lot people in Russia, cause we have it's like: 3D, technologically cool graphics – this is good, and simple sprites – it is all in past century. Remember, how peoples criticized Duke 3D compared to Quake. But from Yu Suzuki's point of view polygonal graphic isn't main advantage. Rather, it's created additional problems
Yu Suzuki continued: We was making something new, something that nobody tried before, and because of that we had a lot of troubles. For example, programmers never worked on 3D games before. And even graphic designers for different requests, answered: “It's not part of my job!”. So I had no other choice but teach and explain everything to people I had at company and who was willing to work. And by the way telling them, that right now maybe it's not part of your job, but in future there's will be more and more work with 3D, and because of that, just for yourself it would be useful to know how it's works. Cause, anyway, sooner or later you will have to. And as you see, back then I was right.
Third Page:
(continued from second page) There's wasn't any specialized 3D Processors, as they exist now. And so I, by myself, had to write a code to work with 3D graphics that would proceed it very fast. Just using Assembler. Now, of course, everyone write on C++, but back then we had to write everything at machine code, otherwise we wasn't be able to make everything fast enough.
There's Jenya Zakirov sitting at the table, our main fightings fan, he is interesting, how Virtua Fighter's battle system was created? And we got an answer that we didn't expected
Back then, the standard was Street Fighter II with 6 buttons, and I decided to make less buttons. In my opinion, it's convenient for developer to make a software with a lot of buttons, It's like: “Let gamer suffer with it and make him remember all their combination”. So I decided to limit it with 3 buttons: Punch, Kick and Block. And to understand which combinations is more familiar for gamers, I gathered a lot of people, gave them controller, and asked them to press any random buttons as they wish. Then I got all statistics and selected more common patterns. Starting with simple, like “Punch-Punch” and “Kick-Kick”. And so based on that, I built a battle system. I wanted to make people, who saw this game for the first time, theoretically, win, just by smashing buttons
It's interesting that, Virtua Fighter is considered as example of technician fighting, where winning just by “smashing buttons” is quite hard, But now we know how it really is...
Anyway, there's already enough talk about Virtua Fighter, so we decided to ask Yu Suzuki about his old “forgotten” hits, for example Space Harrier – shooter with very strange visual settings, surrealistic fantasy, Why did you decided to make game looks like this?
At first, we wanted to make a game, where jet could fly and shoot. But then we realized that it's gonna be difficult to draw in all projections, and it will take a lot of free space in memory of arcade machine. Draw a human is much easier, and it's not necessary to make him fully realistic, and it's doesn't require much of free space. Also back than I liked manga “Space Cobra”, a movie “Neverending story” , and works of artist Roger Dean, based on which Cameron created his “Avatar” world. From all these three sources I got my inspiration when I worked on “Space Harrier”.
About Roger Dean, Yu Suzuki still talked for a long time, with admiration, like – even he's influence can be found in Final Fantasy design, and fans of series didn't even heard about him.
Another two his old hits like “Out Run” and “After Burner” not so exotic, but their sequels suggest themselves. We trying to understand how real it is,and for the first time Yu Suzuki took out his laptop, we looking at pictures and video clips from his two games for mobile platforms, first – resembles Out Run, second – After burner. Titles are different but visual style are the same, Sega should be upset
Ok, let's get back to fightings, in one interview Jenya Zakirov read that there's was time when Yu Suzuki helped famous Tomonobu Itagaki with his Dead or Alive, how is that happened?
When I worked on Virtua Fighter 3, Itagaki-san came by for an advice about Dead or Alive. I helped him a little. The fact is, Itagaki never worked with 3D fightings before, and he wanted to clarify a couple of moments from me about 3D graphics. And I really glad that he was able to make a hit!
Jenya Davidyuk (translator) asked by herself: Did he even invited you for a dinner later, in a gratitude?
Yu Suzuki *throw up a hands*: “No... somehow no”
I wonder how is it even possible – To take advice from a rival company employee, especially in Japan!?
Yu Suzuki proudly answered: With pleasure, I'll discuss games, and give an advice for anyone – even for a newbie in my company or even for an employee from a rival company, even for a person on the street.