—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%.
...
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!
