Article: http://www.onemillionpower.com/snk-40th-anniversary-talking-to-the-snk-creators-that-made-history/
Some tidbits:
Fatal Fury:
Garou Mark of the Wolves 2:
Art of Fighting 3:
Metal Slug:
More goodness at the link.
Some tidbits:
Fatal Fury:
Incidentally, did the staff voice some of the characters at that time?
(Asanaka) KOF used voice talent right from the beginning.
(Abe) For Fatal Fury, the staff did voices for the first game. I remember us hiring an Osaka-based theatre troupe to do the voices from part 2 onward.
(Asanaka) Why from part 2 onward?
(Abe) The company president flew into a rage over the fact that the staff voiced the first Fatal Fury.
(Asanaka) Oh, that's why! (Laughs)
(Abe) He was really angry, shouting "What the hell's with these voices!?". And from that point on we looked for actual voice talent to do it.
Abe) The in-between frames of animation were largely left to the designer's intuitions, so there may have been some ridiculously over-powered characters as a result.
I see (Laughs)
(Kuroki) When location testing the Fatal Fury series, Terry was typically always the most used character. It was understandable because he was so popular, but the other designers tried to make characters to surpass Terry and consequently put way more love into them. So it may have come down to making character personalities stand out more than actually balancing the game.
(Kuroki) The word "moe" started coming into use right around when Garou: Mark of the Wolves was under development, but we were struggling a bit because we wanted to incorporate "moe" into the game, but we didn't really understand what it was! Luckily there was someone who worked at the company who was very well informed, and he gave me a lecture on it. That's how Hotaru came about.
Garou Mark of the Wolves 2:
(Kuroki) I get asked that a lot, but I actually didn't have anything to do with the story. The planners probably don't know anything about it either.
(Abe) Huh? I saw the story for part 2 though.
(Everyone) Huh!?
(Abe) There's a story written for it, right up to the ending I expect.
(Asanaka) Could it be that they weren't planning to include you in part 2, Kuroki? (Laughs)
(Kuroki) No no. I may not know anything about the story, but I created all the content!
Had development already begun on it then?
(Abe) The characters were definitely completed. Including the new ones.
(Kuroki) I also remember that the new moves for Rock and Jenet were done.
This is the first I've heard about all this.
(Kuroki) The old SNK ceased to exist partway through development, so unfortunately it was shelved. Oda (Yasyuki Oda, involved with the development of KOF XIV and SNK Heroines ~Tag Team Frenzy~) says that he'll never stop wanting to make it until the day he retires. Development could actually happen, if fans are vocal enough about it.
Art of Fighting 3:
(Asanaka) Windows was only introduced into development as of Art of Fighting 3: The Path of the Warrior.
I see. So that's why Art of Fighting 3 was a little bit different from the games that had come before it.
(Kuroki) It was a proof of concept that you could make games using motion capture. A Windows PC was necessary to do that motion capture.
So those smooth graphics were possible because of the use of motion capture.
(Kuroki) It's used, but the motion captured data was gradually tweaked and the character animation was brushed up, so you could say that there wasn't much of the original motion captured data left in the end (Laughs)
(Abe) We didn't have the setup to do motion capture at the time, so we flew to America and spent 1-2 months recording it.
(Tanaka) To think we worked that hard on it, and there are barely any traces of it left (Laughs)
Metal Slug:
Abe) After that the rest of the available staff went to help out other teams on different projects. I remember going over to help out on either KOF or Samurai Showdown. But Metal Slug was too much for me…
(Kuroki) Yeah, that was just insanity.
The graphics were, you mean?
(Kuroki) Yeah. The quality was just too high. Looking at it from the outside, I thought there was no way I could help with something like that.
(Tanaka) (Laughs)
How was it from your perspective Mr. Tanaka, since you were the one who worked on it?
(Tanaka) Well, I put everything I had into it (Laughs) Part of the charm of Metal Slug is how the machines slip-slide around, but they don't move around brilliantly like if they were polygons. I thought about giving them a feeling of more realistic motion, as though they were alive, and bringing them to life through animation. So that's what I did with the graphics and animation.
(Kuroki) It really does feel like the machines in Metal Slug are alive.
(Tanaka) I was thinking all sorts of different things while working on it, like should this move this way, or should this transform in this way. But the original art was so precise that changing a single pixel would throw the whole thing off. So I worked on it feeling like I always had to draw with more detail.
(Abe) Wasn't Metal Slug difficult for you because the size of the human characters was so small?
(Tanaka) Yeah. Moving just one pixel would visibly separate the chin from the rest of the body, so it felt more like I was actually drawing in 0.5 pixels.
What technique did you use to achieve drawing in 0.5 pixels?
(Tanaka) It's a technique that by subtly changing the colors of the adjoining pixels, it allows the human eye to see 0.5 of a pixel.
More goodness at the link.
