The Ninth Hour

After we finished X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes, I was promoted from secondary planner to main planner for the then-upcoming sequel, X-Men 2.

The producer, with an amused look, showed us a list of characters for the game's roster — and half of the characters were from Street Fighter Alpha. Thus, we felt that X-Men 2 would be too misleading as a title, so we agreed to change the title to X-Men vs. Street Fighter.

Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes were not big hits in Japan (but had good sales overseas), so they didn't get much attention within the company. When making this game, we were told "we just want this game to disappear without a trace", because the higher-ups thought it made the Street Fighter cast look embarrassing. Thanks to that, we had a lot of free reign and decided to show off our system's power.

The other games weren't big in Japan because they lacked name recognition and appeal, but we got those too, with the Street Fighter characters. We didn't change the basics of the game; all we did in that short development time was put character-switching on top, with the main goals being a comfortable and fast-paced gamefeel and a flashy, satisfying, and mind-blowing presentation.

We didn't have time for balancing adjustments, but the game was well-received in location tests, so before development was done, we were asked about making a sequel. That project was originally Marvel Super Heroes 2, and would've been overseen by a senior planner (it didn't happen because he'd been called in to help with Darkstalkers 3) — it was retooled into Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter.

At the time, all the character designers wanted to make human characters, so special effects were a menial task pushed onto rookie staff members — but the effects designer on our team (Takafumi Sagata) really liked effects and was good at making them, so we thought we could stand out if we put more effort into them. Thus, we added new effects to all the Street Fighter Alpha characters.

The first thing Mr. Sagata showed me was a Yoga Fire that reached the edge of the screen. I had no idea how to react to that, but it was so amazing that I had no choice but to OK it and try to figure out the balance later. After that, any effects that weren't cool or impressive were ordered to be redone, and things escalated from there.

Ryu's Hadouken shots were intended for the Shinkuu Hadouken; the actual Hadouken was going to be smaller, but as we made flashier visual effects for other characters, we realized they looked too plain. So we decided the Shinkuu Hadouken needed to be a laser beam! That's how we made the current Shinkuu Hadouken.

We made Apocalypse huge not only to impress players, but also to save space. The CPS2 arcade board had a lot of ROM capacity for characters, but it was already full; making an immobile giant took up less space than a normal fighting game character, so we put that extra space into the visual effects.