denfami spoke to Namco's Katsuhiro Harada, Arc System Works' Toshimichi Mori and the legendary Yu Suzuki about the heyday of arcades, the histories of Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Guilty Gear & Blazblue and a potential Virtua Fighter 6🇯🇵
https://twitter.com/denfaminicogame/status/1372024443099226122
re: Virtua Fighter 6, Yu Suzuki talks about how he'd approach a new VF: he'd want to simplify and improve the controls/interface so as to allow people to focus on tactics rather than mechanical proficiency, and to broaden the user base
Harada says more & more ppl have been requesting he & Namco make a new VF, be it VF x Tekken or something else; he used to think it was a joke but he's starting to realise ppl are serious, and bc Sega isn't really present at FGC events anymore, all the requests end up with him
the interview ends with the interviewer saying that Harada and Suzuki should go to Sega and tell them they'll make VF6, to which Suzuki's response is "if you need me, just say the word"
Harada also brings up something he's mentioned previously on twitter: at one point, there was a deal floating around at the management level whereby Namco would've been able to add some VF characters to a potential Dreamcast Tekken game, but it obviously didn't eventuate
oh and just to be clear: Yu Suzuki's comments shouldn't be interpreted as a hint that VF6 is happening—on the contrary, he's an outsider & it's very clear that he doesn't know whether it is being, or will be, made, he's just saying how he'd approach it if he were to make a new VF
on Guilty Gear X: Mori talks about how it was made externally from Arc by his old company PicPac Airreal from '98 with just 8 ppl; Harada's like "in '98 my team was already 70-80 strong"
Mori handled backgrounds, UI, effects, storyboards & revising the other artists' pixel art
Mori handled backgrounds, UI, effects, storyboards & revising the other artists' pixel art
(there's a long story about the making of GGX that's referenced but not covered in the interview: basically, Mori's company were associates of GG programmer Anbe & were hired to bring GG to Dreamcast, but Arc's president changed that a NAOMI arcade version, which somehow...
…became a sequel, & when Ishiwatari heard what was going on he forced himself into the process
Ishiwatari & Mori have very different recollections of their first meeting—many of their early encounters, incl. Mori's 6-month contract stint @ Arc, made no impression on Ishiwatari)
Ishiwatari & Mori have very different recollections of their first meeting—many of their early encounters, incl. Mori's 6-month contract stint @ Arc, made no impression on Ishiwatari)
they also talk about how, despite being rivals when it came to game software, arcade operators like Namco and Sega would freely buy & operate each others' games in their game centers, not least of all because they had an imperative to install whatever was making money, but..
...that caused some awkwardness when games like VF2 were so insanely popular & profitable (easily ¥2m+/mo at its peak) because game centers can only hold so many games & a Namco dev might wonder if they'd even be able to fight for space for their new game in their own arcade
coming back to this to say, when Yu Suzuki talks about simplifying the controls he's being super, super broad: he's not talking about input buffers or reducing the amount of cancels or whatever, he means stuff like this
https://twitter.com/gosokkyu/status/813221009994067969
...or this, his mid-'00s touch-controlled arcade fighter Psi-Phy which never made it past location test
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