Stay awake all night and drive in the trunk: the beginnings of Tekken

While working on Tekken 2 in 1995, Namco’s development team was in high demand. After all, at the time there were only so many people who had experience developing 3D fighting games, and games like Virtua Fighter and even Tohshinden became more popular.

A large part of the Tekken team left the company, some founded a studio called DreamFactory and developed games like Tobal no. 1 for Square.

One of the remaining, Katsuhiro Harada, took over the franchise, claimed the title of “Game Director” and not only became the face of Tekken, but also a manager overseeing much of Bandai Namco’s cast.

Masanori Yamada Archipelago / Polygon

Another important employee who stayed has not received nearly as much attention. As the main programmer of the first three Tekken games, Masanori Yamada was one of the people responsible for ensuring that the early Tekken games went well in the arcades – and on PlayStation at all.

In a 2017 interview with Sony’s PlayStation blog, Harada Yamada described as “a true genius in the 1980s and 1990s,” and said his work inspired PlayStation inventor Ken Kutaragi.

Today, Polygon has released Memories of Play, a documentary that looks back on the original PlayStation for its 25th anniversary. That’s why we did rare interviews with Yamada on the beginnings of Tekken and PlayStation, and summarized some of his best memories and anecdotes – some cut from the video – below.

As it turned out, pretty much everything that had to do with Tekken happened at the last minute.

The right place at the right time

Yamada joined Namco in 1988 and worked on a number of arcade games before Tekken. These included a vertical shoot-em-up called Dangerous Seed and a 4-player fighting game called Knuckle Heads, as well as various aborted projects.

“Nobody really started,” he says.

In the early 1990s, Yamada volunteered for a new arcade-oriented development studio that Namco wanted to open in San Jose. But when this job did not succeed, he began to look at the new console hardware that became available. First, he got a 3DO in his hands.

“At the time, we were all told not to go home without a permit, not even on weekends . When I went home, I would say I had to pick up new clothes and asked if that would be the case not the case would be just to go to sleep. ”

“I tried it, but it was not great,” he says. “Then I heard a rumor that something better was coming.”

That turned out to be Sony’s PlayStation and Yamada was skeptical until he personally saw it. “When I saw the console myself, I thought people would fall in love with it,” he says.

Yamada spent some time each day taking his work PC from his office at Namco in Yokohama to the Sony office in Aoyama to take notes, study the new hardware, and then get in touch with his colleagues.

At about the same time, Namco had an interest in developing a 3D fighting game similar to Virtua Fighter, and the timing was almost perfectly in line with Sony’s plans for PlayStation.

One of Yamada’s first memories of the hardware was to test an example 3D model that an artist had created on Namco – a version of Cammy’s Street Fighter series – and get it working on PlayStation. When the texture and level of detail were right, he knew the hardware was special.

Yamada said it has set itself the goal of outperforming its rivals – including early PlayStation Tohshinden and Namco’s own Ridge Racer, which was developed on the same floor as Tekken.

In order to be at the forefront of technology, Namco had short deadlines for his games, Yamada said. He estimates that Tekken’s arcade version took a year, with the PlayStation port taking another three months, while the Tekken 2 arcade version took six months and the PlayStation port more six months.

The PlayStation version of Tekken
Bandai Namco

From Yamada’s perspective, the biggest challenge was to integrate the games into PlayStation’s limited memory. While the arcade versions ran on modified PlayStation hardware, they needed 4 MB of RAM, while the console versions had to take 2 MB of RAM.

“It was a lot of fun,” he says, describing himself as “a bit masochistic,” because he likes the challenge of working with limited memory. “However, I literally lived in the office.”

“At the time, we were all told not to go home without a permit on the weekend,” he says. “When I go home, I would say that I have to pick up new clothes,” he adds, “to which I’m asked if I just want to go to sleep.”

Despite the circumstances, Yamada says he enjoyed the work and was proud of the result. He discovered extra space in the arcade version and compressed it in a most satisfying way.

“In the end it did not look that different, did it?”

Everything at the last minute

In the early days of Tekken it was a common topic to meet tight deadlines.

In one case, Yamada tells a story about showing the original Tekken at the JAMMA 1994 Arcade Game Convention in Japan, where Namco played the game directly against Sega’s Virtua Fighter 2.

Sony and Namco were working on the Arcade hardware of System 11, a modified version of PlayStation that was not as powerful as some of its competitors, such as Sega’s Model 2, running Virtua Fighter 2 but cost-effective and porting games on PlayStation a enabled easier process. Tekken was supposed to be the first game on the hardware.

When the latest version of the hardware arrived, Yamada struggled to get the game software up and running. And just before the JAMMA show, Yamada said Kutaragi had visited Namco and saw that the game was not working.

“He told me not to worry and he would send an engineer that same day,” says Yamada. “He sent Suzuoki (SCEI hardware architect Masakazu), who had just married, to call his wife from a pay phone and tell her that he was late and that he would make amends. After this conversation we stayed awake all night. He had prepared four or five solutions to fix our problem, but it was not going well at first. Then he had one last chance: if this did not work, he would not know what else to do. When he tried, his voice was a bit shaky and told me that he thought it worked. He asked me to give it a try. “

The PlayStation version of Tekken
Bandai Namco

“Fortunately, the next day we had a Tekken, which ran perfectly on the exhibition area. I still can not help but think of Suzuoki as a god and Kutaragi who sent him to us. I’m very grateful.”

Suzuoki landed just under Kutaragi in Tekken’s thank you.

In another case where Yamada worked to the last minute, he remembers a time when the development team had to drive a CD into Sony’s PlayStation production facility in the middle of the night – though he does not remember if it was happened at Tekken 2 or Tekken 3.

“We waited until the end – we worked on the game until the last moment,” he says. “I remember that I brought the game directly to the factory in Hamamatsu. We ended the game at night and had to obtain the final approval from QA. In the morning we got approval – maybe it was 3 or 4 in the morning, and someone in the company hid a bottle of whiskey and told us to drink. So we celebrated. Then our supervisor came in and asked us to bring the game to the factory, so we got into a car and drove towards Hamamatsu. Maybe I should not say that, but we had too much of a passenger to put in the trunk when we went to Hamamatsu.

“We delivered the master and received the test disk – we checked that it worked, and finally approved the production. Nowadays, I would advise against it, as this is dangerous. I am surprised that we were allowed to do that at the time, and I am glad that it ended without any problems. “

PlayStation changed everything

Looking back on his work on the original PlayStation, Yamada, who still works for Bandai Namco, says he misses those days. In particular, being able to work on something while fundamentally changing an industry.

He greatly appreciates Kutaragi, noting that when asked about technical issues about PlayStation hardware, he was surprised that Kutaragi answered them personally, instead of passing them through to the support staff.

“We all wondered what the deal with the guy was,” says Yamada.

“However, I think that Kutaragi’s technical skills were the reason why they were able to release such advanced hardware at the time,” he adds.

Kutaragi meant a lot to Yamada – so much so that Yamada once heard the story that Kutaragi hated an original PlayStation controller (resembling a Super Nintendo controller) and threw it against a wall to break it – so Yamada kept One of Namco’s copies of this controller felt that it was something historically important. He even brought this controller to one of our interview shoots for the documentary, although he did not want to show it in front of the camera because he did not want to risk disturbing Sony. (Shuji Utsumi, a former Sony manager who was also present at the video shoot, remembers the story differently and thinks that former Sony chairman Norio Ohga was the one who broke the controller.)

“I happen to work closely with PlayStation,” says Yamada. “I feel incredibly happy. It was also a lot of fun. I would like to work on something with the same challenge and innovation again. The fact that we can not, makes me a bit angry. It is frustrating. I am ashamed that it remains monotonous. “

“I think PlayStation has changed the industry,” he says.