I was just reading a long interview on Polygon.com with Samurai Shodown devs from earlier this year. It covers a lot of ground and briefly touches NGPC development. I figured that's kind of relevant, so check inside for an excerpt and a link to the whole thing.

[ Post Followup ] [ Search ] [ Return to the Forum ]

Posted by Rockman Pocket on September 22, 2017 at 15:47:03 EST.

I was just reading a long interview on Polygon.com with Samurai Shodown devs from earlier this year. It covers a lot of ground and briefly touches NGPC development. I figured that's kind of relevant, so check inside for an excerpt and a link to the whole thing.

JM: Did Samurai gumi develop Samurai Shodown 2 for Neo-Geo Pocket Color?

YA: Hmm ... I don’t remember. I’ll have to check and get back to you about that. [Laughs] What I remember is that I don’t have any memories of it. This ties back to your questions about whether there was any stress working on the Neo-Geo. There wasn’t much stress working with the Neo-Geo, but it was very stressful working on the Pocket Color. It was stressful because of the low specs, and the Game Boy Color was selling really well at the time so we were competing with that while working on inferior hardware.

I think we would have gotten along really well with the WonderSwan team. ... We probably had very similar experiences working on inferior hardware, and probably would have bonded very quickly while having a few drinks.

The promotional copy text for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color was “I’m not boy!,” in reference to Nintendo’s Game Boy. The Neo-Geo PR team went and directly picked a fight with Nintendo through its marketing, so it was so stressful for us developers.

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/10/15223966/the-making-of-samurai-shodown

Follow Ups:

Wow. "Shodown" from "Shogun." Rage meter from the director being angry when he lost an SF2 match. Gen-an vs Johnny Depp. Aliens in the pot. NGPC stress! So many good things there!

(Paleface)

(16:57:57 09/23/17 EST)

I don’t know if it’s the translation or the Zeta-esque misremembering but the stuff about the NGP...it sounds like he’s complaining that the Pocket was inferior to the competition, which is pretty hard to argue. He must just mean that he was pissed not working on something at least as powerful as a 90s arcade board. I say this because the Swan’s only real drawback was the shitty little buttons they used for controlls and the NGP is pretty close to GBC. The GBC wiped the floor totally with both Bandai and SNK with hardware that sucked quite a bit compared to either. Only the most fully developed GBC games look NGP quality and some Swan screenshots could fool people into thinking it was GBA. Btw, the Shodown thing...who’s idea was that? I was trying to think of the one guy’s name, not Chad Okada the fat guy with the down shore accent. I’m going to blame him because while Shogun was (for some reason) a pretty big hit and it did deal specifically with white people in Japan, its set centuries before the Meiji era. More importantly, most teenagers in the 90s didn’t think much of it 20 years later. Kinda like basing a fighting game on The Last Emperor now. Even the TV ver of Shogun was 13 years old when SS came out. RELATED: Ninja Scroll came out the same summer as SS1, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe they knew either other really closely (totally possible) because I can’t see how one could influence the other since they would have both been made in isolation of each other otherwise.

(SignOfZeta)

(17:27:53 09/27/17 EST)

I should say, preview images can be very powerful and Japanese fandom/production was extremely interconnected and social back then with a lot of anime production places being the same attics where video games were being made so “inside information” or “two influential guys were best friends” are quite possible. I’m just saying that there’s no way anyone from either project had theirs inspired by the completed version of the other because neither existed until July 93 for SS with Scroll coming out one month earlier. Samshow 2 being inspired by Scroll, that I can see, and that works well timing-wise with Caffeine Nicotine.

(SignOfZeta)

(17:37:00 09/27/17 EST)

Good points. About the NGPC, he says "It was stressful working on the low specs," before he says "and the Game Boy Color was selling really well at the time," so yeah it sounds like he just didn't like the come-down from the Neo Geo arcade hardware.