JM: You said he was inspired by “scissor hands.” You mean he was inspired by Edward Scissorhands or Freddy from Nightmare on Elmstreet ? JM: In this original game concept, was Genan one of the playable characters, or was he a monster that you fought against? I’m a huge fan of the idea of “scissor hands” and the inspiration for Genan’s hands comes from that. JM: But he was the only one that remained from the original game concept that carried over to what ultimately became Samurai Shodown ? YA: No, there were initially a lot of different monsters in the game. JM: Just so I make sure I’m getting this straight: Samurai Shodown originally started as a side-scrolling action game like Double Dragon where Genan was the main character, fighting monsters? JM: So when you were originally thinking of a monster fighting game, you were thinking of a 2D, side-scrolling beat-em-up like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage ? I ultimately felt that a fighting game with ninjas and samurais, which represented distinctly Japanese characters, would do better than just monsters, so I changed the concept accordingly. YA: When I was creating the concept for a monster game, I was contemplating what would sell to a global audience. As the concept evolved, the “survivor” of those monsters was Genan. Yasushi Adachi: I’m probably the only one from SNK that knows this, but the idea originally started as an action game with various monsters. Was the original goal to simply create a Street Fighter -like 2D fighting game featuring weapons, or was it something else entirely? The characters are so memorable, and the fighting systems are top notch. James Mielke: S amurai Shodown is one of the fighting genre’s most iconic franchises. Over the course of our conversation we covered a lot of territory, including the series’ origins (it wasn’t originally a fighting game), whether or not anyone was dismembered in the recording of the game’s sound effects and an unexpected appreciation for Genan Shiranui, the hunchbacked claw-handed creature who helped kick off the entire series. Fukui now works at Engines as well, continuing the relationship with his former boss from SNK.
While Tate is now an independent music composer, Adachi is the CEO of a successful but little-known (in the West) studio called Engines, which develops games for a variety of clients - perhaps most notably, it worked on Ultimate Marvel vs. We gathered together nearly 7,000 miles apart on a video conference with Adachi, Samurai Shodown background designer Tomoki Fukui and composer Norio Tate. The end result of this good fortune is the story of one of gaming’s most enigmatic franchises: Samurai Shodown.
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A chance conversation at Tokyo Game Show 2016 put us in touch with Yasushi Adachi, the original series creator, planner, producer and director who guided the franchise up until SNK’s merger with Playmore several years later. With SNK in a bit of a revival at the moment, we went on a quest to track down some of the original Samurai gumi team members and learn more about the origins of the Samurai Shodown series. To most Samurai Shodown fans, the only recognizable contributor to the series has been artist Shinkiro, who provided many of SNK’s most memorable illustrations in that era. While teams like Sega AM2 maintained a high profile through the ‘90s, always showcasing their latest games in public demonstrations and regularly appearing in press interviews, the Samurai gumi team toiled away in obscurity. Yet despite being one of SNK’s most-respected properties, little is known about the original Samurai Shodown development team, Samurai gumi. While the series has lost momentum over time, in part due to not keeping up with increasingly advanced hardware, few would dispute it still sits - especially in its first two entries - at the table of hallowed 2D fighters like Street Fighter, The King of Fighters and Guilty Gear. A bona fide fighting game legend, the game in its heyday was renowned for intense swordplay and large, beautifully-animated 2D sprites. In 1993, SNK released Samurai Shodown, a pioneering weapons-based 2D fighting game set in 18th-century Japan, featuring iconic characters like Haohmaru the wandering ronin, Galford the ninja from California and Nakoruru the Ainu falconer.