- Joined
- Aug 30, 2016
- Posts
- 2,453
When I'm not playing neo geo games, then I'm usually hunting around for SNK/Neo Geo-related information. This time, I was searching around for information about Ragnagard/Shin Ou Ken and stumbled upon a fantastic interview by Heidi Kemps at Gaming.moe.
The interview is with Akihiro Takanami who was the primary developer behind Battle Master on the Super Famicom and Ragnagard on the Neo Geo. It's a very long interview with tons of information for those interested, though much of it was not SNK related, so here are some great highlights:
1) Contrary to popular theories stating that the Neo Geo hardware didn't have a lot of third-party titles due to lack of publisher interest, SNK was actually actively declining/preventing third party developers from releasing titles on their hardware in the early 90's. Battle Master was one of these declined Neo Geo projects:
"System Vision’s president wanted to try doing a release on Neo Geo, but SNK declined, saying that they weren’t interested in third-parties, and we unfortunately had to go with a home console release. The reason this bummed me out is that (at the time – ed), unlike arcade games, console-only fighting games had no chance of going mainstream. On the other hand, we didn’t have to deal with the pressure that comes from having to make a game robust enough to serve as a means of competition, and could just kick loose during development."
Battle Master - Kyuukyoku no Senshitachi ...could have been on the Neo Geo?!
2) The relationship between SNK and Saurus:
"My understanding now and at the time was that they were an affiliate of SNK responsible for porting Neo Geo games to consumer hardware. I never spoke at length directly with anyone internally at the company, so I don’t really know much about them, either. They mostly gave us advice on how to design Shin-Oh-Ken as an arcade game. Very simple stuff, just talk about making the design of the game simpler. We corresponded back and forth with them, but while the release date for Shin-Oh-Ken was June 13, 1996, the game wasn’t actually released until about two or three months after that."
3) King of Fighters 96 delayed the release of Ragnagard:
"One of the points that came up when we signed the contract to make a Neo Geo game is that the release of SNK’s games took priority, and I heard that the ROM burning plants stopped manufacturing ROMs for third-party games. This was around the time when KOF96 went on sale on July 30, 1996, so Shin-Oh-Ken being pushed back was probably the result of us being in the same window. The ROMs for Shin-Oh-Ken simply didn’t exist on its release date."
4) The early draft for Ragnagard was a cyberpunk themed fighting game:
"The president of the company asked me to come back to plan a game. When I got there, he showed me a draft for a fighting game the Mr. T I mentioned earlier had made, a serious cyberpunk game with a roster full of military guys. Nothing about it hooked me. All of the characters looked like sidekick types, and when I asked the planner who came up with it for a reason why, he couldn’t give me a good answer."
5) Darkstalkers was an influence on the theme of Ragnagard:
"At the time we started development, Vampire/Darkstalkers, Samurai Shodown 1, and KOF 94 had just come out. I loved all three of them, but Darkstalkers was easily #1. If Darkstalkers was a game with monsters and demons as a motif, what about a game full of angels and gods? Even if the old guys at the company didn’t understand the characters in SF2, they’d be able to understand gods from mythology."
6) The reason Ragnagard featured prerendered CG characters:
"This was an extremely difficult decision for someone who loved Capcom’s 2D spritework as much as I did. At the time, my mentor Hideki Suzuki was really into the prerendered graphics that you saw in Donkey Kong Country and all sorts of DOS games, and strongly recommended we use a similar style. I finally had the chance to draw 2D pixel art for an arcade game, and swore to myself that I wasn’t going to let this chance get away, but Suzuki pointed out that animation quality would be more important than on any project we’d previously worked on, which meant drawing a crazy number of key animation frames.
“It’s going to be pretty difficult to get those all drawn within the deadline, won’t it?”
That shut me up. I’d pretty much just grandstanded in everything I’d done up to that point, and had no idea how to create a proper work environment for the amount of animation we’d need to create. I finally thought I’d have the chance to show my pixel art to the world on the same stage as SF2, and then that happened. Most brutal decision of my life. That wouldn’t have happened knowing what I know now. I would have been able make a stand, and propose a number of methods for creating pixel art for the game."
7) Ragnagard would have featured Syoh from Battle Masters as a hidden guest fighter:
"We also wanted to see about putting Syoh from Battle Master in the game as a guest character, ala Ryo Sakazaki in Fatal Fury Special. But we talked to Saurus and they said no."
8) The origins of the "Ragnagard" title for the overseas release:
"We matched some words from northern European mythology: “Ragnarok” -> “Destiny of the Gods” -> “Beyond the Battle of Susanooh”.
From there we started thinking of names with suffixes like “<something>gard” or “<something>heim”, trying to match the meaning of heaven and earth taken from Aquarion. The people in charge started getting impatient waiting for us to think of something, though, so we just went with what we had."
Thank you so much Heidi for this excellent interview!
Please be sure to check out the full original interview by Heidi Kemps on her Gaming.moe website:
The interview is with Akihiro Takanami who was the primary developer behind Battle Master on the Super Famicom and Ragnagard on the Neo Geo. It's a very long interview with tons of information for those interested, though much of it was not SNK related, so here are some great highlights:
1) Contrary to popular theories stating that the Neo Geo hardware didn't have a lot of third-party titles due to lack of publisher interest, SNK was actually actively declining/preventing third party developers from releasing titles on their hardware in the early 90's. Battle Master was one of these declined Neo Geo projects:
"System Vision’s president wanted to try doing a release on Neo Geo, but SNK declined, saying that they weren’t interested in third-parties, and we unfortunately had to go with a home console release. The reason this bummed me out is that (at the time – ed), unlike arcade games, console-only fighting games had no chance of going mainstream. On the other hand, we didn’t have to deal with the pressure that comes from having to make a game robust enough to serve as a means of competition, and could just kick loose during development."
Battle Master - Kyuukyoku no Senshitachi ...could have been on the Neo Geo?!
2) The relationship between SNK and Saurus:
"My understanding now and at the time was that they were an affiliate of SNK responsible for porting Neo Geo games to consumer hardware. I never spoke at length directly with anyone internally at the company, so I don’t really know much about them, either. They mostly gave us advice on how to design Shin-Oh-Ken as an arcade game. Very simple stuff, just talk about making the design of the game simpler. We corresponded back and forth with them, but while the release date for Shin-Oh-Ken was June 13, 1996, the game wasn’t actually released until about two or three months after that."
3) King of Fighters 96 delayed the release of Ragnagard:
"One of the points that came up when we signed the contract to make a Neo Geo game is that the release of SNK’s games took priority, and I heard that the ROM burning plants stopped manufacturing ROMs for third-party games. This was around the time when KOF96 went on sale on July 30, 1996, so Shin-Oh-Ken being pushed back was probably the result of us being in the same window. The ROMs for Shin-Oh-Ken simply didn’t exist on its release date."
4) The early draft for Ragnagard was a cyberpunk themed fighting game:
"The president of the company asked me to come back to plan a game. When I got there, he showed me a draft for a fighting game the Mr. T I mentioned earlier had made, a serious cyberpunk game with a roster full of military guys. Nothing about it hooked me. All of the characters looked like sidekick types, and when I asked the planner who came up with it for a reason why, he couldn’t give me a good answer."
5) Darkstalkers was an influence on the theme of Ragnagard:
"At the time we started development, Vampire/Darkstalkers, Samurai Shodown 1, and KOF 94 had just come out. I loved all three of them, but Darkstalkers was easily #1. If Darkstalkers was a game with monsters and demons as a motif, what about a game full of angels and gods? Even if the old guys at the company didn’t understand the characters in SF2, they’d be able to understand gods from mythology."
6) The reason Ragnagard featured prerendered CG characters:
"This was an extremely difficult decision for someone who loved Capcom’s 2D spritework as much as I did. At the time, my mentor Hideki Suzuki was really into the prerendered graphics that you saw in Donkey Kong Country and all sorts of DOS games, and strongly recommended we use a similar style. I finally had the chance to draw 2D pixel art for an arcade game, and swore to myself that I wasn’t going to let this chance get away, but Suzuki pointed out that animation quality would be more important than on any project we’d previously worked on, which meant drawing a crazy number of key animation frames.
“It’s going to be pretty difficult to get those all drawn within the deadline, won’t it?”
That shut me up. I’d pretty much just grandstanded in everything I’d done up to that point, and had no idea how to create a proper work environment for the amount of animation we’d need to create. I finally thought I’d have the chance to show my pixel art to the world on the same stage as SF2, and then that happened. Most brutal decision of my life. That wouldn’t have happened knowing what I know now. I would have been able make a stand, and propose a number of methods for creating pixel art for the game."
7) Ragnagard would have featured Syoh from Battle Masters as a hidden guest fighter:
"We also wanted to see about putting Syoh from Battle Master in the game as a guest character, ala Ryo Sakazaki in Fatal Fury Special. But we talked to Saurus and they said no."
8) The origins of the "Ragnagard" title for the overseas release:
"We matched some words from northern European mythology: “Ragnarok” -> “Destiny of the Gods” -> “Beyond the Battle of Susanooh”.
From there we started thinking of names with suffixes like “<something>gard” or “<something>heim”, trying to match the meaning of heaven and earth taken from Aquarion. The people in charge started getting impatient waiting for us to think of something, though, so we just went with what we had."
Thank you so much Heidi for this excellent interview!
Please be sure to check out the full original interview by Heidi Kemps on her Gaming.moe website:
Last edited:
