Q and A with Tony - The SNK Years: 1992 - 1997

[TonK]

I talked to Tony and asked his permission to put him in the hot seat.

If anyone wants to start a discussion of the old SNK, I'm sure he can answer a lot of questions.

It's been a pleasure talking with him on my end.

He was into game design and a repair technician.

Ask away - he's happy to answer!

 

[Nightmare Tony]

k, I am blushing now on this one. Am guessing there are quest6ions going beyond the repair questions I had been answering, so go for it.

 

[TonK]

I'll start it off.

What games did you work on?

 

[SSS]

Whatever became of the folks who ran 3Koam?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

in terms of full programming, none of them. In auxiliary things such as text and game changes, I had more going at Romstar, with Tiger Road and Ninja Warriors as well as the home division games. At SNK, we did some text trasnslations but I did more of hardware modification designs, such as the Thrash rally steering wheel and ticket redemption system for the Neo Geo. One project which never completed was in revamping a Candy Crane to comply with California state law (joystick and drop button). For that one, I was designing a new computer board from scratch. For the programming manual, I helped int he tech side of translating it to English.

Back at Romstar, I did much more towards game development. One large project was the Tera game system board. I helped in the design (specced the sound system my way, 2 YM2203s in stereo with speech) and spent a week at the hardware designer's house learning to program it in C. On return, me and a friend worked together in making a darts game. Tera was cancelled but the work we did went into the NES cartridge released called Magic Darts.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

I don't recall the owner's name at 3 Koam. I do remember Butch's name of Wood systems. Both did our cabinets for the Neo Geo arcade games. No idea after I left SNK if they are still around or not. (back at Romstar, we used Dynamo in Texas for our cabinets)

 

[SSS]

I do remember finding some online court documents a few years ago referring to 3Koam bankruptcy proceedings.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Ah, thanks for letting me know. Was that pretty much during the game industry crashing? It hit a lot of companies fairly hard. The Neo Geo did quite well as a kit and software sales as over 1.5 million boards were sold. The dedicated cabinets were a tougher sell but sell they did at the time.

 

[caren103]

Hi Tony: many thanks for this!

What's the most silly thing that happened while working in SNK?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Don't know. we were all pretty much a happy working family. The music got noisy so they had to yell to pipe it down from the front offices sometimes. Tony in the home division played death metal, the other Tony repair tech arcade who worked with me listened to Limbaugh and sports and I listened to wierd stuff. I was pretty much the company joker. Come wintertime when it was cold as heck, I would like to yell up to anyone coming downstairs from the offices: "Welcome to the SNK winter wonderland! I'm Frosty the snowman! May I help you?"

During breaks, we had fun playing darts and 4 cabinets linked up for Thrash Rally. Those competitions were ferocious.

but really, can't think of anything being the silliest, per se. It was hard work and good times.

 

[SSS]

Were you there during the daughterboard "fix" for the terrible US composite video? Was this handled in house in the US, or was this taken care of in Japan before consoles were shipped.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

I was working at Romstar at the time and Mr. Yasuki asked me to go down there to help with that very problem. SNK was in a smaller multiple unit building back then, maybe 6,000 sq feet (the building later became Cap Estel/Seta). From what I could tell when being shown the issue was some beat frequencies causing interference between the composite crystal and the main clock crystal. I think I recommended changing them slightly or syncing them up. Am not sure if that was what was implemented to repair afterwards, sorry.

 

[neo-geo-mvs]

Tony's the man! Look forward to reading more!

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Tony's the man! Look forward to reading more!

I now have the air conditionign on, blushing so much to it all....

 

[SSS]

How involved was the US branch involved in game development? Did it seem SNK japan was ever interested in changing aspects of a game to suit western tastes? Did they ask for input? Or did they pretty much just handle everything and leave you guys to localization and distribution?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

We did game text translations and modifications for the US market at first. Then it came time to begin an American r & d division. that was set up a couple of streets down. I remember setting up the computer systems and the motion capture system (SGI Indigo). There was projects of an RPG and Samurai Shodown 4 there. That division was disbanded fairly quickly, though. Their SamSho4 work went into the final game, though.

My own steering wheel and crane and redemption gigs I did on my own, was encouraged on those but I don't think Japan ever knew about those projects.

Given enough time, I do think that the american R & D would have been a sucess had it stuck around. Sigh.

 

[SSS]

That's too bad.

When did MVS hardware production and distribution peak (cabs/ conversion kits)? Do you know approximately when cabinet production ceased? I guess I'm interested on the timeline from when focus was on getting the platform out there, to shifting over solely to software sales. I have this idea it was sometime shortly after Sam Sho 2.

 

[Nightmare Tony]

Not sure of the peak and fall. At the later part of Romstar, we licensed the 1 slot as a kit and they sold like gangbusters, I think over 6,000 were sold there. Stepping into SNK, the kit and the cabinets were going strong. If I thought about it, the cabinets were tapering off gradually, but not really noticeable to me. We were still dealing with Wood Systems and 3 Koam all teh way until SNK moved when I left. Wood Systems did the Neo print cabinets so that got the company moving up there due to that machine. But for cabinet production, it never crashed when I was there.

 

[SSS]

Was the memory card feature ever taken seriously by you guys? (heavy promotion, marketing, trade shows) Was it seen as a strong selling point to operators in the US. Or was it seen as more of a gimmick dropped in your lap by SNKjapan?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

More of a cute feature that wasn't used worth a darn. While I did test them out to make sure they worked, the number of games that came back with bad memory card slots was maybe 5 or 6 out of the several hundred I repaired personally. I think it was bigger in the home division.

 

[SSS]

Do you recall what the price point was for cabinets and MVS kits back then? Like, let's say I'm an operator circa 94 looking for a 4 slot big red, plus 4 new kits to go with it to put on location, how much would it set me back?

I'm assuming there were bundle deals offered to operators as well to entice them into adopting the platform?

 

[Nightmare Tony]

The standard cabinet price was the same across the game industry, $2600. Specialized game cabinets commanded higher prices, of course. the MVS game carts sold for something like $595. they were super attractive to the operators as they earned as much as the full sized cabinet games or other manufacturer's kits. Board kits such as the Street Fighter series were at least $1200. If you can get a cartridge for half of that that earned the same, the choice was simple.

On the top earning game lists, SNK dominated. For years, on the top 10, at least 4 spots were Neo Geo titles.

 

[SSS]

Was there ever any talk of importing any of the plethora of Japanese "candy" MVS cabinets into the US? Was this even considered? If so, was it strictly prohibited due to contracts in place with US cabinet producers? Was there a corporate policy in place regarding keeping cabinet production localized for each region (IE 3Koam for US, Electrocoin for UK etc..) and not importing another regions cabinet for sale.

 

[TonK]

Did you work on or view any games that didn't make it to production?

Which ones?

 

[massimiliano]

Hi Tony, thanks for your availability, I think this is great.

Could you please tell us more about the contacts/workflow with the Japanese HQ?

like behind the curtains of a game of the time... personally I would like to hear anything you think is interesting about the experience you had with the Japanese side.

Thanks in advance!


P.s.

Like Tonk, I think it would be cool to shred some light about prototypes, specially if there are titles we never heard about! (and I'm pretty sure there are!)