THE MAKING OF SAMURAI SHODOWN

In a duel between samurai, victory is often sudden and emphatic. In the blink of an eye, a flash of steel accompanies a swift swing of the sword, and it’s all over. The winner moves on to the next fight – the loser, more often than not, moves on to the next plane of existence. In the early Nineties, fighting games were booming but they were predominantly based on bare-knuckle brawling. SNK changed that with Samurai Shodown, a game that brought the drama and danger of swordfights to the arcade. As well as being a success in its own right, the game began one of gaming’s greatest 2D fighting series and furthered SNK’s claim to mastery of the fighting genre.

The funny thing about Samurai Shodown was that initially it wasn’t meant to be a one-on-one fighting game at all. Instead it was to be a scrolling beat-’em-up, more in the manner of a game like Sengoku – and rather than featuring samurai characters, the main heroes were monsters. Why was the original concept so radically changed? According to Yasushi Adachi, director of Samurai Shodown, it had a lot to do with Street Fighter II: “After experiencing the dynamism of the fighting game that was dominating the arcade and console game scene at that time, we asked ourselves what kind of game design we could do, and decided to challenge that masterpiece!”

With the concept of creating a fighting game now set in stone, the team looked to find ways of differentiating its game from the crowd. “In order to challenge the most popular fighting game of this era, we knew