Takado Yoshihiko sighed deeply and fed the market research report on Virtua Fighter 2 into the shredder.
"Notify the teams to expedite development on those side-scrolling games. As for 3D..." He gave a wry smile. "That's a game for the rich. We'll just observe."
In Ota Ward, Tokyo, at Namco's headquarters, the atmosphere was far more tense than at Capcom or SNK, who had already resigned themselves to ridicule in the 2D arena.
On the long table in the Technology Division, the disassembled cabinet of Virtua Fighter 2 lay scattered in pieces.
Beside it sat Namco's secret weapon: the System 11, a custom board developed in parallel with Sony's PlayStation, sharing the same architecture.
Several engineers, their hair disheveled like bird's nests, huddled around the circuit boards, their blueprints crumpled in their hands.
"Damn it."
The Lead Programmer threw his magnifying glass onto the table, his eyes bloodshot. "The hardware specs aren't that different. The Model 2..."
"While those custom chips we used are powerful, our System 11 is just as efficient at polygon generation. In theory, we should all be starting from the same place."
He pointed to their own demo running on the left monitor.
In the screen, Kazuya Mishima, the protagonist of Tekken, stood in a fighting stance.
While it was a significant improvement over the blocky figures of the original Virtua Fighter, with basic muscular definition, his skin remained a smooth, uniform color, making him look like a freshly manufactured plastic mannequin.
Then, he looked to the right.
Sega's Akira Yuki stood there, breathing, his gi rising and falling with his chest. The fabric even showed visible texture from the weave.
"This isn't even in the same league," another art team leader groaned, clutching his head in despair. "We're still trying to make our polygons look less like LEGO bricks, and those Sega guys are already studying textile science?"
"Don't let them get to you."
Producer Katsuhiro Harada burst through the door, his expression grim.
He walked up to the screen and stared at Akira Yuki performing his victory animation for a long time.
"See what's going on?" Katsuhiro Harada asked.
"I see it," the Lead Programmer sighed, his fingers tracing a pattern on the screen's background. "They pulled a clever trick. The entire background is made of 2D textures, not real-time 3D rendering at all. Those cunning bastards dumped all the saved processing power into the characters."
This was classic "Sega-style" pragmatism.
But he had to admit, it was a ruthless move.
In the noisy, dimly lit arcades, who would bother scrutinizing the distant mountains to see if they were just flat cutouts?
Players' eyes would naturally focus on the visceral, hard-hitting characters.
"Now that you've figured it out, can we do it?" Harada turned to face the room, his gaze sweeping across everyone present.
A tense silence filled the conference room.
"We could do it—" the Lead Programmer hesitated, "—but it would require completely overhauling our current rendering pipeline and reallocating resources. Plus, the art team's workload would explode—every character's textures would need to be redone from scratch."
"Then we'll redraw it," Katsuhiro Harada declared with finality. "Tekken is our weapon to seize the 3D Fighting throne from Sega, and it's the first shot we'll fire for Sony's PlayStation. If we release it with these plastic figures, Sega will crush us. Moreover, if the performance is too poor, arcades won't order many units. We won't recoup our costs, and the problems will only grow—not to mention the sales after the PlayStation port."
He paused, his tone softening slightly but carrying even greater weight. "I'll report this to the President and see how we can coordinate with Sony. Even if we have to delay the launch, we can't release a joke as a flagship title for the PlayStation."
Harada crumpled the original launch schedule into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket.
"Notify the entire Tekken project team: weekend leave is canceled. The release date is postponed. We won't discuss a launch until our graphics are close to Virtua Fighter 2."
While Sega was counting money until their fingers cramped, the lights in the Namco building burned through the night.
The war for 3D fighting dominance hadn't even begun, yet Namco was already forced to undertake a crippling overhaul right at the starting line.
This meant that Sony PlayStation, which had been counting on the Tekken port to drive initial sales, now faced the embarrassing prospect of launching without Tekken.
When a knock sounded on the President's office door, Masaya Nakamura was staring absently at the Virtua Fighter 2 revenue report that had just arrived on his desk.
"Come in."
Katsuhiro Harada pushed the door open, not carrying a folder, but holding two freshly developed photographs.
His face looked even worse than if he'd stayed up two nights in a row, the dark circles under his eyes standing out starkly under the incandescent light.
"President, I have bad news." Harada walked to the desk and slapped the two photos onto the mahogany surface with a thud. "The left is our current Tekken. The right is Virtua Fighter 2, which Sega just stocked yesterday."
Nakamura's gaze fell on the photographs.
Even an outsider with no technical knowledge could see the devastating gap at a glance.
On the left, Kazuya Mishima had a muscular physique, but his skin was as smooth and glossy as a freshly molded plastic figurine, even reflecting light. In contrast, Akira Yuki on the right, though the coarse texture of his martial arts uniform wasn't perfectly rendered, had a completely different texture from the bare-skinned Kazuya.
"The difference between a plastic doll and a living person," Katsuhiro Harada said hoarsely. "If we release it next month as planned, that's likely what players and arcade owners will say about us."
Masaya Nakamura remained silent, his finger tapping on the "plastic doll." As the head of Namco, he knew the arcade market's brutal nature all too well. There was no room for sympathy there; players' coins would only go to the coolest, most dazzling games.
Sega had already set the bar to the ceiling. If Namco served up an undercooked dish, they wouldn't just fail to make money—they'd ruin their reputation and even arcade owners and distributors wouldn't place many orders.
"If we start over now, we'll have to repaint all the character textures and revise the rendering pipeline," Harada said through gritted teeth. "The budget will need at least a 30% increase, and the release date—it might have to be postponed by over three months."
"What if we don't change it?" Masaya Nakamura countered.
"Then we'll be crushed by Sega. Arcade orders probably won't even reach a thousand units," Katsuhiro Harada replied bluntly. "And this will directly impact the quality of the PlayStation port. Sony is counting on us to be a flagship title. If we release this garbage, Ken Kutaragi will probably kill me."
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