Part 1: FOOTBALL FIGHTER
| Ichigo | Let's celebrate TEAM NINJA's legacy!
Should we really begin with a canceled project? |
| EGAWA | Yeah, it was canned. |
| ITAGAKI | Total flop. Though at least other projects from that era shipped - like "Tokidensho" and "Ganbare Ginkun." |
| Miruku | Huh...? Why was the game canceled? |
| ITAGAKI | It was supposed to be an American football game, but we added punch and kick buttons, so that probably did it. |
| Ichigo | Woah?! You could punch someone during a football match? |
| ITAGAKI | Damn right. |
| EGAWA | We got a bit carried away and added moves like Punch Punch Somersault and Shoryuken. |
| Check out the instruction cards available then. | |
| ITAGAKI | We threw the rulebook* out the window. On defense, you could punch or kick the ball carrier to knock them down—and the play ended wherever they collapsed. No flags, no penalties, just violence. |
| The Americans ripped us apart: "No fighting! That’s unnecessary roughness!!"—but we thought it was very necessary. | |
| Ichigo | They tore into ya, huh? OH MY GOD! Classic Americans, am I right? Just kidding! Hahaha!! |
| ITAGAKI | (ignores that) Well, one positive is that we were the first in our company to use 3D CG. Egawa was the chief CG artist at the time. |
| EGAWA | Nearly died doing it! I had only used a digitizer before, but suddenly, we had to use the SGI Indigo 2. |
| Ichigo | Digitizer? S...? |
| Miruku | S.G.I.??? |
| ITAGAKI | I get not knowing what a digitizer is but you should've heard of SGI. |
| Ichigo | Ugh... this is bad... |
| Miruku | Come on, don’t feel so bad! |
| ITAGAKI | You either! |
| EGAWA | (whispering) I'm talking about the blue computer that uses Softimage. |
| ITAGAKI | But the arcade motherboard was an ordinary 2D board. The animations were rendered then stored as individual frames, which ended up using an enormous amount of memory. We used about 36 frames just for the running animation. |
| Miruku | Ho, ho, ho. (I actually don't know what that means.) |
| EGAWA | In retrospect, that was such a dumb decision. |
| ITAGAKI | I’ve forgotten, but I think we had about 300 EPROMs for the characters mounted on a four-layer PCB. |
| Ichigo | Eh?! A four-layer board? That sounds fancy! By the way, is having 300 EPROMs a big deal? |
| ITAGAKI | ....... |
| EGAWA | Wait, was it really 300? ...Maybe we exaggerated a bit. |
| ITAGAKI | Does it matter? Point is, we had so many ROMs that it starved the board for power and sometimes the board wouldn't boot at all. |
| Ichigo | This is way over my head. |
| Miruku | Don't fret! You’re not the only one who doesn’t understand! |
| Ichigo | No way? YOU... |
| ITAGAKI | ...Well, next time, let’s try it out. I’ll hook it up to the Astro cabinet, and we can take a screenshot and upload it here. |
| Ichigo＆Miruku | Got it! |
| EGAWA | There might still be fans who remember it. We used to have location tests around Kagurazaka back then. |
| ITAGAKI | If they do, it’d be nice if they could post about it on the forum. |
| Miruku | It was surprisingly popular and the project is being revived. |
| ITAGAKI&EGAWA | No way!😅 |
| Miruku | You’re right, hahahaha!! |
| ITAGAKI&EGAWA | Oof! |
| (*Football Footnote) | In reality, ball carriers keep forward progress unless defenders push them back. (And no, you can’t punch them.) |