Game Dev Archeology: Unearthing and Preserving Japanese Game History

[Music] hello my name is brandon sheffield i'm the creative director of microsoft games and also researcher writer archaeologists kind of uh for digital eclipse and that's what we're going to be talking about today um so what i've been calling this thing game archaeology and uh that means i i like i'm working on these big collections here like you've seen uh perhaps street fighter 30th anniversary samurai showdown neogeo collection which just came out uh snk 40th anniversary collection these are all collections by digital eclipse of um several games from you know within a certain framework so snk 40th anniversary is all snk's games premiere geo and and we put this together kind of

like a digital museum where you see all the steps along the way for them getting from their early days to their popular days with the necessary context and in the case of street fighter for example we've got 12 games in that collection but we try to contextualize them in their time period how they advanced and do all of this in this sort of digital museum preservation presentation with a mind toward preservation so what do i do i interview developers take video and look for lost games and information then the whole team collects scans and other material and makes sure the games run well and puts them all together into this full package of games museum and context so archaeological tactics i have been

calling this game archaeology it's kind of a weird term considering like i'm not going to a dig site or something but i am digging into the past in a way so it's almost appropriate these tactics vary depending on what kind of access you're given by the company that has hired you so for street fighter 30th anniversary collection we got lots of scans and frank zipfaldi who runs the video game history foundation he especially also got more supplemental material and put these things together into a nice timeline and interesting presentations like you see on the left on the left there but we had no developer access so we couldn't do interviews and we had to piece together development histories from existing interviews and other online sources then checking everything with capcom as we went along but archaeology isn't limited to just talking to developers of course so since we couldn't do that we had to kind of get more creative and dig into the game archives so as i

mentioned there are 12 games on this collection but there was one variant that i really wanted to get in there street fighter 2 the new challengers had a tournament edition that linked eight players together across four arcade machines in a specialized competition wrapper that has never been released at home ever and was frankly not that popular even in arcades when it was released it just it was it took up so much space in a game center that most places couldn't afford to even they couldn't afford the real estate so i kept bugging everybody to be like we got to get this game in there somehow and the producer stephen frost managed to get permission to make this game available using locally linked switch consoles instead of arcade machines and so we were actually able to get this from capcom put it

in the game put it in this version of the game and it's really just a small tweak on a beloved franchise but preserving these small experiences that otherwise you would not be able to have that's really what it's all about finding these minutiae that people might have forgotten or or couldn't experience today and and making that available sometimes you get gray area access so for snk 40th that collection of pre-neo geo snk gameworks i couldn't talk directly to any developers that were still at snk or that were contracting for snk or even who they had the contact info for this may sound odd but it was because of potential legal liability they essentially anything that these developers say would be reflective of snk and since they didn't

you know have them in the fold they didn't necessarily want i mean the people they had in the fold they didn't want to say stuff and be on the record and then the people that weren't they weren't part of the company so it was this whole kind of what do we do what i wound up doing was finding a bunch of former snk developers myself and then i invited them to talk to me so to the left is hiroko yokoyama who worked on crystallus ikari warriors and a bunch of other stuff before going onto the video system and on the right is yoshiaki yoshino who is snk's original pr team all by himself sporting a tank shirt that he maybe made one or two of those are he made those himself he was the original snk fanzine creative creator zine for the fans i should say so how did we get their work into the game going from official to actually official so i don't

work for snk i'm a third party so i can talk to whoever i want to talk to and they can say whatever they want to me snk just has to then check whether what i discover is correct then once we have that kind of wrapped up they're satisfied with the work then they could hire them on as consultants sort of wrapping the whole thing up in a nice little package they uh we have the info and now they're on the payroll a little bit so that it everybody's got like plausible deniability it sounds complicated but with larger companies like this especially in japan sometimes you need workarounds because they're still operating under the you know the old ideas where you couldn't talk to anybody you couldn't share information and so in order to get around that sometimes you have to get even more creative and this here is all of us standing in front of the snk building after everything kind of got wrapped and

the special edition of the collection which will be important again later sometimes you're given full access as full as you can get which was the case with the samurai showdown neo geo collection that we just released that game has all the neo geo samurai showdown games including one that was never released before we were given thousands of scans of artwork from the team because with the release before the release of samurai showdown 2019 the big reboot that they did the uh the group at snk the developers there wanted to kind of go back in time through everything that they had done in the past and see what worked what didn't work and just sort of learn from from what they had so they wound up scanning a lot of this stuff themselves so we pushed them to get some more

and then i was able to go to japan and do some documentary style interviews of several of the original developers across osaka and tokyo so pretty much anything i wanted to try was possible in this case here we have photos of the director adachi in the top left and then his team on the top right including two designers fukui and tomita who you see on the bottom left uh playing a 500 yen death match in samurai showdown 3 which maybe i'll explain in the in the text part of this presentation um and there's a little presentation of you know some of the scans we got that's an early street um summer showdown two stage i almost said street fighter but this kind of work it just doesn't make sense over video calls you really have to be physically there in the space getting lunches and drinks with everybody because it brings to mind things that you know otherwise they might not

have remembered or thought of so uh walking around asaka with the snk developers esaka being the part of osaka where snk is based you realize how much neo-geo history there is just in these buildings like the photo on the right there that's on top of the bridge from king of fighters 98 the bridge that is in that asaka stage and we just use that for b-roll um i'll give a more concrete example there's a game called aso which was one of snk's big pre-neo geo games it was a shooting game and their first office had a rice paddy next to it and the developers would pass by this rice paddy every day and they would see these kabuto shrimp they're like little little armored ovals that have a tail coming out of them and those were the inspiration for a ship in aso a boss i think

this is that building and when i first saw this building it was on a whim of some of the developers that i had gone to an izakaya with we had some drinks and then they were like yeah you want to see where we used to work because it's right around here so we walked over there it was night time and you know they were talking about this for that they you know they worked on aso in this building so i remembered yeah they were they were those shrimp right i heard there was this rumor that there were shrimp that inspired you to make this ship uh where where was that where did that all take place where was that rice paddy and they're like oh that's right where you're standing in that in what is now a parking lot and it sounds really silly because it's just a really minor detail in an older game but it feels kind of it's kind of powerful to physically be in the place where all of this stuff happened where you know you can kind of you're standing with the developers who who made these decisions and had these thoughts and uh you know you can you can go

through what they were thinking and what they were feeling under under pressure to deliver something they're like i remember this the stupid shrimp that we passed by every day um and you know obviously 20 something years later it's all paved there's no kind of rice paddies and stuff but i don't know it makes me really feel like i'm an archaeologist finding out of finding out about these things that otherwise people wouldn't have known like down the street there's a vending there used to be a vending machine that was the last one in uh in the whole area like not just osaka but i think the whole um prefecture where uh you could get this old drink that some of the people on the team still like so there would be like a queue in front of this vending machine in the morning to see who could get this drink that was only sold in this one um one vending machine for many miles i don't know it's it's it's stupid stuff but i love it

so how do you get from no access to full access you do that by building trust and respect again it was really important that i actually went there to snk i met their big boss went out for drinks with developers and things like that because the rapport builds over time when i go i plan at least three days of interviews because things that folks have forgotten might be remembered the next day it might jog their memory and those after hours beers and things are incredibly important to finding out things that people are maybe not supposed to tell you and then when they tell it to you you have to figure out okay is there a way for me to get this into the collection without causing anybody any trouble but people trust you if you do good work and if you represent them well and that gets you even further next time so as an example of this i wanted documents um like

the original versions of the scans that we got for developers to kind of rifle through in their interviews in their on-screen interviews and i knew that at the snk office there were documents in this climate-controlled room there is where they were all held along with like packages and old cartridges and and just a bunch of stuff but my main contact at snk is like there's no way you're getting in there because the guy who's in charge of it he's really you know he's a stickler for things he doesn't let people in there i've never been in there he says as somebody who works in that office every day but i was like you know just send him an email tell him that brandon is here all the way from california and uh would just like to meet him and so he's like you know he's probably not gonna work he like it doesn't matter what your name is he doesn't know a lot of western people he doesn't remember western names and stuff uh

i was like just try so he tries and the guy's like oh brandon sure i'll come on down so he comes down and uh we shake hands and he's like how you doing uh you want to come up and see what we got and i'm like yes please so uh we wound up with tons of documents these gorgeous originals for the developers to look through um you know people don't realize this but like that the logo that you can see on the on the right there it's got a little layer of um like tissue paper over it but those logos which i assumed were done with a computer you know because they look like vector graphics those were all done by hand and hand drawn hand colored i'm sure they use tools and stuff to assist them but the the samurai showdown image that's being held above it that's an oil painting this stuff is is just like they should do an art show with it it's amazing to look at

and so you know in the middle there that's adachi the director looking at these old documents and being like oh i forgot about this and it was exactly what we needed we really needed this stuff um and so much came up that we wouldn't have known about otherwise but how did this happen why did he let me up there that all comes back to this collection that you may remember from earlier so he's a package guy the guy in charge of this room he really likes well put together packages and special editions and things like that because that's what he's been kind of taking charge of for snk for all this time so in this collection there is an art book and this was put together by niponici software and with the art book it turns out there wasn't any extra budget for that but somebody needed to copy edit it um or rather i felt that someone needed to copy edit because they were just taking some stuff from the museum

and putting into the book so i was like all right i'm going to copy edit it for free and make sure it's all correct but you just have to give me credit in the book and also give credit to the layout people and whoever else work on it but what actually happened was they only credited me uh in the back of the book there's like this halo thing it's a memorial to me like i've died almost is what it looks like um and so this package guy he likes this package he looks through the art book he flips to the back and he's like brandon sheffield i like that book and so he remembered my name because of this long straight chain of events where if anything had disrupted along that chain of events we would not have gotten the documents which led to some nice moments in the video and basically that's how all of this stuff is constantly working like happy accidents and capitalizing on those happy accidents these relationships are super important

because sometimes people just don't want to talk we heard that beep which is a um it's a game store that specializes in arcade and old pc hardware stuff we heard that they had some snk games that we didn't have access to and the manager told us to come over whenever we wanted and check it out so when i arrived nobody wanted to talk to me they thought maybe i had been talking to the wrong beep twitter account they didn't know what i was talking about they didn't know what i was asking for they just had no idea why i was there and they were like please go i still love beep no shade on them but they generally shooed me out of the store after i had gone 300 miles to get there from osaka but you know you win some you lose some uh so i want to dive a little deeper into this archaeology thing and take you with me on three of my archaeological journeys here so this is space micon kit which is part of the micon kit series of games

of their like brick breakers similar to breakout and they're some of the earliest games that snk ever made definitely the earliest ones they put their name on all we had was two flyers these two flyers we'd never seen the machine we'd never played it we'd never met anyone who had but another preservation organization told us we might be able to find it in a warehouse way out in tatsuno which is really in the middle of nowhere so i knew it was time to take a trip i started in tokyo i was actually staying there with my friend jake kazdale from 17 bit by the way i don't live in japan so i have to capitalize on every opportunity i get when i get out there i just it's like okay i'm here i gotta go so i started in kyoto and had to take a local train a bullet train and a charter bus to get to this place you can see my general route here tatsuno is very far away very small there's actually a bigger tatsuno that

everyone assumed i was trying to go to when i would ask questions you can also see i've circled tokyo on the right there that's how far it is away from that as well it's far so first two trains to nagoya missed my bus by five minutes had to wait an hour and a half didn't have time to go to the book off really disappointing i got on the bus and rode for hours across some real countryside japan and i saw this incredibly spooky rundown school that you see on the right it's like straight out of a horror film it was amazing made a quick stop at the bus mandated souvenir location and then i arrived in tatsuno population 10 000 which for japan is incredibly small and the proprietor of this warehouse we were trying to get to picked me up in his car and at first i was like how's he even gonna know who i am how will he know to look for me but then i remembered i'm the white guy the only white guy in this town um so we drove to the warehouse and

basically every time i rounded a corner i felt like i was in a period different period film is pretty amazing place and then we arrive here takai shokai run by takaisan who has been doing this since his 20s he has one assistant that you can see in the back he's in his 60s now he's been doing it basically since since the 70s is that longer than 40 years anyway um even here i had to build rapport it took a couple of hours of conversation and convincing and a letter from that i had brought from snk like a physical letter that was signed before i could go back and check out what he had on offer every time i'd be like so you got that thing he'd be like let's talk some more first so you know i kind of talked to him about how important it was that he was that he had all these games that he was preserving him them i actually didn't realize it quite how much he had and how important what he was doing was until later but you know eventually we got to where

he said i could come and check stuff out so after all this did he indeed have space mike on he sure did i got to play it i got to see how it worked everything and so many things that we assumed about this game were wrong and it was absolutely vital that i played this not only did he have space mike on he had tons of other well at least four other snk games that we didn't know very much about on the bottom right he's showing me a game called majon gakuen nobody knows what this game is there was almost no information on the internet before i played it there were rumors that it was a strip majon game but actually it was just totally tame not very exciting regular old mahjong but there were some critical things that we learned about it from being able to play it and see it there on the left here he's got a complete set of data east deco arcade system um cartridges the tapes actually that were given to him by the owner uh the former owner owner of data east

it's just he has a lot of stuff this is just one small view of what he's got in fact he has drawers for every arcade game he's aware ever existed in japan if he's got the board it's in the drawer if he doesn't he's still got a drawer ready for it in case he gets it later he has whatever flyers he's he's been able to acquire in that drawer it's it's a fantastic resource all of this led to just a few sentences about four games in the collection but with space mike on as an example we thought it wouldn't have a dumpable cbu and would just be a collection of circuits and transistors like other early arcade games we also thought it would have a unique connection like so many games in like 1979 had but all of this was wrong it's regular jamma it has a cpu that could be dumped and preserved we couldn't dump the game within the confines of this collection but without this trip every piece of information we had about that and three other games would have been incorrect and also now we know

space my con can be dumped in the future so it was absolutely worth it let's do some more flat flat-footed detective work so in the 70s there was a popular song called yosaku about the life the difficult life of a woodcutter this song was so popular that several companies made arcade games about it i didn't know exactly how many but i knew there were several and including snk they made one now this game has never been dumped and i was determined to find it so to find out how many games there were let's go back to takai shokai's drawers i asked him how many yosaku games were made and he's like let's go see so we go up there he brings me to the drawers one two three four five there's five awesome uh like that information in itself is cool he didn't have the board but he did have a flyer and i noticed some writing on the back so i have to check it out and it turns out the game was so unpopular and it lasted

there for such a short time that a game center employee wrote instructions for installing another game onto it before throwing it away they were basically just using it as scratch paper and after he tossed it takaisan salvaged it and it turns out actually that's how he gets a lot of got a lot of his flyers he would just get whatever they were throwing away and just keep it it was super important that he had that foresight 40-something years ago later i'm in osaka in an area called shinsekai with my friend diamond fight and diamond says hey you want to check out this arcade that's only open twice per month and obviously that is exactly what i want to do so we go to kinako which i did not get a good front picture of sorry it's a mostly western oriented vintage game arcade which wasn't that exciting to me but since they have so many older games i thought they might know about yosaku so i asked and they're like oh the woodchopping game that's promising uh he's like sure uh two months ago i

saw it down at zarigani but i think it's gone now so this is exciting because zarigani is an arcade that is in walking distance in shinsekai and so we went there there's no yosaku inside unfortunately but we predicted that but the real unfortunate thing is it's an unstaffed arcade so there's nobody to even ask about this diamond and i walked to all the other arcades in the area and asked about it and uh after by the time that shady dude in a smoke-filled strip mahjong themed den said listen buddy we don't all talk to each other i realized i'd kind of hit a wall and should maybe maybe just leave it alone for a little bit i asked diamond to check up on the place and see whether he could find a staff member since he lives in osaka but he never found one later back home i managed to find someone on twitter who was documenting or trying to document every game that came through zadigani so i got in touch with them and

found out that unfortunately it was never snk zyosaku at all it was the one by wing and the fact is they're all about chopping wood so it's no wonder the guy in the first arcade got confused anyway um so there's no way to play osaku that we know you can play a pirate knockoff which is on the epoch cassette vision or you can play an official snk remake which is incredibly hidden in this wild way where if you take the new geopocket color game king of fighters battle to paradise and put it into a black and white neo-geo pocket it will launch a hidden remake of yosaku which is bizarre but there it is takai-san does not believe there's a single board left in japan but then that screenshot that i have in the upper left that is taken from a youtube video somebody owns this thing uh and they won't tell me who they are or what it is how they have

it so unfortunately this is where the trail ends for me because um snk 40th is out and without official backing i can't get permission to get these games but maybe someone else can follow my trail and find it so the search for yosaku was a failure but uh in between those failures sometimes you find something totally amazing um this is koji takaya the director of samurai showdown five and six as well as arcana heart and a bunch of other big fighting games i got to interview him during the making of the samurai showdown collection and while we were talking my friend from snk and i got a notion to ask about akaspi that was the nickname given this mysterious version of samurai showdown 5 that had a red logo and there's a what i'm showing here is a website that was dedicated to figuring out what this was because it was basically legendary for 15 plus years it was on location tests

for only a few hours and almost nothing was known about it and there were only these six shaky screenshots so we asked takaisan what is this thing have you heard of this thing and he looks kind of shifty but we pressed you know i have an snk person by my side who's saying it's okay and so we start talking about it turns out it was samurai showdown 5 khan zenbon or perfect edition a complete but unreleased samurai showdown game which had been pulled after those few hours of location test the short version of the story is snk usa commissioned it without permission from japan and japan was going through all these company shifts right then between otters and playmore and trying to get back to snk again anyway we asked if he had it and uh weeks later we get this turns out one of takaya's co-workers had it on an old dusty hard drive this is him playing it

to confirm that it is indeed the final rom you can see the red logo there which is why it was called akaspi red samurai spirits so we got it and we put it in the collection and now 15 years later the final completed official snk neo geo game has been released this is a game that in the grand scheme of things nobody even knew existed or they knew that something existed but they didn't know what it was and we were able to find this and release it and not only that we're able to translate it translate the story which is one of the main new things about it it becomes this link between samurai showdown five and six that just was gone forever otherwise and digital eclipse with snk's blessing added the word perfect to the to the title screen which is what they intended to do upon release anyway but that's a whole conversation for another time but this kind of thing is the holy grail of game archaeology it's something that i hope i can keep doing for a long time this is

exactly what we want out of this kind of preservation and museum-oriented curation of of games and and bringing that to people that wouldn't be able to see it otherwise but obviously it's not that easy because finding and preserving these games takes a lot of time and often fails as you have seen through my trials or it succeeds through luck and perseverance or you know it's all kinds of things basically you need to get people to talk about things they're not supposed to have or know about then get permission from the rights holder to get them to release those things or info to you and that's not even getting to the actual preservation or presentation part which is not what i handle and that's what the rest of the whole team does and that's a whole other situation and unfortunately without funding behind a collection like one of these ones that i've worked on there's no way to justify rights holders letting you have this information so you just get stuck a lot

for example we don't have the data for the famicom version of guevara and or aka guerrilla war we know where it is there it is those are the disks but we can't get it because we don't have an official way to do it there's an unreleased super famicom rpg that i found out about it stars a popular character from a big company a former employee has the data but not even the current employees of that company remembered that this game existed maybe very few people knew it existed at all it's not like there's a finished rom or anything but there's map data there's illustrations there's tons of pre-production work but there's no funding so we can't get it so to kind of wrap this up what can you do to help developers save everything steal important things from work keep them give them to somebody later uh down

donate to the video game history foundation gamehistory.org and importantly for us buy these collections and convince companies that they should make more of them i really hope that digital eclipse can keep bringing these games to light for years to come and the only way that that will happen is if these games do well and if we can make more of them and if you you know like pressure konami to be like let brandon and digital eclipse make a hudson collection i want to make that till snk you want a neo geopocket collection i want to make that um so that's what would help the most and if you want to check out more stuff from me we just had a game called gunsport which just came out on stadia if you want to check that out my podcast insert credit if you want to hear more stories like these and it's also with tim rogers and frank zafaldi you can talk to me on our forums uh follow me on twitter and that's it thanks very much