Tokyo Video Game Tycoon.

Chapter 171 Street Fighter

After reviewing the current development progress of the group, Zhu Youxing discovered that the fourth group had nothing to do at the moment.

The current head of the fourth group is Ryuta Omori. He is a pragmatic person who will develop the game step by step according to the direction planned by Takeyusei. He will not do anything like creating or developing his own game. He is an honest and obedient person.

This kind of person just happens to fit the plan for the next game that Zhu Youxing is going to make.

After everyone finished reporting, he spoke up: "Omori, your group doesn't have any new game projects planned for the time being, right?"

Upon hearing Takeyusei's words, Ryuta Omori, who had been sitting quietly, immediately nodded and said, "That's right. We plan to conduct a two-day creative development period first, and then gather the employees' ideas and submit them to you, the president, for review."

Takeyusei said, "That's perfect. I have a game idea right now. You can lead the team and take charge. Oh, and bring one more person to help you out, that's Tsukino Aya."

"Tsukino Aya-senpai?" Omori Ryuta was somewhat surprised.

Aya Tsukino stopped visiting other game development teams a few months ago and instead focused on working as a network maintenance consultant and a programmer's troubleshooting consultant within the company.

Some people were curious and wanted to find out what Aya Tsukino had been doing lately. All they knew was that Aya Tsukino seemed to want to develop a game on her own, but even the president didn't know what it was. This became a topic of discussion among many employees.

Thanks to the philosophy that Zhuyouxing has always upheld—that those with ability should rise to the top—many highly capable women in the company have not suffered any discrimination.

If a female employee is not capable enough, it's normal for her to be looked down upon, and no one can say anything about it. However, if you are clearly less capable than a certain woman, yet still discriminate against some women in the company, then Zhu Youxing will not be so polite.

He would not hesitate to bench the person and make them reflect on their actions. If they were still not satisfied, they should get out of the company as soon as possible. Zhu Youxing never hesitated to do this.

Now, Aya Tsukino is the most skilled person in the company in terms of programming and network maintenance, and no one dares to underestimate her.

Furthermore, there have been recent rumors that Aya Tsukino may be the president's apprentice. They often see the president personally teaching Aya Tsukino how to use her imagination to create games. In the past, Yusei Takenaka never talked about these things in his game creation classes, as if they were a closely guarded secret.

Many game developers long to hear a lecture by Takeyusei, especially one on such core issues, but so far it seems that only Tsukino Aya has had this honor.

As the president's disciple, no one dared to question Tsukino Aya's title.

Zhu Youxing nodded: "She had some insights during the game's development process that could help speed up the game's development. I plan to include this game as a launch title when the SFC is officially released."

"President, could you please tell me the specific name of this game? If it doesn't have a name, what genre is it?"

"I already have a good name for this game: Street Fighter."

Zhu Youxing turned on the projector, and a game logo appeared: Street Fighter.

Street Fighter was a fighting game that swept the world in its predecessor, Takeyusei. Other games with similar fame include King of Fighters and Tekken, but Street Fighter was significantly more popular worldwide.

One important factor is that Street Fighter's style is significantly more Westernized.

Other fighting games, on the other hand, are more closely related to Asian culture in style, which makes them less likely to resonate with players in the world's largest video game market than Street Fighter.

At the same time, there is an even more important point, which is Capcom's mastery of action game design.

When the Super Famicom was officially released, Takeyusei had already considered the idea of ​​bringing Street Fighter to the market.

But at that time, most programmers had only been in the video game industry for a short time, so it was already quite impressive that they were making games according to their own plans.

Street Fighter, on the other hand, requires a high level of programming data accumulation and constant testing and fine-tuning over the years to achieve its best performance.

The company's programmers certainly don't have that ability now.

To Zhu Youxing's surprise, an unexpected person appeared at this time.

Aya Tsukino.

Originally, Aya Tsukino just wanted to develop what she considered to be the best game.

So she devoted herself to learning from Zhu Youxing and constantly improved her game-making skills.

Then, she actually came up with a brilliant idea.

That is to improve the animation effects of game characters.

On the Famicom, performance limitations prevented characters from performing truly fluid movements, resulting in most characters appearing quite stiff.

In this environment, Aya Tsukino is also helpless; this is a fundamental weakness.

However, the SFC is clearly different.

With relatively smooth action effects already achievable on the SFC, Ayaya Tsukino finally developed a decent action role-playing game through his own efforts.

Unlike The Legend of Zelda, Aya Tsukino's action role-playing games are better in terms of action and special effects.

However, because she was working on it alone, and most of her time was spent repeatedly testing the motion data, she was only able to create a game that was only about two hours long.

When she showed it to Zhu Youxing, Zhu Youxing was stunned.

Unexpectedly, Aya Tsukino created a character with remarkably smooth animations all by herself. So, the data testing Aya Tsukino mentioned earlier was actually just constantly testing the character's animation effects?

It wasn't until this moment that Takeyusei felt he could start considering developing Street Fighter.

Aya Tsukino has proven with her skills that programmers today are capable of developing similar games.

However, Tsukino Aya's gaming skills were still somewhat lacking, and even with Takeyusei's constant guidance, she couldn't become capable of handling things independently within a year.

Takeyusei also realized that it was time to find a team for Tsukino Aya.

Let her go and help develop Street Fighter.

On the one hand, it will be very helpful to Aya Tsukino, allowing her to grow faster; on the other hand, it will also allow me to plan my strategy for fighting games earlier.

This type of game is a long-standing and popular category worldwide, although it has gradually become a slightly niche category in later generations. However, it still has a considerable number of fans and is a force that should not be underestimated.

Chapter 172 Conditions for Opening the US Market

If you want to open up the market in the United States, Street Fighter might actually have a surprising effect.

But in the United States, the audience for shooting, racing, and sports is clearly larger.

So, in addition to Street Fighter, Takeyusei also arranged for members of the second and third groups to go into different game development after completing the development of the next game.

Gun games can be put aside for now, until the 3D graphics engine is truly mature and their own 32-bit game console is released.

The car and the ball can be arranged first.

The Zero racing car that debuted was quite good.

A new modern racing game could be created directly from the underlying code of this game, reusing all the repetitive racing program code, which would save a lot of work. This is almost equivalent to the prototype of a game engine, saving repetitive work and time in game development.

If possible, try to get licenses from some well-known car manufacturers. On the one hand, your game can help promote the car brands, and on the other hand, your racing game can highlight the realism.

Takeyusei also directly entrusted this matter to Matsuhashi Minoru, so that she could help him complete some game development tasks after she went to the United States.

As for the ball, Zhu Youxing hardly hesitated and immediately prepared to start playing the game Street Basketball.

In the arcade scene of the past, street basketball was not only popular in the United States, but also in China.

At that time, China was experiencing a basketball craze, with those born in the 1980s and 1990s being the main audience.

If an arcade doesn't have the game Street Basketball, its customer traffic will inevitably decrease by about 10%.

In the United States, basketball is practically the national sport, second only to American football, or rugby.

The NBA is a perennial ratings hit, and while it may not be as popular as the Super Bowl, it still reigns supreme in viewership.

If there's a chance in the future, Zhuyouxing will definitely organize a rugby game.

Releasing American football and basketball games in the United States is like releasing baseball games in Japan—both are games where you can make money effortlessly.

After all the following tasks were arranged, the employees began to work intensively.

The work arranged by Takeyusei this time was quite intense, and they could clearly see that the president valued entering the US market very much.

Now that they have developed a sense of belonging to the company, they naturally have the idea of ​​making a name for themselves in the US market.

Therefore, I work even harder.

However, this kind of hard work doesn't feel tiring; on the contrary, it feels very fulfilling, as if life is full of anticipation.

During this process, Matsuhashi Minoru finally packed his bags and boarded a plane to the United States, accompanied by two of his former assistants.

Their next priority in the US is to prepare all the necessary paperwork for starting the company and to recruit more qualified programmers locally.

What Zhu Youxing found slightly regrettable was that this was a parallel world.

Otherwise, he could have directly recruited a group of top American programmers by using names he knew from his previous life.

People like John Carmack and Richard Straman.

Now, we can only rely on Matsuhashi Minoru's judgment.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the fourth game development team has already entered the development stage of Street Fighter.

First, there are the character illustrations for various characters from Street Fighter.

Now that the company has a dedicated artist, Zhu Youxing directly gathered three or four of them together to draw various character illustrations for Street Fighter.

Zhu Youxing's requirement is to be as Westernized as possible, with European and American fighters making up more than half of the numbers.

Meanwhile, for some classic characters, such as Chun-Li and Ryu, Takeyuki directly specified their appearance, while for others, the artists were allowed to draw them using their own imaginations, without deliberately pushing them towards the original Street Fighter image.

Then, Zhu Youxing started having a professional composer write the background music for Street Fighter. This process took a whole month.

Most other employees finish their work on time and leave at the designated time. At Zhuyouxing's company, he does not recommend an overtime culture. In terms of cultural and creative work, employees should be given enough rest time. During the rest period, they are also the time when their inspiration is bursting, so they can start working more energetically the next day.

However, Takeyusei himself moved into the company premises.

During the day, he tracks the progress of work with the heads of each company's teams.

In the evening, he would continue to plan the work for the next day, often working until late at night.

Since it's his own company, his own efforts will help him grow stronger.

If he were working for someone else, he probably would have quit long ago.

After a busy month, the second and third game development teams released a Bomberman game and a new dress-up game for girls, respectively. Zhu Youxing plans to develop this category in the future. It may not be making much progress yet, but Zhu Youxing is not willing to give up on the female player group easily.

Sometimes they are more generous when they are willing to spend money, but they just lack a trigger that will make them completely fall in love with video games. They just need to wait and see.

After the second and third development teams finished their research and development work, they all entered into the plans arranged by Zhu Youxing.

The second group was responsible for a realistic racing game, which was directly named: Need for Speed.

Although the first Need for Speed ​​game was actually released after the advent of 3D games, the Super Famicom can now achieve similar graphics, although it is indeed a little bad. But that doesn't matter, since people in this world don't know anything about Need for Speed ​​anyway, so I'll just reserve the spot for the name.

As for the issue of car brand licensing, the negotiations between Minoru Matsuhashi and the United States did not go smoothly.

Americans had absolutely no understanding of Japanese video games, and they couldn't accept free licensing at all. Later, Takeyusei said that they could talk about licensing for a fee.

However, those American car manufacturers were asking for exorbitant prices, with car brand licensing starting at at least five million US dollars. They also needed to publicly announce the deal to attract other similar game companies to bid, with the highest bidder winning. This led Zhuyouxing to give up directly.