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One of Yamada’s earliest memories working on the hardware was taking a sample 3D model that an artist at Namco had made as a test - a version of Cammy from the Street Fighter series - and getting it to work on PlayStation.
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Yamada spent time carrying his work PC from his office at Namco in Yokohama to Sony’s office in Aoyama every day in order to take notes and study the new hardware, then report back to his co-workers.Īround that same time, he says, Namco had an interest in developing a 3D fighting game similar to Virtua Fighter, and the timing lined up almost perfectly with Sony’s plans for the PlayStation. “When I saw the console itself, I thought people would fall in love with it,” he says. That turned out to be Sony’s PlayStation, and Yamada was skeptical until he saw it in person. “Then I heard a rumor something better was coming.” “I tested it out, but it wasn’t that great,” he says. When going home, I would say that I needed to go pick up new clothes, to which I would be asked if it wasn’t just to go sleep.” “At that point, we were all told not to go home without authorization, even on weekends. For it, we recorded rare interviews with Yamada discussing the early days of Tekken and PlayStation, so we pulled together some of his best memories and anecdotes - some cut from the video - below.Īs it turns out, pretty much everything related to Tekken in those days happened at the last minute. In a 2017 interview with Sony’s PlayStation Blog, Harada described Yamada as “a true genius in the 1980s and ’90s,” saying his work inspired PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi.Įarlier today, Polygon posted Memories of Play, a documentary looking back on the original PlayStation for its 25th anniversary. As the main programmer on the first three Tekken games, Masanori Yamada was one of the people responsible for making the early Tekken games run well in arcades - and run at all on PlayStation. Yet another key staffer who stayed hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention. One of those who stayed, Katsuhiro Harada, took over the franchise, gave himself the title “game director,” and went on to become not only the face of Tekken, but an executive overseeing large swaths of Bandai Namco’s lineup. So, much of the Tekken team left, some forming a studio called DreamFactory and developing games such as Tobal No. There were only so many people who had experience developing 3D fighting games at that point, after all, and games like Virtua Fighter and even Toshinden were exploding in popularity. While working on Tekken 2 in 1995, the development team at Namco found itself in high demand.