deathmtn

My 11:30 pm connecting flight out of Los Angeles International Airport was delayed by 24 hours, forcing me to rest in the airport. All my bags were checked, so I had no luggage or spare clothes available. Here's where I tried sleeping and how it went.

Mighty Bomb Jack, the first game I directed after transferring from sales to the development department, was a hit, and so I'd earned the trust of the president, which in turn meant he felt comfortable throwing curveballs my way whenever they presented themselves. One day, I was summoned to his office once more:

"Ninjas are in vogue in America right now, so make a ninja game! Listen up, I want something that goes ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-taaaaaaaa!"

At that moment, I had mental flashes of a ninja kicking their way up a wall, with a ta-ta-ta-taaaa!-esque tempo. Soon after that meeting, I ordered a ninja magazine from America; that magazine made me realize that the American image of a ninja sat somewhere between sorcery and kung fu, as their merchandise pages featured things like nunchaku alongside shuriken and kusarigama.

…

The game's maps were designed on Tecmo's specialized map paper. For each stage, we'd first decide the total number of horizontal screens for that stage, and then draw the terrain for each screen, with a focus on that up-to-down-to-up stage pathing, as well as maintaining a balance between the visual appeal of the terrain vs. the difficulty of traversal.

Once the terrain was laid out, I decided which enemies would appear and when/where, through the use of a homemade viewfinder: I created a scale out of cardboard with a screen-sized window cut out of the center, which could be slid around the paper map to simulate scrolling. Ryu, the player-character, is locked to the center of the screen, and thus the center of the scale, making it easy to visualize which part of the screen would be visible to the player at any given time.

By arranging these tilemaps, it would be possible to create the kinds of backgrounds we were after, and so the programmer was considerate enough to create a "construction mode": pressing the Start button during the game would bring up a 32x32 cursor, which could be moved with the D-pad and cycled in order by pressing A+Up/Down. Once you'd gone though this process and assembled a stage layout, you could press Start once more and Ryu would drop down from the top of the stage, allowing you to test your layout right then and there, which was extremely convenient. (The collision data for the terrain was baked into the 32x32 tilemap.)

By the way, the international title is "NINJA外伝", with "外伝" written as kanji and "GAIDEN" rendered as furigana. That was another idea that came down from the president: "Americans love kanji!".

…

To ensure this, I thought it important to connect these scenes to the players' emotions; players' excitement is at its highest immediately upon buying a game, and maintaining their excitement is crucial.

I'd only been at the company for around five years at that point, so we talked about how we should both keep giving it our all!

In one swift action, faintly reminiscent of a mob boss demanding answers, Otsuka Chimyou picked me up by my thighs and dangled me off a sheer cliff. It occurred to me that, if his grip had failed, or if the hemp rope he had knotted around my torso slipped, the landscape far beneath me might be the last thing I would see. A forest of cypress and cedar, the treetops swaying in the breeze. A buzzard turning on the thermals. A bead of sweat that dropped from my brow into thin air.
“Do you promise to respect your family?” Otsuka screamed, lurching forward, pretending to drop me. “Yes”
“Do you promise to apply yourself to your career?” he continued, repeating the feint. “Yes” I shouted louder.
His tone remained threatening: “Are you a big boy?’

…

While a great deal is obscure about Shugendō, at its root is a simple premise: that participants (also known as yamabushi) derive power by spending time in the presence of holy mountains. There they will face hardships — tests of courage, perilous climbs or spells without sleep, food and water — which mean they grow in stature or even acquire magical powers.