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In November of 1993, Sega took a second stab at the 3-D
fighting game market. Employing its Model 1 arcade flat-shaded polygon
board, which had been developed in conjunction with General Electric and
used in 1992's
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"The Genesis clearly could not
handle a translation of Virtua Fighter, and there was no guarantee
that the game was even popular enough to risk releasing as a
dumbed-down port on the old 16-bit hardware."
| hit driving game Virtua
Racing, Sega's AM2 division created the first polygonal martial arts game,
Virtua Fighter. The concept was fresh: PC game companies had released
polygonal sporting games such as 4-D Boxing and adventure games such as
Alone in the Dark, but no one had created a 3-D one-on-one martial arts
game. Characters were safe bets: VF's main character Akira strongly
resembled Street Fighter's Ryu, and VF's 'cute' Chinese girl Pai strongly
took after SF2's Chun Li. This time, unlike Dark Edge, Sega decided to use
3-D for effect only: Virtua Fighter lacked "true" 3-D movement, but its
characters were full polygonal models.
The first Virtua Fighter
made only a moderate splash in Japan and the United States, arriving
shortly after the popular Super Street Fighter II and Fatal Fury Special,
but Sega was determined to make VF succeed.
Virtua Fighter
| Magazines were given
high-resolution pictures of the flat-shaded VF characters in action, and
Sega commissioned official guidebooks in both Japan and the United States
for the game. Undeniably, the game made fewer waves in America than it did
in Japan, as Mortal Kombat II was drawing away whatever crowds were
willing to ignore Super Street Fighter II, though a small number of people
were beginning to compete at Sega's game. What Sega offered was attractive
to some gamers, especially those in Japan - fewer buttons (3) to learn
than Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat (6 and 5), actual martial arts
styles rather than mystical use of fireballs, electricity, and the like,
and special moves which mostly involved simple taps on the joystick rather
than emphasizing rolling the stick, which was reserved for more advanced
techniques.
The Genesis clearly could not handle a translation of
Virtua Fighter, and there was no guarantee that the game was even popular
enough to risk releasing as a dumbed-down port on the old 16-bit hardware.
Sega's next game console, the Saturn, was underway at this point, and
Sega's AM2 division was put to work on a home translation of its moderate
arcade hit. By mid-1994 Sega was content to release translations of SNK's
Samurai Shodown and Art of Fighting in Japan for the Genesis, and Art of
Fighting alone in the United States.
Now
read Perfecting the Formula
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