Yoshiki Okamoto

History

Four decades after Gyruss reached arcades, Yoshiki Okamoto sat down in front of a camera to correct the spelling of another man’s name. The main programmer was a man named Arima. One character of that name has been printed wrong, he says, and the character it should be is 俊. Okamoto was at Konami when the game shipped in 1983, working the planning and graphics side.

Gyruss began with a colleague. A senior of his loved Galaga and told him that games of that shape were selling everywhere; if he fixed the parts he personally disliked, he could build one he would want to play himself. He calls this the 95% rule. In Japan the game underperformed. The tabletop cabinets common in Japanese arcades sat the player looking down at a game built around depth. What rescued it, he says, was an order from Konami’s founder Kagemasa Kozuki: use an uptempo electronic arrangement of classical music. It shames him a little to explain the hit that way.

Time Pilot and Gyruss were enough to move him to Capcom. A playtest there ran two weeks to a month, sometimes two months. Daily takings were counted not in yen but in credits, so that a 50-yen cabinet and a 100-yen cabinet could be compared honestly. The team posted young designers in the arcade to watch, and called it a stakeout. The moment a stranger stopped wanting to continue is what the next revision was built from.

Street Fighter Alpha was built on CPS1 hardware while CPS2 already existed. The graphics took the hit, and in his own words they made an NES-level game when the SNES level was the standard. Darkstalkers he considered a success until he was called into the office of Capcom’s president, Tsujimoto, expecting praise, and was asked instead why it had failed. The announcement that Resident Evil would be made exclusively for Nintendo hardware ended with a summons of a different kind — a private room at an expensive Italian restaurant in Shibuya, where Sony’s Ken Kutaragi was waiting, and where the food went untouched.

He is now the primary source for his own history. Most of what is written about the arcade era was assembled long afterward by people who were not standing in the room. He was, and he is still correcting the transcript.