Building a Gaming Empire In 1984

Despite constantly getting embarrassed whenever he went up against Ethan, Sam was still an old veteran of the gaming industry. In terms of pure skill, he was absolutely among the top tiers.

The only reason he kept losing was because every new trick Ethan came up with was so outrageous that it completely prevented him from playing normally.

The two controlled their characters carefully, adjusting spacing as they waited for the other side to reveal an opening.

A faint smile crept onto Sam's lips. He knew Ethan's fighting style very well. If he closed the distance and acted like he was going to take the initiative, Ethan would definitely throw out a Flash Kick as a defensive option. That was the opportunity he was looking for.

The startup and input time of a Flash Kick would be enough for him to interrupt it with an even faster move. Ethan had never seen the new techniques he'd learned. So, all he had to do was bait out the Flash Kick.

Sam cautiously stepped forward, compressing the distance while maintaining the appearance of a neutral footsies game. Then, the instant the spacing reached an extremely dangerous range, he suddenly attacked.

He yanked the stick forward and rushed toward Ethan. He was waiting… waiting for the tiny movement that would inevitably occur when Ethan inputs a Flash Kick.

Waiting for the sound of the button press.

Click.

The button sound arrived exactly as expected and Sam was already prepared to react. But the moment the sound rang out, Ethan's Flash Kick had already come out and blasted him into the air.

"...?"

How fast was that?

From the moment Ethan pressed the button to the Flash Kick appearing, it couldn't have been more than five frames. That was already beyond the limits of normal human reaction speed.

Sam simply let go of the controller and stared at the Hitbox in Ethan's hands. It had to be that thing.

"Instant Flash Kicks? How is anyone supposed to play against that?"

They said there were no shortcuts to success. Apparently, no one had met this thing.

"Can it get any more ridiculous than this?"

"It actually can."

"...?"

Seeing Ethan's hand moving toward the switch labeled TURBO, Sam hurriedly stopped him.

"Forget it, forget it. What even is that thing?"

"Hitbox. Our new peripheral."

Ethan waved the device around proudly.

"We're hosting a tournament soon, right? Since we don't have sponsors yet, we'll just sponsor ourselves."

"You're planning to let players use that in competition? That's basically cheating!"

To anyone accustomed to traditional arcade sticks, this thing was a dimensionality-reduction weapon.

More precise inputs and faster inputs. Whether for charge characters or motion-input characters, it was a revolutionary improvement.

"That's what different regulations are for."

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Ethan flipped the switch in the upper-left corner back to L Mode, the Last Input Priority setting.

"We can adjust the rules depending on the tournament format." Then he shrugged. "Besides, if everyone has it, then nobody has it."

With the complete source code of Street Fighter available, developing The King of Fighters hadn't actually taken much time on the gameplay side. Once all the new systems and mechanics had been adjusted, only one task remained: Filling the game with content.

Unfortunately, that was where Ethan ran into another limitation, storage capacity.

"Looks like there's no getting around this problem after all."

The first King of Fighters game, KOF '94, might have been the debut entry of the franchise, but it was far from SNK's first game. In a sense, The King of Fighters was SNK's own version of an all-star crossover.

Characters from Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Ikari Warriors, Psycho Soldier, and numerous other SNK titles gathered together to create one of the greatest classics in fighting game history.

But that also meant the roster was absurdly large. After all, KOF '94 originally ran on hardware from an entirely different era. By comparison, the current technology available to them was practically primitive. Trying to recreate all those characters with their present storage limitations was proving nearly impossible.

"The Japan Team definitely can't be cut. Kyo Kusanagi's flashy combos and Daimon's throws are iconic."

"The Fatal Fury Team stays too."

"The American Team is non-negotiable."

"The Psycho Soldier Team can't go either..."

After going through the roster repeatedly, Ethan came to a frustrating realization. Every team had its own unique appeal, so none of them were easy to remove.

"If that's the case..." He sighed. "The only option left is brute-forcing it."

Turning toward Gerald, he asked, "Gerald, do we currently have any way to store twenty megabytes of data?"

"Pffft!"

Gerald sprayed coffee straight out of his mouth. The liquid shot into his nose, making him cough violently.

"How much?!"

"Twenty megabytes."

Ethan paused.

"Well... seventeen megabytes, technically."

"..."

"What?"

"Seventeen."

"..."

"Are you building a rocket or something?!"

Even the usually mild-mannered Gerald couldn't stop himself from swearing. In an era where most games were under 64 KB, seventeen megabytes was an astronomical figure.

Megabyte-scale storage did exist. But only in laboratories and commercial systems, not in consumer products and video games were very much a consumer market.

Gerald walked over to the Street Fighter arcade cabinet and slapped the side of it.

"See this machine?"

"The entire retail price of this arcade cabinet, the whole thing, is barely enough to buy a ten-megabyte hard drive."

Research-grade hard drives were simply beyond the reach of ordinary consumers. Who would spend over a thousand dollars just to buy a game?

Even for arcades, that kind of cost was absurd.

"Ethan, even if we somehow built it regardless of cost, it'd end up as nothing more than a museum exhibit."

"Hmm..."

Sam, who had been listening nearby, wandered over curiously.

"What's going on? Too many characters?"

"Yeah."

Ethan handed over a roster spreadsheet.

"I'm organizing KOF around teams, but it looks like we won't be able to fit everyone in."

Sam scratched his head. Then his eyes suddenly lit up.

"I've got an idea."

"No clue if it'll work, though. I'm not exactly Gerald."

"Let's hear it."

Sam immediately ran over to a NovaBox and grabbed two Pokémon cartridges.

"Different versions."

"Different versions with different characters."

Ethan's eyes brightened for a moment before he shook his head. The idea sounded reasonable, but there was a major problem.

"It won't work."

"Players need to freely mix and match characters in versus mode."

"If we want every character to be able to fight every other character, how many versions would we need?"

"No, no, that's not what I mean." Sam waved his hands. "I'm saying we let the console load two cartridges at the same time."

He held up one cartridge, "This one contains the main game and the default roster," then he raised the second, "and this one contains character expansion packs."

"..."

Ethan froze.

"...?"

"This is basically DLC..."

He blinked, then blinked again and the more he thought about it, the more it actually seemed possible.

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