[MM#03] The Job of Making Games (Patreon)

Capcom is now a long-established game company. Even before the Famicom boom, they were already developing their own digital games, installing them on arcade boards, and selling them to game centers across the country. Game development is a collaborative process involving directors, programmers, graphic designers, and sound composers, who all work based on a shared design document.

Naturally, the graphics were pixel art. Designers would input visuals one pixel at a time by typing them in.

The rocks and trees drawn in that 2D pixel art were expressed in a dimensional, multicolored gradient style. Whether it was a single character or part of a background scene, finishing them required tremendous time and effort.

When I joined the company, the arcade game Ghosts ’n Goblins was nearing its release. This action game was groundbreaking in every aspect: its beautiful graphics that stood apart from previous titles, its constant flow of charming enemy characters, and its unforgettable music.

Until then, pixel-drawn images—whether fighter jets or people—were largely symbolic representations. But Ghosts ’n Goblins used pixel colors and techniques to render lines and shapes with remarkable realism.

The Ghosts ’n Goblins graphic design team worked on the same floor as me, and they were glued to their monitors late into the night, often sleeping at the office to push through the final crunch. To be honest, seeing that made me think, “This is a tough job,” and I felt both a little shocked and uneasy. I had already started contributing to a project myself, drawing art, so this wasn’t someone else’s problem.

As Ghosts ’n Goblins neared completion, it was time for its location test. A location test is when a pre-release version of the game is placed at a partner game center and run as if it were a finished product. Developers monitor this period to track income (the coins inserted), playtime, and other data for final gameplay balancing.

Since the Ghosts ’n Goblins team was in a different department, I wasn’t involved in the test, but I would swing by the location after work to observe. No matter when I visited, there were always people crowding around the cabinet, marveling at the gorgeous visuals.

It wasn’t my work, but seeing the company’s product being well received by customers and gaining popularity made me feel proud. It was the first time I truly felt a connection with the players. Voices of wonder at the beautiful artwork, the excitement of people deeply engaged in play—they echoed through the dimly lit arcade. Faces, lit up by the glow of the screen, smiled around the tabletop cabinet.

But just as the game was nearing completion, trouble began brewing. The development room started receiving calls every day. The team became increasingly busy, and even the graphic designers who had mostly wrapped up their work were back to working frantically.

I didn’t know the exact details, but apparently the game’s income at the test site was unexpectedly low, and customer numbers had started to fall rapidly. The culprit seemed to be the game’s difficulty. It was simply too hard.

The calls were coming from a sales rep in the field. They were trying to brainstorm solutions and asking the development team for changes, but minor adjustments weren’t enough to reduce the difficulty.

Beautiful graphics. Exciting music. Simple two-button controls. Players were drawn in by all of it and would happily insert a coin to give the game a try. But the game was so hard that no one could progress; no matter how they tried, the screen wouldn’t advance. Eventually, they would give up and just watch. And over time, even the number of spectators dwindled.

I heard Director F, the head of the team, raising his voice during one of those calls from the sales department. When he got off the phone, what he told the team left us stunned:

“They want us to program a way for players to start from stage 2 or 3 because people can’t get past the early levels.”

The idea was to flip a switch on the arcade board to change the starting stage once player numbers dropped. It was no wonder Director F got angry—even I, a new hire with little understanding of game development, could grasp how wrong this was.

Games have stories, and the stages are built to support that structure. Enemies and obstacles are designed to gradually ease players into the challenge. To suddenly have people start midway just because the early stages are hard? That was too much. It would ruin both the narrative and the player experience.

Everyone on the team was disheartened by such an unreasonable demand; it completely disregarded the creators’ intent. Their faces showed the exhaustion of having thought their work was done, only for a new struggle to begin.

Later, they even tried increasing the number of player lives per credit from three to five, then to eight—but it still wasn’t enough to fix the problem.

Up until then, I had been focused solely on drawing pixel art and hadn’t given much thought to the mechanics of game design. But this intense adjustment period for Ghosts ’n Goblins taught me what it really means to make a game. What shocked me most was the unreasonable way the sales department was pushing for changes. I was just a clueless newcomer, but even I thought, “These requests sound like they’re coming from amateurs.”

And yet, despite all this, the arcade was still packed with people. At the center of it all was the Ghosts ’n Goblins cabinet. Even when a player lost and left their seat, no one else would sit down. It was so popular — and yet…

Without realizing it, I had started thinking about games constantly. What makes a game fun? What makes a game good? I didn’t have the answers at the time. But even so, something about it filled me with a restless, burning sense of excitement.