Kenzo Tsujimoto's life is truly legendary, starting from renting arcade boards, machines, and selling related motor parts, until he created the Capcom game empire, which is definitely not something that ordinary people can do.

The right time, place and people, as well as the personal courage of the leader, can be said to be indispensable.

In the early days of .M's founding, the development of related businesses was indeed as Tsujimoto Kenzo had predicted, and seeing this situation, he simply suspended Tsuji's local construction business and went all out to run this new industry. Soon after, Kenzo Tsujimoto happened to hear that TAITO was eager to find a partner for OEM production because of its own productivity, which was far from being able to meet the market demand for "Space Invaders", and he decided that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime deal, so he actively approached TAITO.

It's just that this is a big business, and with Capcom's strength at that time, it is not easy to get involved completely, and if it is not done well, it is very likely that this emerging company will be completely finished.

Out of financial and technical considerations, Kenzo Tsujimoto lobbied a number of investors to participate in the project, and the motor and liquid crystal equipment manufacturing company participated in the project. M became the largest shareholder, joined by Yoshihiko Takado, a wealthy businessman who later founded the New Fuso Project (SNK). Their investment quickly paid off handsomely, and they recouped their entire investment that year, with cumulative sales exceeding 500 million yen and a profit margin of more than 15% the following year.

After 1982, Co., Ltd. M changed its name to IREM after expanding its capital, and as the Space Invaders craze had faded, Shinkai began to plan to develop its own arcade games, but shortly thereafter there was a serious internal split in IREM. At that time, for the purpose of facilitating their own personal interests in the company's business,Kenzo Tsujimoto secretly established a limited company サンビ,Takado Yoshihiko also set up a new Fuso project on his own,The result of the two secretly wrestling is of course Tsujimoto, who holds the important position of president, has the upper hand,Takado was angry and convened an emergency shareholders' meeting to accuse Tsujimoto of misappropriating the company's arcade board for his own personal gain,Tsujimoto Kenzo resigned as IREM president in the summer of 1983 and declared independence,Takado Yoshihiko was appointed as the new president by the major shareholder ナナオ。

The grievances between Kenzo Tsujimoto and Yoshihiko Takado,To be honest,Due to the age and the silence of both sides,It has long become verifiable,But what is certain is,These two people did have a deep hatred because of this,In the future development of Capcom and SNK,There have been many targeted malicious poaching incidents,Such a lingering entanglement dispute can be regarded as an anecdote in the Fuso game industry。

After leaving IREM, Kenzo Tsujimoto founded Capcom, and a generation of game empires began to emerge. However, at this time, Capcom could only be regarded as a younger brother in the game industry, and there were less than 10 regular employees, so he was unable to carry out large-scale game development work, so Kenzo Tsujimoto advertised in major newspapers to recruit game-related technicians with high salaries.

You know, at the beginning of 1983, the Fuso gaming industry was in the midst of a period of chaos after the collapse of Atari.

The so-called Atari collapse refers to the fact that Atari's parent company, Warner, spent 6 weeks making "ET the Extra-Terrestrial", the most famous IP bad work in history. During the Christmas season of 1982, E.T. Aliens sold 150W copies, and Atari prepared 4 million copies. The extra 250W cartridges ended up in the Alamogordo Junk Town, New Mexico, along with some other unsellable inventory. Under the policy of "quantity over quality" implemented by Atari, a game hardware & software manufacturer at that time, nearly 10,000 games appeared on the Chinese market within a year.

The large number of homogeneous garbage games completely lost the confidence of players in the United States, and eventually led to the market collapse at Christmas Day in 1982. In the four years since then, no one in the United States has dared to talk about the game industry, and the local game console market has completely disappeared. The Fuso market, which is closely connected to the United States market, was also impressed, and the direct result was that the game industry showed a bleak and desolate scene of decay after losing a strong market leader, when the New York Times and Nikkei newspaper columns invariably declared that the short-lived video game entertainment market was at the end of the road, and many famous game manufacturers began to survive the long "harsh winter" through large-scale layoffs and salary cuts.

According to statistics at the time, Konami in Kobe alone cut more than a quarter of its employees that year.

It can be seen how bleak the Fuso game industry was at that time.

It was in this situation that Capcom's recruitment was so aggressive at the time when major game developers in Fuso were laying off their employees one after another, which at the time could be said to have caused a strong response from society and the industry. At a time when everyone is not optimistic, or even declining, Capcom, Kenzo Tsujimoto firmly believes that the video game industry is far from the end, and that as long as enough games are developed to make a major breakthrough. When he was still working at IREM and holding shares, there were too many things involved in the division of shares, so he couldn't carry out it at all, and many of the plans in his mind could not be implemented. Now, he's out on his own, and that's when he's really making a big impact.

Needless to say, after a simple process of plagiarism, competition, and all sorts of vicious rivalries with IREM, Street Fighter finally came out.

As soon as it came out, Street Fighter immediately showed his status as a hegemon.

Of course, this was not the case at first, the original "Street Fighter" was not shocked when it was launched in Fuso, at that time the vast majority of players' eyes were focused on the FC console stacked by the masterpiece, and the rare fighting game naturally could not attract attention, and in the same year, the game became Capcom's first PC-E work to participate in the NEC, which was also the first game of PC-E to use 20Mb large capacity, compared to the FC console at that time, the PC-E version of "Street Fighter" With a large character size and FM sound effects that are close to the arcade version, the extremely poor handling dooms the game to a dismal end.

But this is not the end, in 1988, after nearly two years and about 1 billion yen of the new substrate CPS1 was finally developed, the substrate used the latest Motorola 16-bit CPU 68000, smooth movement of super-large characters, The multi-reel display of three-dimensional layering and the vivid colors of up to 4096 colors are all due to the incomparable data calculation power of the main processor, and the technicians have also designed a special loop for the substrate, and the dual-channel FM source can also achieve audiophile-level listening effects. Kenzo Tsujimoto's bold decision proved to be quite forward-looking, and Capcom's software developers finally had a real stage of their own, free to use their imagination, and a large number of immortal masterpieces were born.

At the beginning of 1989, the news came from Capcom's North American division that "Street Fighter", which had a mediocre response in Fuso, had exceeded 10,000 substrate shipments in the United States, and strongly demanded to step up the launch of follow-up products to meet market demand, so the development team led by Kitaka Funamizu and Ryo Nishitani reassembled, and the game was tentatively named "Street Fighter 89", but many reasons led to this epoch-making game not being released until 1991.

However, Street Fighter 89, which was developed using the CPS1 substrate, was developed using the previous game as a reference and improvement, but the magnitude of the evolution made it feel like a breakthrough in a lifetime. Capcom technicians have also developed a new joystick and key scanning program, which is different from all previous fighting games, this program can accurately and quickly feedback the player's operation to the actual game, solving the action delay phenomenon in one fell swoop, giving the player a realistic operation pleasure.

For the first time, the game developers have also subdivided the concept of the previous two stages of defense into three stages: upper, middle, and lower, further enhancing the strategy and fun of the battle. In addition, fighting concepts such as eye-casting, body-attacking, and defense-breaking rear projection are still enshrined as the golden rule, and a variety of attack methods such as rear projection skills, aerial props, air-breaking skills, and body skills have also become the inherent formula of all future 2D fighting games.

In this way, a "Street Fighter II" with a quality far beyond expectations came out, and this time, the "Street Fighter" series really raised its eyebrows and became the overlord.

After Capcom took the world by storm with Street Fighter II, the operators seized on this once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity to play a hat-trick. First of all, in the middle of 92, two versions were launched, DASH and TURBO, the DASH version added the original hidden character of the Four Heavenly Kings to a selectable battle character, and the TURBO version adjusted the details such as the rhythm of the battle. The SFC version of Street Fighter II.-TURBO, released in '93, once again continued the glory of its predecessor, achieving 2.1 million copies in Fuso and 4.1 million copies worldwide. On September 1 of the same year, Capcom released the MD version of Street Fighter II.. at the invitation of Sega with a large capacity of 40Mb. PLUS》。 In October of the same year, Capcom unveiled a redesigned CPS1 substrate that doubled the memory and incorporated Q-SOUND audio processing technology. In order to coincide with the launch of the substrate, the unfinished "Super Street Fighter II-The New Challengers" was hastily taken out, and four new characters such as Jamie and Wyvern were added to this version, but unfortunately the balance of this work was met with a lot of criticism.

Later, in 94, the "Super Street Fighter II.X-GRAND MASTER CHALLENGE", which is known as the ultimate completion form of "Street Fighter II", was launched, and the game added speed adjustment settings and super hidden characters Ghost, which was successfully ported to the Panasonic 3DO platform in November. In the same year, so many versions of the series were launched in a short period of time, which made people sigh that Capcom's operators had a lot of skills.

But there are good and bad, Capcom's use of the "Street Fighter" series to make a fortune directly aroused the jealousy of many arcade manufacturers, and for a time there were many imitations on the market, and some of the games had reached an outrageous level of plagiarism, all of which had a serious impact on Capcom's further development of the fighting game market. Capcom filed a lawsuit against DATAEAST in the summer of '93, seeking a worldwide ban on the sale of the company's fighting game "The History of Fighters" on the grounds that it was an exact imitation of the company's Street Fighter II.

Of course, Capcom won in the end, but it must be admitted that the market has been completely chaotic.

So from 94 onwards, Capcom's performance began to take a sharp turn for the worse. Due to the frequent release of the Street Fighter II series and the large number of similar products from other manufacturers, the market has finally become seriously saturated, and this situation has been especially worse in the North American market, where Nintendo and Sega are facing off. The most critical point is that due to the long manufacturing cycle of cassette, software manufacturers have adopted the method of pressing goods in advance in order to prevent out-of-stock, and it is difficult to make timely response measures to avoid risks once the market changes. The sudden downturn in the 16-bit market, dominated by fighting games, caused Capcom's millions of software products to pile up in warehouses across Europe and the United States, and in order to avoid greater losses, Kenzo Tsujimoto decided to completely destroy these unsalable products.

At that time, the Wall Street Journal and other media also published photos and related reports of Capcom's giant roller crushing tens of millions of dollars worth of game cartridges, causing Capcom's stock price to plummet. In July, the head office building, known as the Capcom Building, was finally completed, but the entire company did not rejoice, and rumors spread that the Tsujimoto family was planning to sell the Capcom Building in order to repay a huge loan.

In the face of the bleak situation, many employees chose to leave their jobs to avoid the disaster of the nest, and the sudden departure of Fujiwara Tokuro, who had been a major minister since the founding of the company, made Kenzo Tsujimoto really feel the pain of internal and external difficulties, and presided over the development of a large number of masterpieces such as "Demon Village" and "Wolf of the Battlefield", and with the secret support of Sony, he independently founded the game development club Whoopee Camp, and began to make corresponding software for the upcoming PLAYSTATION console.

Kenzo Tsujimoto blamed the difficulties on the major shortcomings of cassette media circulation, which prompted Capcom to accelerate its full-scale march into 64-bit consoles for CD-ROM media.

How to say it, it can also be seen from here that Capcom's fried cold rice is already an old tradition, and a "Street Fighter" series can make Capcom keep coming out of follow-up versions, and for a long time, it has indeed ruled the market.

So what about Kenzo Tsujimoto's courage? It can be seen from several aspects, not to mention the above, and then in the process of the development of the game motherboard from 32-bit to 64-bit, the company also had to go through some painful periods, but Kenzo Tsujimoto is very determined, even if the company's operation is difficult, he has not given up. and then to the later support for Sega, the support for Sony, and the support for Nintendo. There is also the launch of the hardware market at a critical moment, specializing in the software market, etc., all of which are good moves made by Kenzo Tsujimoto, but it should be noted that this step-by-step process was quite risky at the time.

But in the end, Capcom succeeded, relying on one well-known IP after another, relying on superb fried rice skills, and it has long been a world-famous game empire.

However, the situation is different now, the development of the Internet and the rapid popularity of personal computers have caused a severe impact on the traditional game console market. It was at this time that Zhou Fangyuan came to the door with the sincerity of the Yuanfang Group, and Kenzo Tsujimoto had made a decision again, he was ready to get on the chariot of the Yuanfang Group and bravely meet the new challenge.

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