On the screen, a red-haired man in a low-cut shirt, a strange red leather strap tied between his legs, was laughing maniacally.
He grabbed his opponent's head with one hand, and purple flames erupted, dyeing the scene in a bizarre and violent hue.
Iori Yagami.
This never-before-seen character, with his "I'm the best in the world" arrogance, immediately captured the hearts of rebellious teenagers.
He was the perfect foil to Kusanagi Kyo, the student-uniform-clad fighter who wielded crimson flames.
One red, one purple; one righteous, one evil. The mere tension between the two during the character selection screen was enough to make players sweat as they clutched their coins.
"This plot is insane!" yelled the blonde kid at the controls, frantically mashing the joystick. "Kyo Kusanagi's dad got brainwashed!"
The game directly adopted the mature storyline from the previous installment, The King of Fighters '95.
Rugal, who had self-destructed in the last tournament, wasn't dead. A mysterious invitation from someone named "R" had once again gathered the fighters.
Not only had the old bastard fitted himself with half-mechanical prosthetics, but to humiliate Kyo Kusanagi, he'd even captured Saisyu Kusanagi and brainwashed him into becoming a mini-boss.
On the screen, Saisyu Kusanagi, his body wreathed in eerie flames, struck down his own son.
The crowd of onlookers sighed at this twisted spectacle of "fatherly love and filial piety."
When the final battle arrived, and Rugal tore open his shirt to unleash the terrifying power known as the Great Serpent Power, the entire arcade fell silent for a moment.
That oppressive force pierced the hearts of the viewers. The System32 motherboard's powerful 2D processing capabilities vividly rendered the chaotic energy radiating from Rugal's body.
Though Rugal ultimately self-destructed, unable to contain the power, the concept of the "Great Serpent" remained, a thorn deeply embedded in the players' hearts.
Everyone could see that Rugal was merely a pitiful wretch consumed by power, and that a darker conspiracy lurked behind it all.
To coincide with the game's promotion, a manga adaptation penned by Natsumoto Masato began serialization in Shonen.
While the manga's sales couldn't yet rival giants like Dragon Ball due to the magazine's target audience, newsstand owners noticed that students were increasingly flocking to buy the issue just to glimpse Iori Yagami's past or research the mysterious Great Serpent Clan.
This was exactly what Takuya Nakayama had wanted.
The game was no longer just a casual pastime to be discarded after beating it; it had become a world with a captivating story.
From arcades to consoles, from manga to merchandise, as long as players were curious about the plot and empathized with the characters, Sega always had something to keep them digging.
Watching the steadily rising coin insertion rate on the report, Takuya Nakayama picked up his pen and drew a thick checkmark next to The King of Fighters II.
March in Tokyo still carried a hint of early spring chill, but in the underground laboratory of Sega's Hardware Development Department, even the air conditioning set to its highest setting couldn't suppress the stifling heat.
Dozens of prototype machines ran simultaneously, the whirring of their cooling fans converging into a relentless hum like a swarm of tireless worker bees.
Hideki Sato, his eyes sunken from lack of sleep, clutched a can of long-cooled coffee, his gaze fixed intently on the oscilloscope before him.
Since the custom R3000S chips had arrived at Headquarters two weeks earlier, the entire Hardware Department had entered a state of "wartime readiness."
Assemble, power on, flash firmware, error, fix, power on again.
They had repeated this process countless times, until today.
"Data flow stable, bus bandwidth utilization at 65%, temperature—42 degrees Celsius, well within safe thresholds." Hideki Sato's voice was hoarse, but tinged with barely concealed excitement. "Mr. Suzuki, you can switch the signal now."
Yu Suzuki, standing before the test rig, remained silent, instead rapidly typing a string of commands into the keyboard.
The monitor flickered, went black, and then, two seconds later, a blue Sega logo burst onto the screen, followed by the familiar Eight Extremes Fist starting stance.
On the screen, Akira Yuki, clad in a white martial arts uniform, stood with knees slightly bent in his signature pose.
If the Akira on the standard R3000 had been a "puppet"—his movements technically correct but his joints stiff—the character now on the screen seemed to have been infused with a soul.
The afterimages of his punches were no longer simple stretched textures, but genuine polygon calculations.
"This is the power of hardware instructions."
Yu Suzuki slammed the joystick forward, and Akira Yuki on the screen instantly unleashed a combo: "Back Gate Elbow." The movements flowed seamlessly, without a hint of hesitation or drag.
Previously, to make this combo run smoothly on the original chip, the programmers—those poor guys who were already losing their hair—had to write a mountain of complex software instructions to simulate the calculations. The graphics were crude, and the performance was so abysmal it made you want to smash your keyboard.
Now, with the custom R3000S, those bottlenecked algorithms had been transformed into native instructions at the chip's core.
It was like taking a tractor struggling through mud and suddenly switching it to a freshly paved asphalt racetrack, while also slapping a Ferrari engine into it.
"What's the frame rate?" Oguchi Hisao, who had been standing silently behind them, suddenly asked.
"A steady 60 FPS, with occasional dips just above 58," the tester beside him replied, his voice trembling as he watched the real-time monitoring data. "And—this isn't even optimized yet. We just ported the original code directly, though we did use more detailed models."
Yu Suzuki released the joystick and exhaled a long, weary breath. The tension that had gripped his shoulders for months finally dissipated.
"Looks like that multi-million dollar customization fee was worth every penny," he said, turning to the team behind him and giving them a thumbs-up.
In the preceding months, many had privately complained: if a custom chip was coming, why bother struggling with the original R3000 for development?
That feeling of dancing on the edge of performance bottlenecks was torture.
But now, witnessing the seamless migration and performance explosion of Virtua Fighter 2, everyone understood Yu Suzuki and Executive Director Nakayama's foresight.
If they had waited for the chip to arrive, they would still be writing low-level drivers and would never have seen such a smooth real-time demonstration.
Those three or four months of "wasted effort" had actually been a desperate race against time.
"How are things with Sega Racing and Gundam Battle Operation?" Oguchi Hisao asked, flipping through his schedule. As Takuya Nakayama's assistant, his primary concern was meeting deadlines and generating revenue.
"Everyone's migrating. With Virtua Fighter 2 paving the way, they'll only move faster," Yu Suzuki said, gesturing to several workstations compiling code at full speed. "Especially the racing team. I heard after upgrading their chips, they finally dared to implement that real-time ray tracing effect."
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