Happy 20th Birthday, Samurai Shodown!

[evil wasabi]

This is the game that started it all for me on the Neo Geo MVS. First played it on a Neo Geo 4 slot at my local sub shop back in the early 90s.

Tampa, FL.

 

[Archdesigner03]

Wow! Has it been 20 years already?....I'm feeling pretty damn old right now ha! SS1 was the first neo geo game I've ever played in the arcades. Good times!

 

[2D_mastur]

Never played SS1 in on MVS, as a kid. When SSII turns 20, I will feel like an old fuck. Jesus were the 90's awesome, eating shit loads of pizza, playing SSII every fucking weekend.

 

[mungrin]

I was always a Capcom fanboy and then I saw SS1 in the arcade and I changed.

 

[Marek]

I was intrigued from the moment I saw Ukyo's stance. He's still my favorite character.

This.

 

[Marek]

The uppercut move sucks. It has sucked for 18 years.

 

[joecommando]

dang first time i played this game was at a place called izzys pizza. They had a 2 slot MVS in the corner only arcade they had and it was SS and king of the monsters in there. SS had me hooked the second i saw that awesome intro. I was like holy crap those graphics i never saw anything like it.

 

[terry.330]

This is up there with Super Metroid, Mario 3, LTTP, SOTN etc. Fucking game changer for sure. Nothing else like it at the time.

I still remember playing it in the arcade and the buttons on the cab being shit and having to jam on them like a madman to get off the heavy slash.

Ukyo is still my favorite character from the series but I remember seeing Jubei and thinking he was the most badass game character I'd ever seen.

 

[Setherial]

I first played it on the Gameboy as a 5 in 1 game. I was hooked. My favorite characters are Haohmaru, Ukyo, Yagyu Jubei and Genjiro.

 

[psychobear85]

Never played SS1 in on MVS, as a kid. When SSII turns 20, I will feel like an old fuck. Jesus were the 90's awesome, eating shit loads of pizza, playing SSII every fucking weekend.

Same here, first one I played was SS2, I would play this every day after school.

 

[BBH]

I believe my local arcade at the time (Fun World in Harlingen, Texas) got Samurai Shodown in either late August or sometime in September 1993. The thing I will always remember about Samurai Shodown was that it was the first Neo-Geo fighting game around here that had regular token lines to play it. Fatal Fury 1 was an amusing diversion but people went back to SF2 right after. World Heroes got a good number of people playing but a lot of interest died when Mortal Kombat came out. Art of Fighting only got played by a couple people other than myself, most people just got bodied by CPU Jack and quit. Fatal Fury 2 and World Heroes 2 did decently but nobody was super crazy about either of them. Samurai Shodown though? EVERYONE was playing it for a while. Obviously that enthusiasm didn't last forever (especially since the arcade cashed in by getting at least two more copies of the game so competition wasn't as fierce), but I'll always remember the time when it came out. As anyone who frequented arcades during the heydey of fighting games can tell you, there was nothing quite like the thrill of head-to-head competition on a great fighting game. Those were fantastic times...

 

[joe8]

The first time I played Samurai Shodown was on the SNES. All of the conversions of Neo Geo games on the Genesis and SNES weren't as good as the originals (in terms of gameplay, which is what counts, as well as graphics). So I probably wasn't that excited by it. Most people bought either SF2 or MK for the 16-bit consoles, because the Neo conversions were crap.
So, all the game magazines focused on SF2 or MK (and because they didn't cover the AES anyway, at least not in Australia).

Also, I never played the Neo in an arcade in the 90's, not sure if arcades even had Neo's (they probably did). In Australia everyone was playing SF2 and Mortal Kombat. So if you wanted to play a good fighting game in the early 90s, the only choice was Street Fighter 2 (because MK and it's sequels are crap compared to SF and the SNK fighters). I wasn't really aware at the time that there were other fighters that were much better than MK (at least when they were the proper arcade version, not the home ports of SS). Samurai Shodown was probably the only fighter at that time which could compare to SF2.

World Heroes got a good number of people playing but a lot of interest died when Mortal Kombat came out.

Most fighting games were better than Mortal Kombat. Even the SNK fighters that weren't as good as Samurai Shodown (like Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, World Heroes) at least had variety in the characters and moves. In Mortal Kombat all the characters were virtually the same in terms of all their basic moves. So there might as well have been only one character to choose from, rather than 7 (MK) or 12 (MKII). The fights ended up just being about jump kicks, uppercuts and special moves. And then there were all the pallete swaps, and the secret characters that were almost impossible to beat. SNK fighters were the only real competition to SF2, but as soon as MK came out it pushed the Neo Geo fighters into the background. Maybe people didn't want to bother with learning more than one or two fighting games. And the SF and MK series kept a lot of the moves the same from one version to the next. It must have been that people played MK and then got the idea that all the non-SF fighters were crap.