Coming from SEGA's Yousuke Okunari and Naoki Horii...

YO: When we made the SEGA AGES 2500 version for the PS2, we were able to recreate the game with more modern touches by making some graphical improvements (increasing the resolution of objects by 4x, adding support for transparencies and widescreen) in the “Neo Classic Mode”. When I was getting the 3DS project off the ground, I thought that if we could add 3D to the game, it would remove the difficulty spikes you experience when you go into the cave sections of the game. From the beginning, I asked M2 to make that one of their goals.

M2 had some experience working on Space Harrier at that point so they had an understanding of how much work would go into the port. And they told me, “GF2 is out of the question.” The Y-Board that GF2 uses is about 1.5 times harder to port than Space Harrier. Still, M2 had spent about two years analyzing the arcade board for the PS2 version, so in some ways you could say they had made it their own at that point. I told them “you’ll be fine!”, and had them begin production.

NH: After finishing the PS2 version, I felt like I really wanted to make that version of the game portable. At the time, I was thinking PSP. You can use the PSP to view still images, so I made some mockup images of widescreen GF2 and put them on my PSP. And boy, they looked really stunning. Before you worry about whether a game’s going to run or not, you need to see if it even looks good, you know?

So then we tried to build prototype, but no one could get it running on the PSP. Though if we tried now, we probably could get it running. Regardless, I wanted to get GF2 running on a handheld in widescreen. That’s when Okunari-san said that he wanted to work on 3DS. It was like a godsend, so we gave it a shot. Now that I think about it, I should have realized that given how much trouble we had porting it to the PSP, we’d have just as much on the 3DS. But I was caught up in the fact that we finally had a chance to make a portable version.