The Most Important Developer You (Likely) Never Heard Of

When I was growing up in Brazil, I had no idea what the hell was a Ryu. But Terry Bogard was THE MAN.

Hearing that he founded dimps was the actual SHOCK of this video. Actually mind blown lmao!!

I was not prepared for the Dimps plot twist. Sonic Advance 2 was my first proper Sonic game, I think

Kung Fu Master (and Game of Death, by extension) wasn't only massively influential for beat-em-ups and Mario - it's also where the terms "level" and "boss" even come from! In the film, Bruce Lee had to ascend each "level" of a pagoda, and each level's goons had a "boss" that Lee had to defeat before moving to the next level. That format was used for Kung Fu Master, and that's how it became standard game terminology

I knew this would be a Derrick video just from the title lol

Wild to think how one person could directly and indirectly influence gaming as whole like this

I had just watched this before it went live on YT and MAN, WHAT A STORY. Nishiyama is a legend.

This is almost like a retrospective on the importance of Jackie Chan in videgames lol

Fascinating to hear how Street Fighter's 6-button input was a compromise that had to be fought for. I don't know if the SNES would have had 6-buttons without that, and the 6-button controllers for the Mega Drive/Genesis and PC Engine were primarily sold for their utility in Street Fighter II, and the following generation would use a minimum of 8-button controllers as standard. A huge development in the complexity and depth offered by console games.

I really enjoyed your deep dive into Nishiyama's career and how many different things in games and even manga his works would help inspire. I would honestly love Derrick to do other videos like this for other game devs who aren't as well known, but absolutely made an impact in the gaming space.

Man, I've heard some of these stories individually, but it's crazy to hear them in one coherent timeline! I knew Nishiyami was influential, but not to this extent

I haven’t really made any videos yet but one I’ve had floating around in my head for a little while has the tentative title “follow the creators, not the publishers.” This concept goes for every industry, and my concept for this video will take an awful lot of research but videos like this one will be instrumental in its creation. I trust that nobody will take this idea, but if they do I’ll just have to make it better.

Great Video! These kinds of spotlights on prolific names in the industry are really cool!

Awesome spotlight on such an influential developer!

I watch a lot of video-game related content and just had to say that this is one of the most enjoyable in recent memory. Very well done GVG, made me a subscriber

It’s always nice to learn about more singular stories from the gaming industry. Just goes to show how far one person could go back in the day. Though it’s also important to recognize the people surrounding Nishiyama. I believe a lot of the people who helped form Dimps also worked on Sonic Pocket Adventure, so that probably helped them get the Advance/Rush contracts.

I played those games, fond memories. I had Kung Fu Master on a floppy disk for the Commodore 64 computer, and played Moon Patrol at my school's computer lab on an Apple II computer.

SNK WAS APART OF MY CHILDHOOD WITH KOF & METAL SLUG

Kung Fu Master is a real classic, it kickstarted my love for fighting games. I still playing them to this day.

Another individual I think is worth doing a deep dive into is actually somebody else tied to Street Fighter amusingly, namely Yoshiki Okamoto, producer of Street Fighter II. Despite the magnitude of that credit alone, it often feels like his other credits are largely understated if not overlooked, between other innovations in the early years of the shoot-em-up genre on behalf of Konami and Capcom (one of which of course inspired the Red Dead franchise), directly also having a hand in seemingly every other capcom IP of note in the 90s, and even most notably being responsible for another of the highest grossing video games of all time (despite being almost exclusively a Japan-only phenomenon) in Monster Strike. Overall this video was very enlightening in its own right though, and I was convinced thanks to this that Takashi was every bit as worth talking about as him. Clearly there are a lot of long-time creators out there who aren't given anywhere near the recognition they should have and I'm glad this video was made to put a spotlight out on one of them.