Development
Tomonobu Itagaki has stated that he was dissatisfied with the way modern fighting games were presented at the time, he missed the old arcade style of play and had another vision for the fighting game genre. Having worked for Tecmo for a long time, Itagaki was eventually given the opportunity to develop a fighting game. The game, the first Dead or Alive, was released in 1996 as an arcade game for the Japanese market. It had been a success in Japan, but not in the West. This was possibly because of the competing game Tekken, which was already a popular fighting game series for the PlayStation.
There are three different versions of the original Dead or Alive:
- The original version of Dead or Alive was released in arcades in 1996, utilizing Sega's Model 2 arcade board (it was also the first time Sega licensed their hardware to a third-party company; in this case, Tecmo). It was later ported to the Sega Saturn in Japan on October 9, 1997. The game was never released for the North American nor European Sega Saturn. It was released in the United States and Europe for the Xbox on October 26, 2004, and February 18, 2005, as part of Dead or Alive Ultimate (see below).
- On March 12, 1998, Tecmo released Dead or Alive for the PlayStation in Japan. This version included two new characters (Bass and Ayane), a different graphics engine, a slightly revamped fighting engine and new background music (BGM). The PlayStation version was released in North America on March 31, 1998, and later in Europe on July 1998.
- In 2004, Tecmo released a revamped version of the Sega Saturn version on the Xbox along with an updated version of Dead or Alive 2 in the same package. It was basically the original game ported to the Xbox, making graphics smoother, sound from stereo to surround, and adding Xbox Live online gaming. This game along with Dead or Alive 2, Ultimate became the second fighting game with online play.
The original game, which ran on the Model 2 arcade board, had fully 3D modeled backgrounds. The Sega Saturn conversion used bitmap tricks and overlapping layers in the same fashion as the Sega Saturn version of Virtua Fighter 2 did. The original arcade used pure 3D on all the arenas. It was impossible to achieve this on Saturn hardware and the game was scaled down.
Read more about this topic: Dead Or Alive (video Game)
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—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)