Q&A: D4's Shimizu On How Neo Geo Got To Wii

We can almost guarantee you've never heard of D4 Enterprise, but the company is gaining relevance as the supplier of Neo Geo titles to Nintendo's Virtual Console service on the Wii. Founded in 2004, the company is also responsible for engineering and releasing the 1Chip MSX, a handy recreation of the popular '80s home computing system. Gamasutra had a brief opportunity to speak to project manager Shinobu Shimizu at Tokyo Game Show and find out more. Can you tell us a little bit about D4 Enterprise? Shinobu Shimizu: Up until now, at D4 Enterprise, we've focused primarily on rereleasing a variety of retro games on the PC. Starting with Fatal Fury though, we've begun acquiring licenses for Neo Geo titles that we'll release on the Nintendo Wii. We've also brought near-finished versions of games like World Heroes and Magician Lord to the show. These Neo Geo titles are slated for release in North America, Europe, and Australia as well as Japan, so I'm hoping fans around the world will show their support. It's been said that you'll primarily be dealing with SNK and ADK licenses. SS: This time around, all the licenses we're working on have come to us from SNK Playmore. Will these all be carried out via emulation? SS: Yes that's right. These will all be ports, or emulations rather, of the original arcade games. We will be including certain features though, such as difficulty settings, to make difficult titles, like Magician Lord, more user friendly for players at home. Since these will be emulations, will you be raising the framerates of any of the games, to make them play faster? SS: It might be something we could do, but we don't currently have any plans to increase the play speed as we're focusing on reproducing the games in their original format. Do you have plans to do any high-resolution remakes of older titles? SS: No, we're not actually planning anything like that right now. Are D4 and D3 Publisher related in any way? SS: No, we don't really have any connection with D3, but people seem to notice the similarity in our names a lot. I really like the D4 logo. SS: Heh, thanks a lot. I'll give your compliments to the designer.