Developer Explains How Samurai Shodown Made Fools Of Its Players

Samurai Shodown is one of SNK’s most successful brands with millions of fans who never suspected that they were being made fools by their favorite arcade pastime.

One of the most memorable sights in the 1990s arcades was seeing two Samurai Shodown players mashing their buttons fiercely in order to win a small mini-game that determines who’d lose his weapon. Problem is, all this mashing was useless as the mini-game’s outcome was completely random.

The revelation was made by Long time game programmer, Gregg Tavares, who ported the game to Neo Geo 20 years ago. According to Tavares, one of the porting team members actually suspected the foul play before working on the project, so he checked its source code when he had the chance and discovered that the mini-game’s outcome was determined by “picking a random number.”