Sega AM2 veteran Daichi Katagiri spoke to IGN about his origins, his dual love of games & cars, working under Yu Suzuki, his involvement with series like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA & his love of the "real-time puzzle game" Outrun https://www.famitsu.com/news/202102/09213453.html https://twitter.com/famitsu/status/1359079686760853510

on Akira's infamous Doppo Choushitsu input: the initial plan was to give it a 2-frame input window for the negative-edge G at the end but the programmer, who was still thinking in relation to 30FPS a la VF1, said a 2-frame window would be too wide & went with 1 frame, & when...

…he had Katagiri, who was the team's best FG player, test it out, & instead of saying it was ridiculous, he was like "it's tough but I managed to do it", and so it stayed as-is

(for the uninformed, you have to press K+G & immediately release G within 1 frame to do Akira's knee)

Katagiri didn't officially work on VF1, as he was part of a team working on another game, but Yu Suzuki brought him in to give advice during devt as he was the company's best SF2 player; Katagiri expounded upon SF2's attack/block/throw triangle, the purpose of high/low blocking(>

& how VF's big floaty jumps screwed with that setup bc they made crouching-guard super advantageous, & Yu was all "but irl, if you kick a crouching dude, he's gonna get hit, right?"

the next time they played, Yu picked Sarah and Katagiri used the scrapped character Siba, and...

Kitagiri's lame crouch-blocking strat, which he was sure couldn't be beat, was losing to Sarah's new elbow-knee move, which was hitting mid—Yu had come up with a high/mid/low system in the interim, not just to fix the game system but to stay consistent with real martial arts

elements like down attacks and rising attacks also came from Yu questioning why they weren't a thing from a strict martial-arts perspective, first and foremost, and a ton of the game's systems that were considered innovative were conceived & designed along those simple lines

there's a ton of VF2 stuff in here in particular, I wish I had time to go over it…

here's one more for ya: before he joined Sega, Katagiri was pals with Kurita, the future champion VF3 Taka player, and when he won the VF3 championship, they reunited for the first time in ages