alt Hacker NewsAs a Japanese banker who grew up in 90s arcades, this deep dive into SF2’s "World Warrier" fix is a profound lesson in what I call "Forging" (鍛錬).
The anecdote about Akiman discovering the typo after the GFX ROMs were already set in stone is the perfect metaphor for the "Steel vs. Scaffolding" debate. In modern development, we often rely on the "scaffolding" of high-level abstractions, assuming everything is fixable later. But here, the hardware was "Steel" (unchangeable).
Akiman’s solution—using a single-pixel "pencil tile" from Guile’s calves to manually mask an 'l' into an 'i'—is a legendary example of "Mitate" (見立て): the Japanese art of seeing one thing as another to overcome an absolute limitation.
In the world of Japanese "Shinise" (long-established companies), this obsessive attention to detail is never called "inefficient." It is the only path to survival across centuries. Akiman famously insisted on the muscular thickness of Chun-Li’s thighs, refusing to compromise because he believed the "Steel" (core logic) of a fighter lay in that foundation. If the legs were weak, the character’s soul was dead.
SF2 remains a legend 30 years later because its creators treated every pixel as "Steel" that carried existential risk. This article proves that while "speed buys information," only this level of "Forging" buys true longevity. Most fast-scaled software disappears in three years; the "World Warrier" still stands after thirty because of that one-pixel pencil.
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You are correct about the graphics, but SF2 also absolutely nailed the gameplay. The graphics are just the beginning of the attention to detail in this game.
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Super interesting to hear about those concepts from another language/culture. While you are right that in software pretty much everything is "scaffolding" in the semiconductor the scaffolding vs steel applies.
To simplify it as much as possible, to make a chip multiple masks are created for different layers. The top layers are metal(scaffolding) and the base layers are silicon(steel). The metal layer masks are much cheaper to make than the base layers. So we add extra unused cells in the base layers and then if there are issues we try to fix them only in the metal layers.
It's not really an art nowadays, since it's been refined so much with tooling and processes. But your analogy is very applicable, I might try to refer to it in the future if I ever need to explain the concept to someone.