On a warm April night in 1995, two developers reclined on their balcony and stared up into the sky. It was three o'clock in the morning, and a hundred stars stared back as the pair swapped stories of heroic barbarians and monstrous demons. These late-night discussions were not uncommon for James Goddard and David Winstead. Together with the team at Visual Concepts, they had been hard at work for the past 13 months building a game designed to give Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat a run for their money. That game was WeaponLord.

Since development began, this one-on-one, weapons-based fighting game consumed Goddard and Winstead's lives from dawn to dusk. When they were not in the office, the two designers were back at the two-bedroom crash pad they shared with game tester Fred Cochero. Armed with crates of Snapple and Easy Cheese, the three alternated between competitive bouts of Street Fighter and endlessly tuning their usurper to the fighting game throne. This is the game they always wanted to make, and each is confident WeaponLord will be more badass than anything the genre has seen before.

The final draft for WeaponLord's box cover drawn by comics artist Simon Bisley.

Throughout the early 1990's, a lasting divide between Eastern and Western fighting game design was forming. Eastern fighters, such as Street Fighter and The King of Fighters, had a reputation for fast-paced, highly complex play; while Western fighters, such as ClayFighter and Primal Rage, demonstrated a simpler, slower-paced approach. Unless you were Midway, creators of Mortal Kombat, it was suspect to think the West could bottle the technical wizardry of the East. Then along came WeaponLord. Designed by a small team in California, this game sought to combine Eastern complexity and Western brutality into one muscle-bound, broadsword-wielding whole. WeaponLord's creators thought they would conquer the world with this game--but they had to make it first.

James "DJAMES" Goddard never cheated at Street Fighter, though plenty of people accused him of such. "There was no Internet back then," he said, "so if you knew these tricks, such as doing a walking pile drive with Zangief, people thought you were a voodoo priest or something!" Knowledge was power, and Goddard knew all the tricks. In 1991, he was hired by Capcom, creator of Street Fighter II, as a game tester, and quickly rallied that into an apprenticeship at the company's Japanese offices. He then took that knowledge and worked his way up to support designer and advisor on Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, followed by master game balancer on Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. Goddard was learning from the best, and those lessons would help him immensely when developing WeaponLord.

There was no Internet back then," Goddard said, "so if you knew these tricks, such as doing a walking pile drive with Zangief, people thought you were a voodoo priest or something!"David "Dr. Dave" Winstead was in the right place at the right time. The time was 1989, and the place was Gary's Game Corner, a locally owned comic book and video game rental shop in Redwood City, California. Not far from Gary's, a little magazine called GamePro was just getting off the ground. The editors would sometimes stop by to peruse the games selection, and Winstead was always there to toss in his two cents. Eventually, this made an impression on Patrick Ferrell, one of the magazine's founders, who tasked Winstead with turning his stream of advice into a few demo articles for the magazine. Before long, the young writer found himself taking screen shots part-time, and eventually becoming a full-time editor.

And then Street Fighter II happened. In 1991, Capcom's breakout fighting game landed in American arcades, jump-started arcade culture, and created the template for a new genre of gaming. Unlike most arcade games, Street Fighter didn't have you compete over a high score. It was direct competition against the person standing next to you, and if you lost, it was because the other person was better, plain and simple. Winstead was enamored. "I told the editors this game was crazy! I'd never played anything like it. You really got this buzz off fighting another person." He knew Capcom had struck gaming gold, and he pushed for coverage in the magazine. After some convincing, his editors relented, and suggested he contact Capcom about purchasing a Street Fighter II arcade board. Given the game's popularity, they were sure to have plenty in stock.

Capcom didn't have any in stock. It could barely keep up with orders already because of the game's explosive popularity and didn't have any extras to sell to random magazine editors. But Winstead kept calling, and one day an exasperated Capcom representative handed the phone off to James Goddard. When Goddard learned that he was talking to the Dr. Dave of GamePro magazine, he got an idea. This was a golden opportunity to get arcade coverage in a console magazine. He arranged to get Winstead a board, and in the meantime he invited the writer down to Capcom's offices to check out the latest version of the game. The two hit it off quickly, and within a few days they were meeting regularly to play--and analyze--Street Fighter. Slowly, the game became their entire lives. They were obsessed.

Roughly a year later, in 1992, Goddard offered Winstead a job working with him at Capcom R&D. The R&D department was currently a one-man operation, and Goddard needed someone who shared his passion for the game and who could help shape its future. Winstead, still early into his career at GamePro, wasn't sure at first, but the other editors encouraged him to follow his dreams and not let this opportunity pass by. After much consideration, Winstead accepted Goddard's offer and Street Fighter became his full-time job. "The work was never done," he said. "We would bring the arcade board with the latest build home, and we'd play religiously three or four hours a night before emailing updated suggestions to Japan."

As the former journalist settled into his new life at Capcom, Goddard was already planning his next move. By 1993, he was becoming frustrated with Capcom's direction for the future of Street Fighter. The 25-year-old developer was ready to try his hand at game design. And Ken Lobb was going to make that happen. Lobb, an employee at Namco, was working on an unannounced project (codenamed "Melee") and encouraged Goddard to join the team. Little did Goddard know that this was because Lobb was planning his own move, and when Goddard made the jump, so did Lobb. Melee ended up in Goddard's hands, while Lobb joined Nintendo to develop a little game called Killer Instinct.

Meanwhile, Winstead remained at Capcom a little longer, helping publish Aliens vs. Predator and other games. But eventually--inevitably--his old friend came calling, and the offer was even more enticing than before. This is our chance, Goddard told him, to finally make a fighting game of our own! This wasn't going to be one of the many copy-cat Street Fighter II clones flooding the market. It was going to have weapons. It was going to be a gritty, "no-bullshit" take on barbarian style. It was going to be their game.

This was an offer Winstead couldn't refuse.

Together again, the duo took stock of their new team. Visual Concepts was known for its work with Electronic Arts on various sports games, including Madden and NHL. Recently, the developer had taken its first, awkward steps into the fighting genre with ClayFighter on the Super Nintendo. Now they were working with Japanese publisher Namco on Melee, a four-player brawler. A handful of Visual Concepts' staff, around 20 people, was assigned to work on the game, and they didn't bat an eye when Goddard proposed taking it in a new direction.

By January of 1994, Melee had been scrapped and development was in full swing for WeaponLord (the project's new codename). However, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon. The golden age of the 16-bit game console was waning, and a new technology--3D technology--was on the rise. Change was coming to the realm of video games, and WeaponLord, an original, 2D fighter developed for home consoles, was looking to become the last of its kind. As an American team supported by a Japanese company, Visual Concepts had been granted the leeway to create exactly what they wanted. It was an envious circumstance that would, for better or worse, forge WeaponLord into a fighting game unlike anything the genre had seen before.