Development History

Showa American Story has no single start date, and the studio has never given one. The creative director has described two full years of high-level concept design between 2016 and 2018, carried by a team of up to about five people, and he said in 2026 that pure development time to that point had been about four and a half years, with a long design phase before it. Those statements describe different phases of the same project, which is why a flat founding year for the game does not exist.

The game surfaced publicly in September 2021 under the working title Project SAS, and was revealed properly in January 2022 as NEKCOM Entertainment's tenth-anniversary project. It then went quiet for most of three years, missed a 2025 window, and came back in August 2026 with its first playable build.

Timeline

From Concept to Reveal

Chigusa Choko's face was left unfinished and deliberately obscured in trailers, which the studio explained in 2024 by saying the design was not final.

Four trailer beats make up the whole public history of the game: the 2021 teaser, the 2022 reveal trailer, the 2024 trailer and the 2026 trailer shown at gamescom Opening Night Live. The studio posted that last trailer on its own channel on the evening of 25 August 2026 and the publisher reposted it the following day, which is why two dates circulate for it. Whether the 2021 teaser counts as a trailer has never been settled, so they are not numbered here.

Reception of the 2022 Reveal

The January 2022 reveal trailer drew far more attention than a first announcement from a studio this size usually does, and it drew it in three countries at once. Contemporary accounts of the response agree on its character: curiosity and amusement at the premise rather than offence at it.

In China the reaction was broadly delighted, and players coined a joking genre label for the thing the game was doing, along the lines of a domestic game made for laughs. Longer-serving players placed it next to the low-budget, high-concept action games of the PlayStation 2 era. American players were summarised as saying that it was strange, that they wanted to play it, and that they hoped it turned out well. Japanese players were struck by the audacity of the premise and by the fact that a Chinese team had arrived at it, and the accounts describe that reaction as prompting some reflection alongside the laughter. A Japanese game director and a Japanese character artist both shared the trailer publicly, the director calling it the most striking game trailer he had seen recently.

A phrase that translates roughly as stoking a cultural argument was attached to the game by some players at the time, and the accounts that record the phrase also record it being used as a joke rather than as a charge. Nothing available describes an organised backlash in any of the three countries. The studio's own answer on whether that response changed anything is in the next section. The game is unreleased, so as of September 2026 there is no review coverage and no aggregate score to report.

The Silence Between 2022 and 2026

The creative director said in 2024 that the long gap was not a deliberate marketing strategy, and that the team had put all of its effort into development instead. He came back to the point in 2025: the studio is small, most of the team are developers, and marketing takes effort away from making the game.

Asked in 2023 whether the reveal's reception had changed the plan, he said the team was committed to delivering the game it had originally intended to make. It would not rush the game out and it would not throw money at drastic changes, and no major changes had been made to the game's systems since the announcement. It is the closest thing on record to an answer on whether the project grew after the reveal.

The bottleneck he named in 2023 was art production: the overall game framework was ready, he said, but art was holding progress back, and the studio had secured extra capacity from an external art company. Describing the delay in 2024, he said the original estimate had the game shipping in 2022, and that the pandemic plus an outsourcing capacity crunch caused the slip, with no stable long-term outsourcing partner ever found.

The second slip was announced directly. On 12 November 2025 the executive producer said the release window had been moved from 2025 to 2026 after careful consideration, to ensure the best possible quality. He apologised for the delay and said the extra time would let the game reach the level of quality it deserves. Current release information is on Release and Platforms.

How the Game Is Written and Built

The creative director said in 2025 that everything with direct stylistic impact on the game is written by him personally: the script, the character design, the action design, the visual style, the level design, the prop design and all in-game text. Internal designers write the execution documents for gameplay features. Despite the project's scale, he said, in creative terms it is still an independent game.

He also described, in 2025, scrapping the first version of the main story outright and writing a replacement in about a month, followed by roughly two weeks on the secondary characters. The script then went through eleven rounds of blind testing, three listeners per round, each of them scoring a chapter independently and revealing their scores at the same time.

Level art is directed from his own accumulated phone photographs, which the concept artists work from, and that pipeline feeds the city building described on Cities and World Structure. Choko's attack animations were motion-captured with him personally supervising the shoots. He said in 2025 that some of the combat animations shown in earlier trailers were placeholders that do not match the final style, which matters when comparing old footage against the current Combat.

Influences and Intent

The creative director has been open about what he drew on, always as influence rather than as content in the game. He has named From Dusk Till Dawn as a model for a road movie that derails, the films of Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike, the Yakuza series for the flavour of its side quests, giant-robot anime including Getter Robo and GaoGaiGar as the reference behind the drill, and the Japanese manga and anime that reached China during the Reform and Opening-Up era.

He said in 2024 that there is no Japanese cultural supervisor on the project, and that everything is made from his own and the team's memories and sensibilities. In 2026 he added that the aim is not to be deliberately strange: he wants a world the player can believe in, where the comedy comes from serious people caught in an absurd situation rather than from mugging at the camera. The three stated design pillars are violence, romance and comedy, and the era they sit in is covered on Showa 66 Setting.

Where the Project Stands

The studio put the game at 80 percent complete in December 2024, and described it as being in the final polishing stage in September 2026. Between those two points came the August 2026 return and the first build the public could actually sit down with. The soundtrack work running alongside all of this is covered on Music.