popular Sega's Virtua Fighter series was in Japan at the time, the management asked Tomonobu Itagaki to create a game similar to Virtua Fighter. Itagaki was a fan of Virtua Fighter, but he wanted Dead or Alive to stand out among the competition. This included a stronger emphasis on being provocative, as Itagaki believed entertainment needed both sexuality and violence to truly be entertainment. All the animations in the game were created using motion capture. The original game, which runs on the Sega Model 2 arcade board, the same arcade board that Virtua Fighter 2 ran on, had polygonal modeled backgrounds. Dead or Alive was unveiled alongside Jaleco's Super GT 24h at the February 1996 AOU show as part of Sega's announcement that they were licensing their Model 2 hardware to third-party companies. In comparison to other 3D fighters, such as Tekken (which gained a substantial market base in Japan and North America), DOA introduced a countering system unique to the genre and an added emphasis on speed, as well as a rich graphics engine that lacked many jaggies and incorporated very smooth surfaces. A Nintendo 64 port was rumored, but did not come to fruition. Dead or Alive was instead ported to the Sega Saturn exclusively for the Japanese market in 1997. Acclaim intended to bring the Saturn version to the UK by Christmas 1997, but plans were shelved for unknown reasons. When ported to the Saturn, the developers used Gouraud shading (a feature not available on Model 2) for the character models to compensate for the Saturn not being able to generate as many polygons as the Model 2 hardware. The Saturn conversion uses bitmaps and parallax scrolling in the same fashion as the Saturn version of Virtua Fighter 2. It also includes a new rendered intro and tournament and training modes. In 1998, Tecmo released Dead or Alive for the PlayStation in all regions. It was the first game designed for Sega arcade hardware to be ported to the PlayStation. This version included two new characters, a different graphics engine, a slightly revamped fighting engine, new alternate costumes, and new background music. Most of the PlayStation version's development team had worked on the original arcade version. Tecmo also released an upgrade titled Dead or Alive++ for the arcades in Japan which was based on the PlayStation version. This version was based on the PlayStation version with a