“The solution came under the form of paper sheets and scissors.”
Capcom’s arcade board freed artists from rectangular sprites, which made ROM space impossible to count. So the team printed sheets, cut out every pose and pasted them onto boards. Street Fighter II got 144 sheets for 4.6 MiB of sprites. The ending nearly didn’t fit until someone found a lost board under a desk. Budgets used to be physical, and the games were better for it.