Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 231: Kemco-Seika

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Jeremy Parish and Anthony Schwader look back at the checkered history of publisher Kemco-Seika—from iffy original works to beloved conversions of computer classics. And lots of Crazy Castles.

This week in Retronauts, Seca. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and I am Jeremy Parrish, and I am at Midwest Gaming Classic. Yes. And here in the high-tech studio with me is returning from last year. Anthony Schwader. How's it going, my man? It's going pretty well.

And Bob Mackey may be along. He had to go seek some curds. He likes cheese, apparently. Yes. And in Wisconsin here, we like to celebrate cheese by deep frying it. And, well, putting it into the curd form first. I mean, it's cold up here. So you want to pack on those pounds for the winter.

I totally understand. And actually, The secret to a good cheese curd? Not many people know this, but a good fresh cheese curd will squeak when you bite into it. I see. So is that where the whole mouse thing comes along? Oh, I never thought about that. Meas squeak, cheese squeaks.

Clearly they belong together. Yeah, I think all these mice are just really seeking cheese curds. I see. And speaking of mice, that's going to be relevant to today's podcast topic. This was an accidental connection, but I'm proud of it. Yeah, so I asked Anthony what he would want. to talk about for this year's podcast session. And he said, strangely enough, Kempko Seca. Yes. And so that's what we're going to talk about. And actually, that's a pretty cool topic

because, well, for a few different reasons. One, because it's one of those companies that I think anyone who grew up playing NES or Game Boy games, like ended up playing some Kempco games. Absolutely. And on top of that, their probably best known game or most beloved or most most infamous game, actually just got a remake on Xbox 1, PS4, and Switch. That's right. So it's suddenly relevant, and we can talk a little bit about that, too. But first I have to ask you, Anthony, why did you want to talk about Kimco? Okay.

So when we were first talking about this, I gave you kind of a list of what I thought were underrated companies that made NES games. And now that I've done a little bit of research, Jeremy, I'm kind of regretting putting Kempco on here. Because you don't want to talk about them or because you don't think they made good games. Well, when I got down to it, I think that they're kind of a below average developer themselves, but they made very smart and savvy publishing moves. Well, that's important, too. Publishing and developing were two different facets of the games business. It still are. But I feel like there was a lot more bleed over in the early days where companies, you know, would develop their own games internally.

then they would also publish other people's games. And you see that still with some Japanese companies like Atlas, they do that a lot. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But you don't really see it so much on the U.S. side. I don't know. I guess, yeah, like if you look at Square Inix, like what did they bring in from other companies?

They'll reach out to other like contract developers to work on their products. But you don't really see Square Inx just like picking up properties to publish in the U.S. They're not like, oh, you know, this teenage girl. school visual novel is going to be a huge hit. We should pick it up and publish it in the U.S.

Yeah, they don't really do that. The industry as a whole kind of streamlined into everyone kind of taking care of their own business unless, you know, there are some companies that do pick up like indie games.

But I mean, with the advent of steam and, you know, the e-shop, you know, online transactions, it's so much easier for these indie companies to release their own games nowadays. Right. And so if you look back at Kemco, I mean, they really did have this kind of two-pronged approach where they were publishing their own games.

They were making their own games, developing and publishing their own games. But they were also picking up external properties and bringing them to platforms. And for the most part, what they were doing, especially in the beginning, was finding Western properties and bringing them over to Japan for the consoles. And that was a pretty viable business model. A lot of companies did that. And it was a pretty effective way to, you know, to expand, you know, their roster of games. And it was also very valuable because there were a lot of sort of Western computer games that just weren't going to be picked up in Japan. Right. They were mining the West, kind of.

And that was smart because, you know, these Japanese players had not seen any of these games. And sometimes concepts like Ultima or whatnot had not been seen by a lot of Japanese. Japanese players and was kind of revolutionary in some genres anyway. Right. And I think you saw more of this happening on the Japanese side than on the Western side. And that's because I think, you know, just the difference in the size of the markets. Like there weren't necessarily a ton of companies in the U.S. who are like, we need to open a Japanese branch because it is a small market. As you know, it's like the total population of Japan is like a third of that of the U.S. Right. So it's just not as compelling. Whereas, you know,

for the Japanese, they're like, wow, the American market is three times the size of our market. So obviously, we want to open up a branch over there. So you had companies like Taito and Nintendo and Sega and so forth just starting up their own businesses, you know, their own, you know, Western branches. Whereas you didn't really have American companies doing that very often. Yeah. So it fell to companies like Kempco and, uh, imaginering and so forth to take these Western properties and bring them over to Japan. And, you know, some companies that did that early on, like Hudson, had big successes with stuff like Load Runner. And so this is where we kind of get to Chemco. We look at, you know, a year after Load Runner came to Famicom

and it was a massive hit. You have a bunch of companies saying, oh, yeah, hell yes, we want in on that business. And so that's where Kimco enters the picture. So let's talk about Kempko just a little bit like the origins. It started out as the Kodubuki engineering and manufacturer. As so many Japanese game publishers did. They started in another line of business. Exactly. And they saw there was money to be made in game publishing and game development.

And they jumped on in. And there were dozens and dozens of companies that did this. And most of them ended up publishing just some crap and went away after like two games. But some of them stuck around like Squarespaceoft, which started out as an electrical company. And thank God. Squarespace has done a lot to enrich my life. I think Enix also started as like another. you know, some other company. We were just talking about Hayanko Alien. Meldak was a jazz music label

in Japan. No kidding. Okay. All right. So, so you definitely had some of this happening. But Kimco, yes, they started out not making video games, but they did eventually make their way into making video games. And that's kind of become what they did. And they're still around, you know. I know. Kimco is still around. And every other week or so, you log on to the Nintendo Switch e-shop. And you see some sort of very generic looking RPG with extremely generic looking art and a very generic name. And you're like, this is a chemco game. And it is. I don't know why. But their thing now is just like, seriously, like every other week, they just publish the most generic ass RPG on Switch. They have dozens of these things now, I think. And they're all, they all look exactly the same. They all look like, you know, someone's RPG maker 14 version of lunar or something. And that's what they do. I think these were all mobile games that they developed over the past decade.

And then we're just like, well, we can just dump that crap on Switch. There you go. So it's kind of a, I don't know. It's a very specific niche they fill, but kind of like on brand for them, kind of consistent level of, yeah, whatever. Now, I don't know if these are actually developed in-house by Chemco or not, these new games that you're talking about. But if they're not, it might be a case of, hey, it worked in the past. It put food on the table. Um, why not? Let's do it. Why not? I mean, it could be a case where Kempco is like one dude who just like picks up and publishes the rights to these super generic ass RPGs. It could be. Absolutely. Just a prodigy. I mean, honestly, looking at these games, like they could just be procedurally generated. Like, they just have a randomizer. They're like just, okay, I'm being mean. He's putting a hammer down, folks. All right. But I, I've never played one of these games, but I just look at them, I'm like, these. All right. These, all.

all look exactly the same. Like, seriously, this happened two days ago with the most recent e-shop update. I don't remember what the game was called, but I do remember logging on. I was like just looking through, like, scrolling through the thumbnails of new releases. And I was like, that one's a Kimco RPG. And I clicked through. And it was a Kimco RPG. But that's not where they started.

So let's talk about where they started. I kind of got off on a side. Well, okay, this is a game that I haven't played, but I know that they kind of had their start with a port of doughboy from the Commodore 64. have you played that jeremy i am only familiar with it through uh crontendo oh yeah crondendo but it was it was like it was like yeah it was kind of like sort of a proto action proto strategy game it's hard to describe it's like top down world war i guess one oh do boy as in okay i get it now the military yeah it's not like uh like you know pickle boy or something i was thinking like the state puff marshmallow no no no it's it's do boy as in a british soldier

So it's like a, it's sort of a, like, kind of commando-ish, but there's more of an element of, I'm reluctant to say strategy, but it is, it is a little like less direct action, just pure shooting than, than commandos. So, yeah, anyway, I guess it was a pretty successful game on C-64, but Dr. Sparkle did not have nice things to say about the Kimco's port. And you know, if Dr. Sparkle doesn't like something, then it's Kasuga. That doesn't necessarily mean that much. He has very specific opinions, and I don't always agree with them. Speaking of Kasuge, or it's Kusogi. Kusogi. There's definitely a couple of games in here that I would label as straight up Kosovo.

Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Which, by the way, means shit. Yeah. Just pure shit. Well, shit game. Shit game. Yes. Game is in gameu, game.

Yeah. Game, yes. So, yeah, that is exactly correct. And this, I think, might qualify. You know, this was, I think, your notes here say that these games were internally developed. So I think this was a case of, as you saw with a lot of early Famicom third parties, them just like handing off the reins to like, well, here's someone who's never really made a game before, but maybe, you know, programmed a spreadsheet for his mom or something.

so we'll give them this game. And there was a definite learning curve. And by like 1987 or so, you really started to see kind of clear leaders emerge from the pack. People became more familiar with the hardware. But 1995, 1986,

man, it was the wild east on Famicom. It was... People just dipping their toe right into it. It was, man. It was just like, you know, one of the reasons the Famicom disc system came out

was because there was no quality control on cartridges. And people were talking, Like, the system was three years old. And, you know, critics were like, well, this market's crashed. And it was going exactly the way of the 2,600. But eventually there was kind of a winnowing. And I think it also helped that they did put quality controls in place for the U.S., like concept approval and things like that. So, you know, that was a huge market.

So I think that kept the market from completely imploding and made Famicom development continue to be viable. But, yeah, Kempco was definitely part of that gold rush. and you did not see a lot of gold come out of the rush. It was mostly the stuff that was just left over in the pan. Now, when we're talking about Kemko in the early days, especially on the NES, there were a couple of mainstays at the company that actually worked on both games that they would contract in from other developers and also the internal projects. Hiroyuki Musuno was a part of every single game as the music composition.

And he did sound design for a lot of games, including the epic sound design for games like DejaVu, Shadowgate Uninvited, which did not originally have sound when it was part of the Mac Venture series. Yeah, they were Mac games. So that was just like simple speaker beeps. Right. And his work, I cannot say like when I thought very well initially about doing Kempcosa Cica games here, I was thinking like how I loved, you know, deja vu. and Uninvited and Shadowgate. And I think the music has a lot to do with it. Yeah, Kimco didn't actually make those games.

They just converted them from Macintosh. But the overlay of glaze that they put onto it and the actual system, the mechanics, how you control the game with the point and click, that's all Kimco Seika. That's true. Sakei. Yeah, so we should actually talk about the name a little bit. So obviously, Kimco started out as Kotabuki Engineering and Manufacturer. That's the KEM and Kemko.

SACA, I think, I think that was just their U.S. branches name. And they included that name because the company was based in SACA, Japan. Yes. And so it's kind of a weird choice. Why not just call them Kimco? Maybe there was like another company already called Kimco in America. Yeah, I'm not sure. But they were like, well, this is Kimco and they're from a place in Japan you've never heard of.

Okay, sure. But yeah, Kimco, Kimco, Seca, they are the same thing. Yeah, with the dash right in the middle. And it's a memorable name. I remember it from my youth. It's like I would always, it would always just pop into my mind. Like, wow, I like saying it. It is fun to say.

And it also, it fits the cadence of the Muppet Baby's theme so you can sing it that way. Kim Kosaka, you make hot dreams come true. I don't know about that. But they definitely made some video games. So on the other side, we have Kiminari Sueda, who is a great. graphic designer and he along with Hero they were they were kind of locking it

down throughout the entire NES mainstay of all the games that they brought in and so those two in my eyes were kind of the backbone of Kemko Seika as through the

NES years anyways and somewhat into the SNS years as well so yeah I have some, I have a couple of notes on a couple of notes on Hero. Since I'm in love with a lot of the music that he does. As I said, he's best-knownst for composing the NIA soundtracks for Dejavu, Shadowgate, Uninvited. And he left the company in March 1998 and started working for Compile as an executive producer.

He kind of pinballed around after that. Yeah, I was going to say the compile was not long for the world after that. Right, right, yeah. Maybe not the best career choice. He actually started his own company, the ICA Corporation, where he programmed and translated video games, which is important work. And then now he works with our friends at Arc Systems as a game designer programmer and sound engineer.

So he has gotten just more and more prolific and he's started to learn a lot more as he's gone through his career and good on him because you got to leave the sinking ship that was KEMCO at the time. Yeah, it was kind of rough. But I guess it was kind of rough all along. So after Do Boy, you get to 1986, and I think the big game for Kempco that year was Spy versus Spy, which was another computer port. Yes. And I remember that getting a lot of coverage in Nintendo Power, but it just didn't look that appealing to me.

And it kind of has the same thing going on as Sunsoft's xenophob, but I don't think it's as good. I don't think so either. In that game, it was just very confusing. It wasn't intuitive at all. You were searching desk drawers for different types of, like, weapons to use against the other spy. Right. So it was based on the Mad Magazine cartoon by Sergio Argoniz, right? Yes.

Yeah. Nice. I just looked that up the other day. Okay. It's been a long time since I read Mad, but I do remember the people who made the good cartoons. And that was, I think Spy versus Spy was always no dialogue. It was just like pantomime cartoons of a black spy and a white spy. Very classic.

Neither one was the good guy. Neither one was the bad guy. They were both just spies. And, you know, neither one was guaranteed to win. You never knew which spy was going to come ahead, which was actually kind of more interesting than having like a good guy, bad guy. Agreed. Uh, arrangement.

Because you never knew, like, the outcome would be unpredictable. And you would have someone to root for, which is something that I think was genius about it. Like, are you. black spy or are you a white spy guy oh white spy no way man black spy all the way and and you know when you got down to the end of it um you would feel better if your spy won right and so yeah the two spies the black and white spies were always uh outdoing each other with like devious traps and you know just performing espionage feats and trying to get away with secret documents and so forth it

was very, it was very cold war, very like sort of post James Bond. And so this game tried to convert that into a simultaneous two-player action game with a split screen where you see, you can see what's happening on the other person's screen. And you can see if they're like laying down traps. But, you know, you have to kind of keep that in mind while you're also setting up diabolical traps for the other player. So it's kind of a multitasking game. And it's, it's kind of clever. But yeah, I don't think it really played that well on NES. Right, yeah. You would have to have someone who's been stuck with the game for a while, as, as, you know, a lot of us were. You had a rental or, you know, maybe your parents bought this, you know, pile for you. And you just learned how to play it. It would take two people that were in those unfortunate circumstances together to actually have a good spy versus spy game. Someone who really understands the mechanics or two people. Right. So also in 86, they produced another computer port electrician for the disc system.

which I don't really know that much about that game. I don't either. Just watching videos of it, it was like, okay, it was a game that existed. And they also developed, I think, their first two original games, which were Space Hunter and Time Stranger or Time Etranger. I think those are the same thing. I've definitely seen something called, in, like, Japanese stores, something called Time Etranger, which is just French for Stranger.

Okay, sure. but I don't know that much about them. They also are games that I like. I see these games and I look at the packages and the photos on the back of the box and think, no, I can't see spending $35 for this. So they've passed me by. And good, good. I'm sure you were much better off for it.

So we move on to 1987 where they, I think they took a different approach. Instead of just licensing an existing Western game, they licensed a Western property and brought it to Famicom. And this game actually made it over to the U.S. on N.S. Oh, man. And that is, oh, I know you love it. It's, yeah, the first Superman game for ES.

Oh, my God. I guess it was the only Superman game for N. Jeremy, okay, so I spent some time I actually popped it in. And I had never played this before. And I mean, Superman talks to a really super cute version of the Statue of Liberty. What's not to like that? Oh, it is. Yeah, it's cheeby and it's nice.

And, like, oh, man, the Statue of Liberty is adorable. And, you know, Superman, looks pretty adorable, too. The style, the graphics are, are okay. Let me say that right off the bat. Also, like, they're trying a lot of new ideas in this game, which I think is also very good. Yeah, 87 was definitely a year of innovation and creativity on the Famicom where people were really, developers were really saying, like,

RPGs are what's in. We've got to put RPG components and elements into all of our games. We've got to add depth. We can't just have action games. It's got to be something more. And this game does give you more. You have six different superpowers that you can access. And power-ups from each come from beating up different thugs in the city.

And they leak out powers. But let me tell you, there are D power-ups, I call them, that pop out of enemies. They take your energy away. Man, is that? I hate that. Okay, so this sounds like Athena in a way, almost, where things come out of enemies and you're like, I didn't want that. Yes, yes. Kingsfield was another one that did that.

And, uh, hell no. Okay. So like, it's a mess. It's a mess. Um, I'm sorry. Not Kingsfield. Chesterfield? No, no. It was by square. One of the. Oh, Kings Knight. Kings Knight. I'm sorry. I was thinking, I was thinking Chesterfield by, uh, Victor Kai. We, we both got screwed up there. But yeah, Kings Knight did that as well. Yeah, I hate that design philosophy. Yeah, I do too. It's especially Superman. Like how. That's the thing. Unless it's hard tonight. How do you make a. How do you make a. game out of Superman, a guy who can do everything. Like, unless you cripple him somehow and debilitate him, you can't make an interesting and

challenging game. And that's the whole point of Superman is that he can do anything. And the question is like, how is he living the best life and being the best example he can be? And that doesn't come through in video games. And so you get stuff like this. Right. So tell us about what's wrong with Superman by Kim Kosaka. First of all, I have one more good thing to say about it.

The map on this is a very extensive map. You can ride subways to one place or another. And you can also go up in the air and fly to different places. But not all places. So it limits you there for some reason. But, okay, so when you jump, you jump like seven to eight times the size of your pixel-pixelated caricature. So you mentioned Mighty Bomb Jack in here. Yes.

It is basically all of the physics of. mighty bomb jack without the precise control of mighty bomb jack and it's awful it is just awful the collision detection is terrible um you can punch okay you can punch enemies from like three feet away which is fine but they're also going to just shoot bullets that are the size of characters at you which is also crazy um and of course superman is very vulnerable to bullets as we all no wait what right exactly so you can go into the movie when someone shot him in the eye and there was like a slow mo of the bullet like crumpling against his eyeball, that's Superman. This is not Superman. This is not Superman. And even when, you know, your Clark Kent,

you have these terrible controls. Now, what happens between Clark Kent and when you turn into Superman by going into a phone booth? Well, not much. You get to jump like one or two characters higher and your punches do moderately more damage. I mean, Clark Kent is Superman. Clark Kent is just a disguise for Superman. So it's fine, like, I guess, but yeah, I don't know. So the MPCs, they're awful. They, they tell you stuff like, I don't know how to speak English or what are you doing here? And I know nothing. It gives you no exposition, no help at all. I hate it. I hate almost everything about this game. It really frustrated me when I put it in. I played it. I gave it a good chance. I gave it like 30 minutes. I just couldn't do it, Jeremy. I hear you. There's just, Superman's not a good character

to turn into a video game. He's just, you know, unless you did some sort of like, you know, I could see like some sort of animal crossing-ish kind of game where instead of being about performing amazing feats of, you know, like combat and stuff, it's more about like, how do I manage metropolis and, you know, like keep everyone safe and, you know, balance my time as a reporter with saving the world. See, I just came up with a great idea and someone needs to pay me money

to make this game. Nintendo? Well, probably Warner. Warner's kind of on the Mortal Kombat kick, so they'd have to find some way to make it like angry, bloody. Oh my God, can you imagine a Mortal Kombat Animal Crossing hybrid? It depends on which

way you go. Are you going to turn Mortal Kombat characters cute and friendly, or are you going to turn Animal Crossing violent? Because that's like the most common kind of Animal Crossing satire. So, I don't know. Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know which way to go because either one is gold to me.

All right. Well, there you go. Oh, man. Anyway, this is not that Superman game. It's bad. Avoid it at all costs, everyone. All right, but starting in 1988. All right, now we're getting this stuff.

What you have is KEMCO licensing the Mac Venture series from ICOM simulations, an American company or Canadian or something, that made four, I think, graphical adventure games for Macintosh. Dejavu. Uninvited. Dejavu to Las Vegas or leaving Las Vegas or let's go Las Vegas. And finally, Shadowgate. And I think Shadowgate is the most beloved and popular of these games. I agree.

It actually, I don't know if it was the first one released in the U.S. It wasn't the first one they converted. But it's definitely the one that made the biggest impression. So why don't we just lump all these together? Because they all came out around the same time. And they all were very much of a piece. They were. They had the same graphical implementation, the point and click interface that Kempco put it in, was actually very good. It's a lot like Maniac Mansion. Yeah, well, you know, this came before Maniac Mansion, or at least on NES, and was actually very pioneering. I mean, you can look at this and say, like, oh, well, they pulled a lot of the concepts here from, you know. The Scum engine.

Well, no, I was going to say it was before Scum. Right. From the Ujihori's Portopia. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. Rinjoku Satujin. I can't remember the exact time. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, like, that was the first game that really said, how can we take a, you know, a PC adventure and make it work on a console? And this took notes from that. But, you know, the graphic works, what was this name, Inouye? Uh, hero. No, Sueda, that's it. Oh, Sweda, yes. I don't know where I was getting Inouay from.

Swayda, he tried to make the graphical interface visually appropriate to the games in question. So in Shadowgate, it's like everything is taking place, like, you know, there's like a pin writing out the text on a scroll. Yes. And in DejaVu, you play as a detective. And so it's like you've got a little notebook with like lined paper. Yeah, and the typewriter goes across. And then uninvited, there's a spider. Right.

So he really puts some thought into, you know, making this look good. and, you know, giving it some personality. And I think that went a long way towards selling the game. You know, it is like these, we're all graphical adventures. So the bottom, I would say the bottom third of the screen was basically given over to, you know, text. Action commands, yeah. And so then I think, I want to say the left side was menus. And there was like, you know, menus that kind of had layers to them.

Oh, it was the right side. The right side. Okay. Yeah, the last side was the window into the view. That's right. Yeah, the room. Basically, your inventory would take up the upper right, right-hand side, and the bottom third would be how you interacted with both the graphical pane and the inventory that you had

on the upper right. So these games, you know, they are 80s graphical adventures, so they can be unfair, they can be arbitrary. They have moments where you're like, this sucks. Yes, very unfair deaths a lot of times. But that actually is part of the charm with Shadowgate because it's not super punitive. You can save any time. So you know, like, before I do something, I should just save the game.

So, you know, you pick up a sword. Oh, and a kraken comes out of the water and eat you and death shows up. Well, that's fine. It's okay. Also, another thing that makes it okay is in the ports anyway for NES, if you died, you just want to screen back. So saving wasn't actually, you didn't need to like scum save through it. as, you know, a lot of people. So, like, you would just go one screen back.

It's not that much of a penalty. And another thing about dying is this game had a sardonic tone. It was, it was always very sarcastic. And the ways that you would die are humorous. The flavor text is really amusing. Yeah, this game has a really, Shadowgate especially has a kind of strange reputation in Japan. It's not quite Kuso gay. but it definitely

like it's kind of seen I think with a mixed of affection and bemusement because they rewrote the text to be more first person in perspective and it's very very lurid and exaggerated so it has this kind of like

reputation is this sort of goofy game they like played up a lot of the elements way more than they are in the American version I did not know that. So, yeah, it has kind of this like oddball place in the Japanese Famicom Pantheon. But, yeah, the flavor text in this game, all three of the games really, like, it's really sharp and clear and funny. And, you know, there's a lot of snark to it. Like, well, you really blew that one, didn't you?

Yes. And that really, that really works in its favor because, especially at the time, there were not that many games on NES with even competent writing. So to get not just competent, but like funny and good writing, that made a huge difference. Like there's a lot of appeal to that. So it really made these games stand out. Absolutely. With all these games coming out with, I mean, just blatant misspellings and grammar errors, this was a real nice breath of fresh air here. Now, the ports here also added a hint system, which was not in the Mac Venture series, by heading the select button, but rarely would it actually help you. It would give you very, very vague hints or just give you nothing almost. It's just

be like a more flavor text, which is fine. But it was a convoluted game. I mean, I'm telling you a lot of the solutions in this game are not telegraphed at all. You're just kind of blindly reaching out using items here and there, unless you really pay attention. Yeah, but that's a function of the original games. That is the, you know, how they were designed. Truth. That is not Kimco being like, thou, you don't know how to make games. It was, it was really like, this is how Icom design games. And, you know, at the time, this was, again, before Scum. This was before Maniac Manchin. And so the idea of a fair and balanced and friendly and approachable adventure game, that just didn't really exist. So these games, I think, were kind of ahead of the curve in that sense,

because, yeah, they would kill you instantly and they had some cheap deaths, lots of cheap deaths, and things could be confusing. But I think on the whole, they were much clearer than you would see in like a Sierra game. And I know people get upset when we talk about Sierra games because we don't have much nice to say about them. But, you know, like they kind of set the tone

for adventure games in the 80s where it was just like, ah, screw you. Oh, you didn't do one little random thing that you didn't know about and wasn't obvious at the, like in the first five minutes of the game. Well, you can't actually finish this game now. Sorry about the last 20 hours. You're screwed.

Yeah, Shadowgate didn't do that. Like, I think the worst thing that could happen was you farted around too long and you would run out of torches. But I think even then there's a way to work around that, isn't there? No, there isn't. There's only a set amount of torches in the game. So that does give you a definitive time limit, which I think is a really neat aspect to it. But it's extremely generous. It is.

I mean, I remember beating this game in a weekend at the time without, you know, without like a guide or anything. English was back in before game. Wow, you've seen them. What's that? I said, wow, you phenom. No calls to Nintendo Power. No, but this was the only one I did that for, like uninvited and deja vu I never finished. Yeah.

But Shadowgate, for some reason, I don't know, Shadowgate especially, but all three of these games really showed off one of Kempco's strengths in the NES era, which was great box art. Oh, hell, yeah. The original Shadowgate is especially dynamic. It's got a gargoyle that is like transformed. It's in the process of transforming from stone to flesh. And it's printed. It's like a, you know, painted, airbrushed at this very dynamic angle that's kind of breaking out of the frame of the box. And like kind of interacting in a destructive way with the trade dress of the box, it really stands out.

It's got like some neon colors to it, like neon green and a very vivid red. It just really stands out like against white and black. Yeah. It's really great graphic design. And that carried through to a lot of their games. Well, deja vu, it captures all the noir that, you know, the music's there. But that box art, man, I'm telling you. It's got like a detective, like, standing against a brick wall looking kind of over a shoulder at the distance, right? Oh, man. It draws, like, wow, it sparks the mind in the imagination. And it's exactly what you do in the game. So, like, whoever they did to commission, if that was internal, or they, they, they, they. They maybe went out to a different artist.

They nailed it. Absolutely. Agreed. Yeah. I don't know. So anyway, these are, I would say the Mac Venture games on NES are very strong and I think maybe kind of give Kempco a better reputation among the NES literati than they necessarily deserve. I agree. But you have to hand it to them for recognizing these are good adventure games and they did a great job of porting them.

So is that really so bad? Like, I think they do deserve the plotts. Absolutely. They just were kind of fumbled a lot when they actually made their own games. For example, Ghost Lion, an extraordinarily generic RPG on NES. It was just, they said. With another remarkable box art. Yes.

Oh, my God. I love the box art. It's like, I'm going to go do aerobics and save the world. Oh, by the way, here's a lion. Oh, right. There's like, yeah, it's, I don't even know how to. It's just remarkable. Yeah.

Yeah, so it's an RPG with a female hero, a hero and a woman in the lead, and that's unusual for the time. It is. But for whatever reason, instead of saying, like, she should be in cool armor, they were like, she should be wearing, you know, like, aerobics, an aerobics outfit, like, you know, leg warmers and the, the off the shoulder t-shirt and everything. The headband, yeah. Yeah, and like super frosted, uh, permed out blonde hair. And a white lion. It's like, I'm pretty sure she's Siegfried and Roy's assistant. I think, you know, when they were researching, when they were researching the Las Vegas part of the uninvited or deja vu two that never released, they were just like, let's go to Vegas and let's go see Sigfried and Roy.

Oh, that chick. She should be on our cover. Grab her. Actually, yeah, let's paint her. Let's paint her right now. Yep. So, yeah, not a great game, but definitely one of the best. covers of the NES era?

I would have to, I would put it up there. Most memorable. Yeah, there we go. There it is. There's also in, in, what are we? 88. There's also, or 89, maybe, rescue the embassy mission.

Okay. Which is famous for being a game you can finish in five minutes. Yeah. Okay. So I played this too. Okay. Let's, let's hear about it. All right.

So this was developed by InfoGrams initially in 88 for PCs in France, actually. The original title was hostages, which makes sense. Kempco kind of snapped it up right. away, gave it the Nintendo bath, which includes censoring the nationality and the politics. Kimco had a relationship with infograms of some sort, and I don't know what it is, but we'll talk about more another of their infograms games later. But yes, I guess maybe this is the beginning of a strange and somewhat not beautiful relationship. Agreed. So basically, initially you got ground floor soldier positioning. You have to dodge spotlights. That's part

one of the game. There's three phases to it. Um, and then this, uh, part two is the search and destroy, which basically you are a sniper on top of a building and you are looking through nine different windows through a sniper scope. And when a, a shadowy figure goes, uh, appears in a window pane, you must shoot. And, uh, that way you clear out a lot of the, uh, the, the terrorists that are attacking the embassy. And then you get a, a little bit of a cutscene where, you see a helicopter drop off some more operatives on top of the building and the third part is basically

scaling the wall on the outside and you get to bust in through a window and then the last part of it is kind of like a first person like, do you remember Zybots Atari games? Okay, so it's a lot like that.

But on the 8th bit NES and yeah you kind of just turn around and if you see an enemy, like you have a map and you just shoot them and you spray them. I mean, that was in a few games at the time. That was in the first Golgo 13, top secret episode. Okay, yeah.

And a platoon. Oh, platoon. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. Holy moly, that's another crappy game. Really weird scene where you're a sequence where you're mowing down tunnel rats. It's weird.

Or not the tunnel dwellers as a tunnel rat. Yeah. So, no, I totally forgot about that. But that's the game, folks. Thanks for playing. Thanks for spending $59.99 or $49. hope you had a great time. But yeah, once you got good at it,

basically all you could do is up the difficulty and thanks for playing. And so, I don't know. That's, I would have been, I would have been really esteemed if I spend my hard-earned money on that. Yeah, I could see that not going over well. So that's that.

Yeah. I mean, I don't have much else to say about it. Right. So that was, that was maybe not the best pickup they could have gotten from, you know, a license choice. Oh, hey, you know, one other thing, One other thing I wanted to say is that it uses squad-based combat way before, like, Tom Clancy or Rainbow Six or anything like that.

I will give it that. I mean, it's actually a beautiful looking game for the NES, too. So there are good points to it. It's just over too quick. Yeah, that's all. Yeah, there's just nothing there. It's, like, extremely slight. It would be, like, you know, a QTE or two in a modern game.

Right, yeah. But it's missing the other 40 hours of gameplay. True dat. game that Kimco picked up from another license they picked up from the West around this time was Bugs Bunny and lots of other licenses really because they gave us the crazy castle Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle but that game was many things. It started out actually in Japan on disk system as a Roger Rabbit game just called Roger Rabbit and that's different than LJN's Roger Rabbit developed by Rare which was kind of like an adventure weird sort of game

in the Ghostbusters vein. This was just a puzzle platformer where originally Roger Rabbit was running around trying to avoid the weasels. That's why all the enemies kind of on NES have like the green and white and I think red color schemes, even though it doesn't make sense for Sylvester to be green. And they all behave the same. It's because they're all just weasels. Well, they don't all behave the same, but they don't really necessarily behave like you would expect. But when they brought that to Game Boy, they called it Mickey Mouse in Japan. And they just, like, switched over the graphics to be Mickey Mouse characters.

And when they brought it to NES and Game Boy in America, they called it Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. And they switched the graphics. Same gameplay just to be, you know, Bugs, Sylvester, Yosemite, Sam. I can't remember who else. But, yeah, it's like all these characters trying to kill Daffy Duck, even, trying to kill Bugs Bunny for some reason. And it's not a terrible game. I think there was an angry video game nerd episode that exaggerated how bad it is, as always. Oh, yeah.

But as an actual game. I think we all remember what happened in that episode. I haven't seen it. So I, what did happen? Oh, well, um, well, um, well, he beats, uh, he beats a, he beats the living crap out of Bugs Bunny and then ends up, uh, defecating all over him. So, so. Okay. In classic nerd.

That explains a lot of the comments I got on my, uh, crazy castle video. All right. Good to know. Sure. Uh, it is not that bad. It's, it's a perfectly serviceable little game. game. And apparently it did really well for Kimco because this became one of their mainstay series. Yes. I think it got like four or five sequels. And they just, they, they,

they hoard that series out. Uh, it's license. The license attached to Crazy Castle include Roger Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Hugo, which is like a, I think a French cartoon series, Garfield, and Kid Clown. Wow, I don't remember Kid Clown. Well, no, that's because that's Kimco's original character do not steal. They, I guess, eventually said, what if we just did one of these games with our own character now that Crazy Castle is a brand? And so they did, and I don't know, Crazy Castle, or Kid Clown is mostly notable for starring in a game called Kid Clown in Nightmare World. It's not Nightmare, it's like the mayor of the night, like the elected official who officiates, you know, the evening

hours. I don't know. They, they did some weird stuff. That is odd. I didn't catch that. That wasn't a crazy castle game. That was like an isometric or, you know, oblique 3D perspective platformer. Kind of like land stalker, but as a linear platformer. And that's weird. Yeah. That's really odd. I didn't get a chance to play that one. So, but the way you're describing it, how would that even work? Not great. Yeah. One game that I think does work really well and that deserves some credit, and it's

original, more or less, for Kimcoe, is the sort of hope. Their very first Game Boy game. That came out really early in the Game Boy's life. And, I mean, it's very clearly them saying, well, you know, we have a lot of success with these Macaventure games, and kids love this, and we've got this engine here that we developed for like the adventure scenes. But what if we made something that kids in Japan would like more? What do kids in Japan like more? Oh, they like RPGs. So it's a hybrid adventure game RPG. And it works really well. I really like it. It's a very good game. I need to play all

the way through it someday. But, you know, what I have played, you know, probably spent five hours with it. It's very entertaining and fun and is a really fresh take on two genres. I remember going to high school and I had a subscription to Nintendo Power at the time and I had already played through Kimco's shadow gate, deja vu and when I saw

that the Sword of Hope was from Chemco and they gave it a really high rating and I just saw the screenshots I was ecstatic. I was like, I'm picking this up day one and I did and yeah, I had a great time with Sort of Hope. I thought it was very well done. Yeah, meshing. Yeah, I

recommend anyone who has the opportunity to track that down, do it. I think Sort of Hope 2 is available on 3DS virtual console, and I think that's pretty much the same game. It's a much rarer or more expensive game. So, like, you can pick up Sort of Hope pretty cheaply. I think Sort of Hope 2 is pricey. So grab that $3 virtual console game and give it a try, because they're pretty much

the same thing, I believe. So we're kind of almost out of the NES era here with, with Chemco. Yep. They released a game called North and South, and I didn't look up this game in advance, but I believe that is also a port of a strategy game from another publisher or another developer. And it's one of those games that you're like, oh, Koea didn't make that? Okay, that's weird. Yeah, it seems like it would have Koea written all over it.

But I guess Koea was like, no, we just want to study, you know, focus on Japanese and European history. Thank you. We don't care about your American history. This is like a stripped down, a very... very stripped down, like Nomenaga's ambition type of thing with, you get your troops and you, you know, you converge on certain cities, according to the Civil War, of course. And, and yeah, it's, it's decent for what it is, but it did not hold my attention very much. I played it for about 15 minutes.

Yeah. I wonder if they could release a Civil War-based game these days. It's such a hot-button topic. Yeah, I don't know. Kind of hard to sympathize with the Confederates. Awesome. Right. I agree with that.

100%. Um, so also in 1990, another license game, this one starring Snoopy, Snoopy's magic show, which is bad. Uh, it's a question work. I mean, maybe it's not bad and I just don't like it, but I didn't, I didn't enjoy playing it for Game Boy works. It's, um, yeah, you're like, you play as Snoopy for some reason. There's nothing about the game that is especially Snoopy-ish.

and the magic show is that there's a ball that bounces around and you're trying to find all the woodstocks in a level before the ball hit you and the ball will kill you because Snoopy is not good at magic I guess So he's like, I don't know, summons some sort of demon that has possessed the soul of this ball And wants to destroy him I really don't know I believe that Woodstock has special powers that could protect Snoopy

Oh yeah? That's why he's hunting for him I see well no, you've found Find all the woodstocks and you just move on to the next level. Oh. There's like five woodstocks on the stage. Yes. Well, maybe that's the help. He just needs a secretary and then he can go on.

That's right. Yeah, anyway, not a great game. But you seem to have a lot of thoughts on Snoopy's silly sports spectacular for NES. Well, let's hear about that. Okay. So I don't really have many thoughts on it. Although, originally this was developed by Gremlin Graphics as alternative world games. Now, this is not a direct.

port over. Chemco did some work to this, and this originally appeared on the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC, and ZX-Betcrum. Promising? Promising, right. Okay, so what had happened in Japan? This was originally called Donald Duck. Now, this harkens back. Oh, God, again? Yeah, this harkens back to the Bugs Bunny crazy castle thing. So, Kempco had the rights to release the Disney-based video games in Japan, so they chose Donald Duck.

Now, for North America, Kempco decided to license Snoopy for the North American version because they did not have that. Capcom had those rights. So they went to Snoopy instead. And so we get this amazing game that features six mini games. I'm not going to go too much in a detail about this, Jeremy. It's a two-player game, and that is its biggest strength. Let me just say that.

yeah i mean honestly to me the the marketing or the licensing is more interesting than the game right but anytime someone puts the word sports and a game title i'm like uh i don't care it's basically uh on onyx's uh winter games but epics i'm sorry epics and uh yeah but stripped down and uh not as good oh not as good at all too bad because winter games hasn't really aged that well either no it hasn't but yeah the the weird the weird licensing stuff I'm sure has to do with the regionality. Like, you know, Capcom had the

the Donald Duck license. Right. Ducktails and everything. All the Disney stuff wrapped up on an EAS. So Kimco was like, well, we'll just shove a different sprite in there. Good to go. You know what? They were good at it. I mean, like, Snoopy's magic show, that did not need to be a Snoopy game. There is nothing, nothing whatsoever

that is Snoopy about that game. There's no great pumpkin. You were not flying a sop with camel. It's just you're a character who happens to look like Snoopy, and that's kind of the approach they took with all their license games. And it's brilliant, and that's what made Kempko put food on the table, and

that's where they made a lot of money. A lot of parents would come in and be like, well, let's get that Snoopy game for young Jonathan. Yep. He loves him some generic license games. Yes, indeed. So what do you say? So, yeah, I think we need to kind of wrap up here. But I do want to talk about 1991's Drockin, which is another, it's another infograms game and another PC port.

And, you know, this was very much kind of Kimco's bread and butter, but it's such a weird game. And it was, it's notable, you know, the Super NES was a role-playing game powerhouse. And Drachen is notable for being the first RPG to launch on Super NES in America. Cool. But it's a port of a PC game. And it's, it's really, it's, it's hard to wrap your. head around. It's a really abstract sort of game. Open world. So, uh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of, it's like super ambitious. So the world is open. It's divided into four quadrants.

There's like north, east, west, south, something like that. Um, and so you as a party of people that you put together from generic characters travel around and are trying to be like a dragon race, but some dragon races people are friendly and some are not. And sometimes you're walking along and all of a sudden a giant cat head pops out of the ground and uses lasers and kills you instantly.

A thing was scary. I was legitimately scared of that when I first played it. And it's interesting because it uses like this first person 3D perspective when you're exploring the overworld, but it's not using Nintendo the Super NES mode 7. It's like a primitive polygon

system. Yeah, I was going to say, are those those are like polygons. Yeah, it's like they, there was a lot happening with this game. And I feel like there's something really interesting there, but it just doesn't come together on Super Nias. There was a sequel that they published four years later called Dragon View, which is now very expensive because it's good and late.

And of course, it's expensive because it's super Nias. But that was like they really worked that one out a lot better. It has a great reputation. And it's supposedly a much better. take on the same drachen concept but yeah this is this is a challenging game it really is i think the most frustrating thing about is you don't really have direct control over your fighters when when when you're fighting it's it's very much a um you don't even have nice roll you don't even

have in indirect control with the menu it's not like final fantasy it's like a real-time combat system where your characters just automatically uh will wander into whatever direction they feel like wandering and attack whatever they feel like attacking. Very frustrating. And you can you can kind of issue commands, but it's very sort of hands off. It's a little bit like, you know, what they tried to do with ogre battle, except instead of being turn-based, it's all just happening on the fly. And like you can cast a spell on your characters to make them invisible. So I recorded a lot of footage of this game that is just like invisible sparkles like floating around, getting into battles and apparently dying. I don't know. Like,

oh yeah, and sometimes like stars will fall into the sky and turn into like some sort of star monster thing. I remember that. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's, that is a memory. Holy moly. I hadn't remembered that in a long time. It's, it's just a game that does nothing to explain itself. And I feel like, you know, if that had been like the only game I owned for my Super NES, I would have, you know, I would have cracked the code. I would have unraveled it. Absolutely. And figured it out. But I did not. I rented it and said, what? And because I did not with everyone else. I was not $60 in the hole for it. I had no obligation to continue playing. And so I didn't revisit it until I, you know, did a retrospective for Super NES works. And it makes a little

more sense to me as a man who has played many, many RPGs now. But it's still very, very abstract. act. They were doing a lot here or trying to do a lot. And I don't know how effectively they managed to pull that off. But God bless them for trying. And God bless them for Dragon View later on. All right. The last game that we have really kind of written up in detail is Phelanx. And it looks like you don't have details written about the game itself. No. But about the cover art. Right. And let's face it, Phelinks is a very middle of the road horizontal shooter for Super NES. And that is not a system that is known for being great for shooters. So the thing that does make the stand out is the extremely weird cover art, which is it's an old man with a banjo, like dressed like a hillbilly, sitting on his porch, looking shocked as space fighters fly overhead shooting at each other.

Right. And so, it's a weird choice. Basically, what the, uh, advertising company that Kempco had hired had said, they were interviewed by destructoid. And they basically said for different products, they would put different teams or different ideas on them. Well, for this one, they went for the quote, unquote, heavy huh factor. And they achieved it pretty, pretty dang good. A lot of people know about this cover because it is so, it does have the heavy huh factor. I never played the game.

But every time I saw it on the rental shop shelves back in the day, I would be like, what the hell? They got it out of everybody. And that's why it's so memorable. Yeah, the game itself is a very middle-of-the-road shooter. There's not much. I mean, it's solid. I'll give it that. Colorful and decent.

You know, there's nothing very much wrong with it. It's just not a very, it's not one of the upper echelon shooters that you hear people talk about. And you always hear about the cover art. So it's interesting that they actually tracked down the people who designed it and, you know, gave them an interview. And it's pretty cool. Kind of explaining the back. story of it. Yeah, I agree. But not necessarily a great game. God bless him for putting a weird cover out of it, though. All right, just to kind of wrap up here. I mean, this is kind of

Kimco in a nutshell. It's like, oh, yeah, this, I remember this. It wasn't that great, but I remember this. I mean, that's the company. I will say that arguably the worst thing they ever published was published in 1995 on Virtual Boy. And you say, oh, ha, ha, ha, virtual boy, that sucks. Of course it was bad. No, Virtual Boy was a troubled console system, but it wasn't inherently bad. Like the games on it were often quite good. However, Kimco is notable for having published the worst game to see release for Virtual Boy in America, and that's Virtual League Baseball. And it is just an absolute pile of crap. Like, I was able to find something, you know, I'm through the American Library of the Virtual Boy now for Virtual Boy Works.

I was able to find something redeeming about every game except this one. And it is, it is a bad, bad game by any standard. It's a bad baseball game by 1995 standards. Like the fact that, I don't know, this game would have been kind of like, eh, in 1983, where it to come out in 1995 and be this awful. It's embarrassing. Yeah, I mean. And also that advertising.

Oh, well, even irrespective of, the advertising, just the fact that they could release such a bad baseball game in 95 and does nothing to take advantage of the virtual boys' capabilities. Like, they could have done some sort of scaling effect or some sort of, you know, immersive in the field effect, but they didn't, they didn't. It's really bad. It's so terrible. And then they advertised it with, like, chili farts.

Yeah, the ass crack of someone watching a baseball game. Talking about chili farts. Chili dog parts. It played right into the play-it-loud type of marketing that Nintendo had going on at the time. But, God, it was just how many wrong moves can you make with one game? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to say that one game just doomed Virtual Boy on its own. The system could have been a contender, but then that came out. Oh, dude.

I don't know. That was bad. But finally, Swan Song, Kimco, well, not a Swan Song, but just, to wrap this, because we talked about what they do now, but maybe the most interesting choice in their later life was the N-64 and

Game Boy color conversions of Dicatana. They were not good at picking horses in the 90s, virtual league baseball for Virtual Boy, and then Dicatana, the infamous game that was supposed to be like the future of shooters

and was a giant mess and made John Romero look like an idiot. Didn't he make us, uh, his bitch? Not really yet. Well, this was the marketing team decision. And apparently John Romero was like, I'm not comfortable with this, but they said, no, it's great. Trust us. And everyone said, uh, no. So yeah, lots of bad moves made all around. Yeah, they started to stumble. They're pretty hard. But, you know, that's Kimco right there. That's the Kimco experience. Like, oh, that's interesting and bad. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of these.

podcast you go in and you're like, oh, I have lots of good things to say. And some of them, you go in and you're like, this probably isn't going to go anywhere good. And it doesn't. Like I said before, to sum up everything, I was excited about this. I said, yeah, all right. I bet you Kempco Psycha has a bunch of awesome games because I remember Dejavu and I remember Shadowgate. And I get down into it. And wow, they were a below average developer with a very smart, savvy publishing know-how. And that's how I would just sum them up. Yep.

Pretty much. So they have some successes, and they had a lot of failures. And they're still around making extraordinarily generic RPGs. So if you are in the mood for an extraordinarily generic RPG, you were to look. Just hunt for sake. Kimco on Nintendo Switch. And they will lull you to sleep.

Go to town. But, yeah, in any case, I would definitely recommend checking out the new remake of Shadowgate for Switch and Xbox 1 and PS4. It doesn't have the same kind of, like, unique style of art and the same sort of personality, but it still kind of hits all the points. It's a pretty faithful remake of Shadowgate with some modern niceties, like a talking skull Yorick, who will offer you hints if you want. and it's more on point than the hitting select on the NES version. So that's kind of cool. It's very beautiful. That legacy still kind of lives on.

I guess that's not technically a Kempco game, but they're the ones who brought it to everyone. They're the reason people love Shadowgate. True. So you have to give them the credit for that. But I think that's really all the energy I can give to Kempco. Here to you. I'm exhausted, buddy.

Why don't we wrap this up? So Anthony, tell us a little bit about yourself, self, and where we can find you on the big worldwide web. Okay, well, I do a podcast called Game and Movie Podcast. I've taken a break from it. I need to go and sew my oats other places. But I do have a punk rock and roll band. We're called Holy Shit, and we're doing a Japan and Vietnam tour.

Okay. And we're leaving on Thursday. So everyone wish me good luck. I suppose by the time you hear this, I'll be back already with lots of cool Japanese food in my stomach or else you'll be hiding in the embassy one of the two oh one of the one of the two that's right um but yeah that's that's a little bit about me if you want to check out game and movie podcast you can check out old episodes on youtube and uh i don't know maybe you can throw me a message on twitter under game and movie podcast as well or i think it's game and movie podcast USA

thank you jeremy for uh let me appear on retronauts again yeah actually uh absolutely thanks for uh thanks for joining and um Yeah, it's good to have you on the show. Of course, Retronauts, you can find at Retronauts.com, on iTunes, on various other platforms such as Libson. We go live every Monday and every other Wednesday or Friday. And that's something you can listen to for free. But if you would like those episodes early and with higher audio quality for all those cool game music interludes, I would recommend going to Patreon.com slash Retronauts, where for $3 a month, which is less than the cost of a coffee at most. you know, coffee shop chains, you can get yourself a one week early access to every episode of Retronauts. And for higher values, you can even get cool bonuses and stuff. So that's maybe something worth doing. I don't know. It would be great to have your support, but even if you don't support us, we're still grateful for you taking your time to listen to our podcast. And we will be back in however many days, I don't know what episode this is going to be. We'll be back soon.

with another episode, so look forward to that, and look forward to probably another episode with Anthony next year at Midwest Gaming Classic. And in the meantime, don't go play those Kimco RPGs. I guess it's... Click, please don't. Thank you.