Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 80: Famicom Boom-era Developers

Episode Date: November 28, 2016

TOSE! Towa Chiki! VAP! Meldac! SunSoft! Atelier Double! These are but a few of the studios we (that is, Jeremy, Dr. Sparkle, and Frank Cifaldi) explore in this look at weird, often terrible games made by vanished Japanese developers in the '80s. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronaut's total crap. of Retronauts, and I apologize if that does not line up with a number that you see in your iTunes, because it's not my fault. I'm just making a guess here. Hello, I'm Jeremy Parrish. I'm hosting this week. You may recognize my voice if you are a regular listener.

And this week, I've got people who aren't Bob in the studio, because Bob is maybe dying somewhere. It's really, it's sad. I mean, that's literally true. He could be, you never know. I mean, actually everyone is dying. Dying. Yeah, we're dying in this room.

That's right, exactly. And it's not just because of our bad comedy. So who do I have here with me this week as we talk about things that are total crap? So I'm Frank Sevaldi, and I think I'm here because I shipped a bad game. That's actually not why I invited you, but sure, sure, yes. You can be our man in the field. Okay. Share with us the experience of making a bad video game.

I totally will. What bad video game was that? I mean, it wasn't bad, bad, but. I would say Shark Nato, the video game, is sort of a modern equivalent of a lot of the games. I guess so, but, I mean, at the same time, like, I remember when you were working on that game, and there was a certain element of pride and satisfaction in it, too. Yeah, because, like, all of my dumb ideas made it in. But it was also a two-month project that was budgeted at about half of what it should have been.

Yeah, you seem super thrilled to be working on that at the time. Yeah, I made a really dumb game. I'm so proud of it, but it's also a bad game. And we, you know, it's, I don't know, it's a Shark Nado game. It's supposed to be bad. Right. I feel like it hit on point. But the point is that, you know, I have some personal insight into how I would imagine a lot of these games went down.

And who was that whose voice we just heard? This is Dr. Sparkle of the Cron Tendo series. And I'm the guy for some reason who is playing every single NES and Famicom game in chronological order. That's right. You're now 750 games into that project. So... Is that true? You've done 50 episodes with 15 games per...

Oh, yeah. You're probably right. So, yeah. So you have played most of the games that are kind of the milieu of this podcast. I mean, by the time... You're what up to like 1989 now? Late 89, yeah. Yeah, so by that point, most of the bad Japanese stuff had been winnowed out.

And now it was kind of moving more toward bad American and European. and stuff. Episode 50, the last one, was pretty much all bad games. Okay, bad in a different sense. Like, the stuff I'm thinking of is more like convoy no-nazo, that kind of thing,

where it's just like, how do you make video game? Right, these guys were, didn't really know what they were doing. It was sort of like a new medium in some sense to them. So they were exploring and often failing. I feel like 89 in Japan is about

when there's a video game industry as opposed to a toy industry that makes video games. And that actually kind of ties into the nature of a lot of the companies that are going to be covered to some degree in this episode. But yeah, so

the topic of this episode specifically is I put dreadful Famicom Boom era developers. That's not really entirely fair. But the topic is really meant to explore all these, like, little companies that made video games in the mid to late 80s in Japan

that, you know, emerged in response to the popularity of Nintendo's family computer and then kind of, for the most part, vanished pretty quickly. They made some games. They mostly were not good games, and then they went away. It's a, I guess, you know, every generation has that. But I personally have a fascination with a lot of these companies because a lot of them survived long enough to make a Game Boy or two, so I've been stumbling across them in the course of doing the Game Boy World project, and I'm like, what the hell is an Atelier double? So then I start, you know, reading up on these companies, and I'm like, oh, they made some

other really crummy games that I've heard of or, you know, no by reputation or no by having watched Cron Tendo. So it's kind of this continuity of mediocrity. And, you know, not every company making video games back in the 80s was a Nintendo or a Konami or a Capcom. In fact, very few of those companies were a Nintendo or Konami on Capcom. That's why we elevate those, you know, those three companies, those kind of rare and exceptional developers and publishers because they made things that were really great. like for whatever reason their people grasp the ins and outs not only of good game design which they sort of had to intuit and create from scratch because that was still being defined

but also how to make that work and express that within the limitations of the NES which was not a very capable machine I mean by the standards of 1983 sure but the standards of 1989 maybe not so much yeah and you know I might be mistaken also but I feel like at least in this era Nintendo Japan didn't have as strict of a publishing policy as Nintendo of America although I do know they had one

like you had to be a licensed publisher for the Famica Yeah they went after those guys who were unlicensed Like all those guys making those Like hacker Yeah all those Boro chan stuff yeah

because they I think they Or Super Marioo They went after them in courts or something along those lines Or tried to Yeah so my understanding is that when the family computer launched, it was just a first-party machine.

For the first year, you just had Nintendo games. And then midway through 1984, you start seeing a few third-party publishers. Hudson. Namco, I think. Namco is one of them. There's a Konami. Taito was pretty early as well.

They were pretty early, elevator action. But it was mostly those. Oh, maybe Enix? Yeah, Enix. They did Door Door. pretty, yeah. So you had like a handful, maybe half a dozen companies that kind of showed up in 1984 and, you know, a lot of them had been working on PCs already. So it was kind of a logical jump for them to say, well, there's this other system that's starting to take off. Let's try out

some of our games over there. So you saw stuff like Load Runner, Doordor, some Namco arcade classics like Galaxian. It all made sense. Some Konami stuff that also showed up on MSX. So it was just, you know, those companies beginning to sort of explore. And about that time, the system really took off and exploded and became huge. So about a year after that, third parties really began in earnest, and you really started to see like an explosion. And by 1986, the Famicom market was glutted with third party stuff of incredibly dubious value. And there's a magazine clipping that I think was on schmupplations.

where there's like people, this is from 1986, lamenting that the family computer was dead, that it had been destroyed by bad third-party software, that it was all over, basically. And around that time, Nintendo launched the Famicom Disc System for the console. They launched the U.S. in America and then in Europe. And, yeah, they started to kind of crack down.

Like when they launched the NES, the NES, ES came with a security chip in place that forced third parties to, you know, publish through Nintendo. And that was where they really started to lock down their controls. But they couldn't really do that with the Famicom because there were millions of systems already out there. Well, and also, I just don't think there was any precedent for them to even think about that. Because, you know, we're talking 1983, the Famicom launches, right?

And in America, you know, we're still. still going through that like Atari and television age over here and we have a video game crash that is often blamed on a glut of product that is of dubious quality. Japan didn't have that, especially in 1983.

They didn't really have that equivalence. Whereas when the NES was launched here, they vary specifically in their marketing and publishing plans were actively combating what they identified were factors in

a crash and as part of that were not approving games that they thought were bad. Whereas in Japan that, you know, there were restrictions and they did have to go through Nintendo to publish, but I think they let a lot of, you know, kind of bad product through because it didn't really matter so much. There wasn't a crash that they were trying to prevent. Well, if you look back at the sort of history of Nintendo and the launch of the NES, like the, they didn't know that the Atari crash was coming, that the American market was about to collapse, they tried to distribute the NES, the Famicom, through Atari. Like, that's not something you do if you know that that company's about to go out of business or, you know, be severely impacted by those massive losses. So, yeah,

I mean, obviously they didn't build the Famicom with the foresight of knowing, well, you know, there's, we need more controls in this thing to keep it from imploding. And they did try to sort of factor that in after, you know, sort of after the launch, once third parties began to appear, it was something they could build into the international releases of the console. But again, like there were millions of Famicoms on the market at that point. You can't, like, start releasing games that will only run on certain, you know, systems with a security chip if there are two or three million security chip less systems in the market. So they just had to kind of use their clout, which at that point they had. Like, you know,

they, the FAMICOM had become huge. So they could, you know, sort of lean on publishers to say, you need to, you know, you need to go through us. And that actually caused some bad feelings with Namco. Namco, the reason most of their games were published through Tengen in America is because they basically said, well, we were here early. You gave us these favorable terms. Now you're going back on those.

And we feel like that's not, you know, like that's a poor, you know, you're acting in poor faith after we helped you build this console. So there were some really bad feelings there. And they moved over to PC engine development for a long time. So you see a lot of turbographics games. And then other Namco games that did come out for NES, like I said in America, mostly came through Tengen unlicensed because Namco is like,

let's stick it to Nintendo. Yeah, Namco didn't release games under their own name in the U.S. until early 90s. 92 or 93. Yeah, I mean, there wasn't a name. Namco home division in the U.S. until then is my understanding. Right, but they didn't release any very many official licensed games for a long time. Like, Tengen had Pac-Man, which they published as a licensed game.

And then that was like one of the three licensed games they did. And then that was reissued as an unlicensed game. And then eventually Namco republished it as a licensed product in like 1993. But aside from, I think, Zavius and Gallagher, which were published by Bondi in America, everything else from Namco, like Rolling Thunder and so forth, you know, RBI Baseball. Yeah, well, actually, maybe it was, what, tax hand? Yeah, that's right. But you saw a lot of, a lot of Tengen published Namco games, and that's part of why. So anyway, what was my point with all of this?

Oh, just that, you know, like... I was just trying to sort of get on the topic of why there are crappier games in Japan than there are here. Right. Yeah. I mean, there are something like 1,500, 1,500 Famicom games, official releases in Japan, and about 750 in America, like, yeah, somewhere around there. So literally, half as many games in the U.S. as in Japan. And it's not like we missed out on 750 amazing games. Basically, I mean, you take the number of games we have here, good and bad, and multiply those by two,

and you have twice as many crappy Famicom games as you do crappy NES games. Yeah, there aren't really a whole lot of hidden gyms that were Japan only, the Famicom. There's a few like Ataki, that music game gimmick. Yep. But most of the stuff that wasn't released here, I mean, we wouldn't have wanted it. released. Right. If we had seen what they were getting over there.

I mean, there's some cool stuff, but most of the stuff that came out just in Japan is like, oh, that's pretty cool. I would have enjoyed that back then, but very little like, oh my God, how do we miss out on this? Or like, you know, like there are some interesting, like, adventurey games, but I would argue the Princess Tomatoes the best one and we got that one. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, if a game came out in Japan and was good, then someone said, we should publish that in America because it'll make money over there.

So actually, I would say the proportions, we probably had a much higher proportion of good games. Like most of the stuff that came from Japan, not all of it, but like 50-50 that came from Japan to America, it was good. And then most of the bad stuff that you see on NES was probably developed like in the U.K. Or in the U.S. Right. It was made by Gremlin or Rare in like Two World Ocean. Don't forget beam software from Australia. Yeah.

Like those, I mean, which is not to, you know, throw shade at those companies, but they had a much later start with a hardware than Japanese publishers and developers. Well, they also, excuse me, they also came from a microcomputer background where they were, you know, making games that you bought for $2 at the grocery store. Right. So they would. And also standards of what was good in the UK was a lot different. I mean, I think their tastes were very different.

I mean, we play a lot. If we look at like these ZX Spectrum games, I mean, the people who live through that in the U.K., they love them, but... They all have Stockholm, say, yeah, they seem God-awful to us and just completely unplayable messes. But they also think N-E-S games look terrible. Well, yeah. Some of them do. Some, I don't know. It's a generalization.

But no, we're definitely right and they're wrong. Right. That's right. Make video games great again. That's going to be a dated reference by the time this episode drops. Thank God. Yeah, think of the lucky listeners in the future who are living in a post-election world. Yeah.

Well, maybe. We'll see how the hanging chads do this year. I mean, if you detect any fear in our voices, the election is two days away. Yeah, we're close to Armageddon here. I hope that we live to publish this episode. So anyway, yeah, like that's kind of the context for what we're talking about. So going back to 1985, when the Famicom starts to become really huge and everyone's like, let's get in on that. I mean, naturally, you had companies with background in video games who were like, let's jump in.

So you had like Capcom, which was a pretty young and plucky games developer in the arcade who were like, let's make some NES games or Famicom games. But Capcom didn't have, it was a little tiny company that made arcade games. They didn't have an NES or home development division. So what does a company like Capcom do when it wants to take a cool game like Ghost and Goblins or 1940? to the NES. Well, it says, let's contract that out. So you also had these companies blooming from nowhere that existed just to basically ghost write video games for publishers. And at the same time, you also had companies that had no experience in video games whatsoever.

Like record companies or electrical power companies that are like, well, kids like video games, we could do video games. Why not? I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense for Meldac, a jazz music label, to say, let's make video games because it's a package media product, kind of like a jazz record, sort of. But I don't know about Squarespace, soft, which emerged from, like I said, an electrical power company. I mean, yes, video games run on electricity, but I don't know. But both involve money coming in to the company's coffers. That's ultimately the most important thing.

And you have to keep in mind the economy of the time, this was the very roundest part of the economic bubble, the miracle, the bubble in Japan, where money just flowed like water, it trickled through everyone's fingers, and they splashed themselves with the yen coins and laughed because there was so much money. And everyone was like, how did Japan, this company or this country that was crushed in World War II and impoverished and burned to the ground? How did it come back like that in 40 years? It's terrifying. They have all this money. And that would disappear like five years later. But at this time, companies just threw money at anything. This is the period of original animated videos where you would buy a video cassette of 30 minutes of anime and it would cost $80 because everyone had money.

So why not? Let's make a movie that's just dark and cynical and violent animation and pour tons of money into it and make the most beautiful dark and cynical and horrible animation you've ever seen. Like that's the context of these games. Like just dark cynicism. Yes. No, just we have money. Let's do stuff with it.

Let's make more money. So, yeah, that's kind of where all of this comes from. The Famicom boom, the economic miracle. and dark cynical anime, I guess. Yeah, and it's just, you know, as companies increasing their portfolios, right, is really what it comes down to in a lot of these cases. Yeah, because that kind of, you know,

sort of investing in other types of products, I mean, that makes your company more financially sound. That way if one thing collapses, you still have other stuff to rely on. So it is a good business decision for these companies to branch out in video games. Yeah, I mean, that's what Nintendo did. Nintendo was a toy company

Before that, they were like a love hotel and packaged rice company. And they said, well, it kind of makes sense to turn our toy business into a video game business or to have the video game business running in parallel. And eventually, the video game business subsumed all the other aspects. And it became a video game company until Amoe came out and it became a toy company again. And, yeah, like, so this was a natural decision, I think, in a lot of ways. But not every company that made this leap did it very. well. And you did have companies that came around this time, like SunSoft or Natsime, that eventually,

you know, they went through some rough times. You had your, Dr. Sparkles shuddering at the mention of Sunsoft, but Sunsoft started to make some pretty good games after about three years. It's those first three years that were really difficult. And you had games that meant well, like Modola no Subasa, Wing of Modola. Oh, yeah. Like, it's almost this really cool action RPG, but it sucks. And Atlantis Nonazzo, which is almost this really cool exploratory pitfall-style game, except it's hateful and kills you all the time and the controls are terrible. But eventually, they learned from it. Yeah, and then you got Blastermaster and Batman, and now you have Blaster Master's Hero coming from...

Quest also? Oh, that was a weird edge case. That was designed by Americans. Yeah, but it's still... same team, I think, as Batman and... It's just like the top-down sections of Blaster Master, which is without the tank, which is the cool part of Blaster. What the tank? Is it Master Blaster? Blaster. Master Blaster was the villain on Kid Video.

Okay. Yes. I, aye, yeah, we look like cartoons. No? Okay. I don't know that cartoon. Wow, you kids didn't grow up a Saturday morning cartoons in 1984 or whatever. Okay.

Sorry, Jeremy. That's okay. someone's got to be the old person here. to a Saturday morning, 1984 cartoon game on your list? Oh, what game is that? Would that be a transformer? Oh, boy, no. Okay.

Yeah, so let's make a clean break here. I've basically broken a, put together a huge list of developers, publishers, and their games. Like, their notable, most horrible, despicable games. And I've kind of broken that into three sections. There's the tolerable tier. There's the crummy tier, and then there is the trash tier. So why don't we just start with the ugliness first and look at trash tier? These are the companies that never did anything good.

And again, I don't want to say like these are bad people who hate children or anything like that. But for whatever reason, their business model did not encompass. Like there was no VIN diagram between our business and good games. It was always just like, let's turn out some stuff. So it's sort of like the Adam Sandler of video game development. As long as it made money. Less annoying, though. Maybe a little bit.

They never sang in a baby voice. We're playing a ukulele. So that's Advantage Micronix. But the music for the Micronix 1942 must be one of the, of the most annoying video games. Oh, I thought that was someone trying to communicate with me in Morse code. I mean, it is... Like, help me!

Let me out of this game. How many kids just turned off the volume on that? I mean, that was beyond belief. Yeah, it's like Morse code and static. I don't know, when I was a kid, I feel like I've talked about this on the show before, but when I was a kid, I don't think I recognized quality in video games. I just accepted that, like, oh, that's what. this game is.

Yeah, kids are stupid, you know. Yeah, absolutely. If there's anything you want to take away from this episode, it's like, kids are stupid and we'll buy anything if it has a neat box and their parents are like, we're never playing more video games again because this is a waste of money. But My Kronix, I think, at least for you, Dr. Sparkle, is maybe the most notorious Famicom developer?

Yeah, maybe, I mean. And I say for you because you're the one who's actually played all the other. I had never heard of my Kronix until Krontindo. Like, I just thought, man, Capcom really sucked in the early days, and then they suddenly got really good. That's weird. Well, obviously, their first two were 1942 and Ghost and Goblins for Capcom, and then they started working with just all kinds of crazy companies.

Well, mostly S&K after that. They did, yeah, they did Akari Warriors, which was, I think they did Akari Warriors too as well, and eventually they somehow changed to a company whose name is called Chaos. With a cage, which is, I'm pretty sure my hacker alias from the BBS in 1995, 1995. Yeah. Eventually, Micronics, I mean, they started doing other things. Like, they started making things like sort of text adventure games. And those are a little bit harder to screw up, I think, in some way.

Because, I mean, all you have to do is create static pictures and text. and some kind of plot. Well, yeah, and also I would say that, you know, that they could very well be a work-for-hire developer as opposed to, like, game creator, right? So, like, a text adventure might be delivered to them completely designed, and it's just make this into a thing that goes on the TV. Right.

All they have to do is sort of make the pictures and the words. Yeah. And it's not a situation like Ghost and Goblins where you have to sort of design. this very careful control scheme and jumping controls and physics and all that stuff. So some of their later stuff doesn't look that bad, but it's also stuff that's maybe a little harder to screw up. Right.

I mean, the biggest problem was with Micronics games, especially the early stuff they did for Capcom and for S&K, like Athena, is, you know, like static pictures, that's great for them because they were really bad at frame rates. They were like making NES games and had like 12 frame per second frame rates. like, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's impressive, actually, like, the slide show effect on NES, really? You don't see a lot of that. Um, and they also had this really distinctive sound driver that was painful. Um, now, now, Frank, you said, like, you didn't mind that at the time, but I guess maybe because I'm a few years older than you, my friends and I, like, definitely had opinions on which NES games were good and which were really bad. And things like 1942's, quote-unquote music, like that definitely did not sit well with us. I didn't play that one back then.

I played Ghost and Goblins, though, and I don't know. I didn't see anything wrong with it. It was just like, oh, this game is too hard for me, was my dumb kid opinion. Which is still true, but among other things. Right, but I don't know, like that's one game, that and like Chubby Cherub,

like there was just sometimes I could tell, like this game is not as well made as others. And like I would sometimes think that about the Nintendo black box games. Like, this game is not that well made, but, like, then you would, you know, play it side by side, you know, Ice Climber, which is a kind of crummy game, but play that side by side with Chubby Chirubby Chirub, and you're like, no, actually Chubby Chiribb is a worse game in a lot of ways.

Like, the controls don't feel right, but also the collisions don't feel right, but also everything moves weirdly and the sound is bad and so forth. Yeah, Ice Climber is just a simple game. I mean, there's not much to it, but they... It just has a really bad jump art, which is unfortunate. Which is unfortunate because it's a game all about jumping. If they could fix that, it would be actually pretty good. Chubby Cherub, I mean, everything just seems a little bit off.

Like, it's just not quite right, just the way everything looks, the way everything controls. It's just that, for whatever reason, that was made by Tose. It was made by Tosei. We'll talk about them in a moment. As you kids call it. You actually pronounced it correctly. Last time it'll happen. He had to force himself.

I could see the pain. I could see the pain in his face. It's okay. You can say Tosa if you want. No, it's interesting. No, you can't. Micronics also developed for one of the very first sort of non-game-related companies to release games for the Famicom was Takuma Shoten. And they were a publisher.

Mm-hmm. They did a lot of manga. Yeah. And their first two games were Lot Lot and XXs, both of which were pretty bad, but actually were developed by Micronics. Well, X at X's was a Capcom game. in the arcades. Yeah, yeah, it was like, yeah. Killer Bees game.

Yeah, that's right. Savage Bees. Savage Bees, that's it. But both of those ports were, again, just like Ghosts and Goblins, just terrible junk. Mm-hmm. And I don't really know how Takamu Shoten ended up with X-Dexes, why Capcom didn't release it themselves. But that's just kind of how weird things were back then.

I mean, you'd find companies that made the arcade game were releasing Famicom games, but somehow this particular port got liced in some completely a random company. Yeah, it's all a mystery. Like Sunsoft with the Sega games. It's kind of strange. Well, that I think it has to do with Sega being a competitor to Nintendo and Sunsoft probably saying, well, we like these games.

Can we put these on Famicom? Would that be okay? Can we license them? Can we give you money to put your games on a competing system? And Sega, who had like a 10th the install base probably was like, yeah, okay, why not? Yeah. Why would they say no to that? Yeah, right.

That's kind of a weird case. But yeah, I definitely, like, that's kind of the inspiration of this whole episode is just like all these weird names doing weird things and the strange connections. Like, there's no way for us to sit down and dig into all of that. Like, that's just, that's a lifetime project right there. We don't have time to do investigative reporting in Japan on these companies. I mean, I do what I can with the Game Boy World, but even that, like, you know, getting help from people who read more Japanese than I do, there's not that much out there. Well, yeah, I was going to say, like, there's not anything really in Japanese that you can read that explains these companies. Yeah, like, is there anyone in Japan who cares that Tokomashoten published Savage Bees or Ex-At-Xs?

No, no one cares. It was just one of those things. It's this game, and it was on Famicom, whatever. It's probably in the Kusoge corner. You mentioned that there's a rumor that Micronix was one guy, and that makes sense to me. Yeah. I should say one person. I shouldn't be generous specific.

but that, you know, they strike me as games that are developed by one person. Right. At least at the beginning, yeah. Yeah, that, you know, they're engineers, right? It's probably an engineer that, like, got a sound driver working and never wanted to revisit it because they're not an artist, they're an engineer, right? And, you know, they had a programming routine that displayed multiple sprites at once, and maybe it didn't look great, but why would they revisit it?

It works, you know? And, like, that's what their output sort of reminds me of. Yeah, so Dr. Sparkle, like I said, Cronendo was the first time I ever heard of Micronix. Where did you come up with that name? Like, where did you find, oh, 1942 was developed by Micronics? You can guess. Go ahead.

The Game Developer Research Institute. That's right. Yes. Because they, yeah, like, they seem to be the primary source of Micronix online. And I feel like they've gone in and kind of like done additional research after some of your episodes have come out. Oh, yeah. And they're where I came up with the tidbit that there's speculation that it was like a college student,

who wanted to become a game designer and took jobs, you know, converting Famicom games for publishers and never actually got to make his own games. I don't know how much of that is true. Like, there's no real information about Micronix on the Internet. And it's a lot of speculation and, like, things that have been sourced from, like, single tweets by Japanese developers five years ago. It's all, you know, hearsay and innuendo. And that's kind of unavoidable.

just because of the nature of Japanese business culture where relationships are very important and also very guarded and there's not a lot of spilling dirt on other people. Yeah, they tend to be very secretive, unlike U.S. game developers who just... I wouldn't say secretive. I'd say discreet. Okay. I don't think they're like, we must not tell anyone, like, our secrets.

Maybe Nintendo. But for the most part, it's just more like, oh, well, you know, like that was something between us and we're not going to talk about that externally. So that's another barrier to getting information on all this stuff. But, yeah, like Frank said, Mycronics is one of those developers where you play their games and you're like, I could see one person doing this.

And they probably had like six weeks to put together. I mean, like, you know, it's kind of a Pac-Man for Atari 2,600 situation. Like just a little bit of money and a little bit of time. And we're not going to give you source code to work with. But please take this, you know, world-class complex platformer, like revolutionary video game like ghosting goblins and put it on NES now. Thank you. And, you know, like, if you had the whole story, that might look like a pretty miraculous port. But since we don't, it's a pretty crappy port.

Well, you know, actually, that's the first NES game release to include or to have been programmed for one of the advanced mapper chips. I want to say... Oh, is it an MMC1? I don't think it's MMC-1. I think it's U-N-ROM. Yeah, it's like the third-generation chip before M-C-1. So for whatever reason, this possibly one guy was able to put his pretty janky port of a great arcade game on, like, you know... A knowing Nintendo on a not-at-all documented new piece of hardware.

Right. So you kind of start to understand why Ghost and Goblins is kind of crummy on NES. I don't know why they put it on the NES Classic Edition mini-consul. That's not a port that deserves to be chronicled and saved for posterity. But there it is. It's out there. I mean, it sold well, right? I mean, those early games sold tons, from what I understand.

So, you know, people remember it. NES games or FAMIACOM games? I think it sold pretty well. Yeah, I mean, it was out there early. It was one of the, definitely one of the, like, the first or second wave of third-party titles for Famicom. NES. It's one of the earliest, I would say, ports of a game that people actually played in the

arcades. Yeah, I mean, Ghost and Goblins came out in arcades the same month that Super Mario Brothers debuted on NES or Famicom. And they were both kind of equally like, wow, I can't believe it. So when Ghost and Goblins came to NES, I mean, that was a pretty big deal. And I think that made up, you know, like people didn't mind the fact that it was kind of crappy because you expected a home port of an arcade game

to be kind of crappy. It wasn't until later that... Yeah, like, later we started to see that, oh, no, the NES can do better than this. But I guess at the time, like, it was still sort of untested and it was better looking than anything on Atari 2,600 or in television, so this is the coolest game.

Well, and I also think a lot of these games that we think are bad games are also running on bad hardware. You know, like, budget isn't just the time that goes into the... making the game, it's also the hardware that you will manufacture the game on. I think a lot of people don't understand that NES games, you know, they evolved and got a lot better looking, but that's not because necessarily that people got better at making NES games.

A lot of it also has to do with that the cartridges themselves had evolving hardware inside of them that allowed more techniques. There are some pretty crappy games on MMC3 chips, but yeah, for sure. like two things had to happen. People had to kind of come into their own and the hardware inside the cartridges had to get better. Right. So, I mean, there's a lot of cases here I would imagine

where, like, you know, they're halfway through development and then the manufacturing budget gets cut and they have to port down to the, you know, like a crappier cartridge format. I don't know why I'm getting defensive about these games we haven't even named yet, but it's fine. I mean, like, on one hand, I have friends who bought my Chronics developed games for NES and were really unhappy about it.

I had a friend who bought Akari Warriors and was just, like, livid. He lent it to me and was like, this game is so bad. You can play it, but it's terrible. And I played it, and it was terrible. It was bad. True. Like, a really awful port. Like, it's possible to become stuck in that game.

Like, because you have, like, this cheat code where you can continue infinitely. if you do it in the wrong place you can get stuck in scenery and no one can kill you and that's as far as you can go. That's it. I did not know that. It happened to me.

And what else we got? Yeah, so in the bottom tier, you also have Culture Brain. I just kind of have a grudge against them. Okay, the people think, oh, Culture Brain, the Magic of Scheherazade, that game was cool. It was. It was really cool. Yep. And everything else Culture Brain did, I think, is terrible.

Flying Dragon is fine, you know, that whole series. Fine, okay. That's a sterling defense. Well, you're saying they're like, you have them in the bottom tier. This is like garbage tier. I'm bitter because of Ninja Boy for Game Boy. That game is trash. I have not played the Game Boy version.

The NES one is also fine. It's just a dumb game. I don't want to play it, but it's not. Like that, Kung Fu Heroes. Like, it's just stuff like, eh. It exists. I don't know. Exactly.

But it exists as not bottom of the barrel, worst developer on the system tier. Yeah, they're not in the same league as some of these other guys. And they did create one great game, which seemed so far ahead of its time. Yeah. Cherazade. And the other stuff, it's okay.

It seems to be a little bit better than like the Tose stuff. It's not great. but, I mean, I think that to call them bottom of the barrel is way off. It's also consistently, I don't know. It's also consistently, like, kind of goofy.

And, like, there's some... I mean, but there's a lot of goofiness in Japanese developed NES games. Sure, but I don't know. It's just... It's like calling Ed Wood the worst director or something. You know what I mean?

It's like, well, yeah, technically, maybe they're not amazing, but, like, there is, some consistency to it and I'd rather play their broken, interesting games than a technically solid boring game.

Okay. That's fine. We can agree to disagree. Their advertising was funny. They did have good advertising. Very memorable. And Magic of Sharazotti was a really cool game.

They had a certain amount of personality. Yeah. Okay. There is that. I mean, I was talking to Frank before this episode started about how much I really love. of Victo Kai and games like Golgo 13 and Clash at Demonhead, which I recognize objectively are not really good games, but I really liked them. And they felt like they were really trying.

Like, how do you take a long-running spy, like violent spy manga with lots of sex and killing and turn it into a game for kids? Well, I don't know, but they did and they made it like this multi-format platformer and light gun style shooter and maze game and you fly around in helicopters and you can swim and there's sniping sequences and you end up sniping Hitler's brain at the end. So that's cool. It's uneven and sloppy, but it's also cool. Victa Kai, I mean, they're certainly like in the top 25% of Famicom games. I mean, no questions asked. I mean, there's so much mediocre, boring stuff. At least they have personality, they're different, and they put sort of new things that you haven't

already seen a million times. So many of these Semicom games, I mean, it's literally just the same stuff over and over with different stripes. Tell us about Dragon Quest clones, Uncle Dr. Sparkle. Well, there's a lot of them, actually. So Dragon Quest came out and went early 1986? May 86. May 86. There you go. And it took a while, but the weirdest damn things got converted into dragon quest clones, like zoids, which are those robot dinosaurs. I played one of those on Game Boy World. And they made them in, I mean, it's odd because you have what I believe are these like Godzilla-sized mechanical dinosaurs, like walking into castles.

Aren't they like robot suits that people control? Well, there's like a little guy who sits in the head. They're huge. They're like Mecca Godzilla or something. The viewers cannot see me holding my hands up. I see, though. That's what kind of do. Very impressive.

I mean, of all the things that, though, you would do with, like, the Zoyd's license, putting them into, like, a Dragon Quest clone is certainly the most bizarre because you have, like, zoids, shopkeepers. I mean, it makes no sense at all. What was the game that I saw on Cron Tendo? That was a weird Dragon Quest-E game where the environmental tiles made absolutely no sense. Like, you'd be walking on water sometimes. and, like, it had a triple-digit HP counterbalation.

Stargazers. Hoshio-Miro, Hito. Yes. That's on the list. That's a game. And I think when I did my list of, like, the worst Famicom games that I've experienced at that point, I think that was number two. I think that's right. After Super Monkey DiBoken, it's a huge mess.

I mean, there's no other, you wouldn't think that making an RPG would be really that hard. but they somehow managed to mess up every single aspect. Like, the town that you begin in, when you exit the town, the town is for some reason not displayed on the main map so you don't know where you are all of a sudden. I mean, and every single decision is just completely bizarre in terms of like when you fight how much damage you do, how much damage they do to you, everything is completely unbalanced.

Yeah, who was the developer on Hoshio, Miro, Hito? It's on here. Oh, yeah. Well, while you're looking that up, I want to say that my feeling when I see that game, and I haven't played it. That's another. Another. Play it.

I will not play it. I've played it through you. My feeling, looking at it, is that it's a situation where, like, they had to suddenly stop and just wrap up whatever they had in progress and just make it not broken and ship it. You know, because, like, it just doesn't make sense. There's no way that someone, you know, was directing that game and looked at it and went, yep, got it, nailed it. That's what I was going for. You know, like, it's obvious that, like, tons of stuff was cut and just, like, sewn together as tightly as they could.

But, yeah, I think that's generally considered to be sort of the most infamous RPG, Dragon Questel RPG on the Famicom among Japanese gamers. Did you find out who did that one? Yeah, that was developed by another, which is a company that does things like championship bowling. So maybe a sci-fi RPG wasn't in their wheelhouse. Yeah, some of these guys, I mean, they can put out, like, decent golf games or decent mahjong games, but they completely do not do well in other genres. And I think that's part of the problem here is that you had just people throwing everything they had at the wall. And some games you're going to make as a passion project and some games you're going to make because that's what someone tells you to do,

even if you don't get it. Yeah. And some games require much more development time than others. Like a baseball game is probably pretty straightforward to create because you have all the rules right there and the scene and there's a good template for it in games like, you know, FAMista or Nintendo Baseball. But then something like an RPG, like, whoa, that's a lot of stuff to deal with.

There's stats and there's equipment and there's shops and there's MPCs and there's towns and there's rulemaps and there's battles and there's monsters and whoa, what's going on in a magic system? Like, that's a lot more to take care of than a baseball game. And you have to kind of invent that from whole cloth or else totally rip it off from someone else's game. So, yeah, like, I think it's pretty easy to kind of understand why so many of these games were terrible when you stop and think about it.

But it doesn't change the fact that there were lots of children paying $50 to play terrible video games. And that was like three months of allowance. What did they do for the next three months? Were they actually that much? In Japan? Yeah, they were like between 4,000 and 6,000 yen, I think. Yeah, 4,500, 5,500 were sort of the common price.

Is that equivalent to what we had here? Like 50 bucks-ish, okay. And then you, well, exchange rates were kind of weird back then, but yeah. Roughly, yeah, sure. Roughly. Like, the system sold for 1,400 yen, I think, the Famicom did. So, like, you know, and here it sold, or was it 100, yeah, it was like 100. $150,000 yen.

So that's like $150,000 equivalently. So pretty equal. And then you had like specialty chip games like LaGrange Point by Konami that had the FM synthesis chip inside of it. That sold for like $90,000 or $9,000. Oh, we had that here too with like Fantasy Star 4 and stuff. Yeah, but not on NES. Sure. So like you had games getting kind of really far into the weeds in pricing on Famicom.

Anyway, the point is, like, I can see why people would have a grudge against some of these games. Yeah. At the same time, there is, there can be a fondness for these bad games, like Kusoge, which means shit game in Japan. Like, people have sort of a soft spot for a lot of these games, like Takashi major, or, no, uh, uh, uh, uh, Kichich, yeah, Takeshi, no, Chosenjo, yeah, Takeshi's Challenge, that's it. that's bad on purpose It is bad on purpose But when you're You know

Eight years old and you buy it You don't realize that But did eight year olds buy games By famous comedians? I don't know I don't know Was that more for adults? I don't know

That's another weird thing Is there so many video games That involve Japanese TV personalities Getting their own game Like one most Common one other than Takeshi Tukano is

On the turbographics J.J. and Jeff. In Japan, it was based on two comedians. Tato and Kin. Yeah, but a lot of these guys, I mean, it doesn't seem like, well, I guess, well, now, Ticano was known for that game show challenge thing. He was like

Takeshi's Castle or whatever it was called. Also a ninja, basically. Yeah, exactly. Most extreme elimination challenge. The original Japanese version of that, so I guess kids might know who he was, but he was sort of like an adult humor type comic, from what I understand. So it'd be like George Carlin's challenge.

There you go. Okay. But George, oh, he did do kid stuff. Never mind. Did he? Well, wasn't he Thomas the Tank Engines? I thought that was Ringo Star. Wasn't George Carlin?

It's easy to get those two mixed up. It is. They kind of look alike. They're both bad drummers. Oh, whoa. Okay, sorry. That was a slamming Carlins' drumming. I know.

He's actually a great drummer. That was drumming, too. Wow, that was. Well done. Thanks. I'm a pretty good drummer myself. Yeah, so. I'm trying to think of the equivalent here.

Anyway, we kind of went off course there. But so bad games existed. Transformers was really bad. We didn't talk about Transformers was really bad. Yeah, we really kind of straight off. Who developed Transformers? It was published by Takara. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I, um, I screwed up on my, my list here. Where did I... Oh, that was Intelligent System Corporation. Oh, I.S.O. Mistaken for intelligent systems, the Nintendo subsidiary

that makes really, really good RPGs and strategy games. This is Isco. And they made some weird stuff. Yeah. Okay, so Transformers Convoy-No-Nazzo. That probably should have gone and put them in the trash tier, honestly. That game is bad.

That is a trash game. I don't know how many people have actually loaded up a ROM and tried to play it, but it's one of those games where it's difficult to avoid getting killed, like, in, like, literally the first second of the game, because something, like, comes at you, like, immediately. Single-hit kills. Yeah.

And when you transform from your big-rig truck into Optimus Prime, or I guess for some reason they call him Convoy. That's his Japanese name. That's a Japanese name, yes. Or Com-voy. Com-Boy. It's actually misspelled on the box art. So you become completely exposed when you're transforming,

and when you shoot a guy about. of your head, they fall right on you and kill you. It's, I suspect that probably most kids playing this thing back in the day never got to the end of the first level. If they owned it, they did. Yeah. Maybe. You, you, you, you spent a lot of time when you're six years old, learning, learning how

reflexes work and just memorizing things and slamming your skull against sadness. And you'll make it. They may never have beaten it. you know, they would play probably pretty far into it. Far enough to see that, like, the first boss is apparently a tiny Unicron, and then the second boss is, like, the Decepticon symbol. Like, I don't know. When I think of that game, that and the Macross game that I didn't put on this list,

like to me, those are redolent of the early days of emulation back, like, 20 years ago, when emulators just first started showing up, and you could download one ROM at a time from a GeoCity site, if you could find a GeoCity site that actually hadn't used up its data bandwidth on downloading ROMs. And, you know, I would put these games together and be like, wow, cool, there was a Transformers game for NES.

I'm going to play this. And I would get my crappy little Gravis game pad and boot up INS and be like, oh, wow, this game isn't good. Maybe it's just the emulation. Then I play Macross and be like, hey, here's another game that's actually very similar in spirit to that terrible Transformers game, and it's also bad.

And then I would play a game that I knew, like Kidigorous or Bina-Commando, and they'd play pretty well. And I'd be like, no, it's not me. It's the games. Yeah, that seemed like one of the very first sort of like kind of infamous Japanese games that people discovered back. And Bocasuka Wars? Ah, yes.

So are these both products of Sean Baby.com? Are they? I know Bocasca Wars was not. We talked about that in our IRC channels back in the 90s. I don't remember where it first appeared on the web. I remember Transformers was probably on Sean Baby somewhere. I don't know. I discovered it just through messing route of the ROMs. Because it says Transformers in the name.

Yeah, like, literally, I think it was one of those things where people were like, I've got all these video games that I've never heard of, and I loved Transformers when I was a kid 10 years ago. So I bet this game's cool. Okay, so I was wrong. And you start to understand why these games didn't come to America. Oh, they made a game based on the movie Labyrinth. That's great. I love David Bowie.

Oh, this isn't good. Jennifer Connolly, what did you do to me? There's a game based on Milo and Otis on the Nintendo? Which is not a terrible... I mean, it's a charming game. It's not as bad as some of this stuff. It's got nothing to do with the movie. I mean, it's not even called Milo Notis in Japan.

It's Koeniko no Monogatari, which means the story of kitten. Yeah. Okay. Any particular kitten? No, just kitten. Just kidding. Right. Now, ISCO, one of the very first games was called Sakima 2,

which was based on a Japanese sort of glam rock band. They were sort of a kiss clone. They wore like very similar makeup. And again, it's a very sort of basic runaround on like a little dungeon thing, you know, jumping on platforms and stuff. But it just seems so odd by our own standards that these guys, this apparently popular band in Japan that you've never heard of, somehow got their own video game. So a lot of their stuff.

That was the Japanese equivalent of the Journey game, right? Yeah, maybe something like that. But, of course, Journey is well-loved worldwide. That's true, especially here in my heart. In this room, yes, they're loved. But a lot of their games are not, I mean, yeah, they're terrible, but they often have like a certain sort of strange charmdom at the same time. Like Paris-Dakar Rally.

Yeah, that's the other game by Isco or ISCO that I put on my list. And it's bad, but it's interesting. Like, they, why don't you talk about it? It would appear to be a racing game, like a regular racing game at first glance, but strange things happen. It's like a top-down bump-and-jump-and-jump-style racer. Yeah, but then you like drive through the streets of Paris. You like have to stop.

You go underground and like open up gateways and you actually go underwater at some point. And it's horrible to play. I mean, everything about the game, the controls, the graphics are incredibly ugly. unpleasant to play, but it's just so different than what you usually expect from a racing game, that it has a certain fascination to it. Yeah, and then it has like the side scrolling

sections where it's like almost like a precursor to Blastermaster. You get out of your car and have to like throw switches and stuff to create platforms to drive across. It's, yeah, like there was some effort there, some originality, some creative thought, just

not good execution. And the one thing is why did they try to connect this to like an actual real-life famous car rally when the game did not depict the rally at all. I mean, I guess because the Paris de car rally is kind of famous as being like this grueling challenge, like if you're going to turn any race into a crazy platform or adventure, why not the Paris de car rally?

I can kind of see where they were going with that. But again, like, it just kind of fell flat on the execution. Like the top-down racing is sloppy, the platforming is sloppy, the parts where you get out of the car is sloppy. It just doesn't quite come together, but they tried. Give them the little start. It says you tried. Yeah, when you play these games, there are so many that are like, you know, oh God, not this same crap again, the same terrible baseball game I played 500 times. And then you come to stuff like, you know, Paris de Car rally where it's like, this is horrible.

Wow, I've never seen this before. They were trying to do something. Right. Yeah, I mean, I definitely get a lot of that in Game Boy World. Like, oh, it's another box-pushing puzzle game. Oh, but here's a game where it's like you're like an army of samurai fighting through feudal Japan in a shoot-em-up, a formation-based shoot-em-up. That's weird.

What's this? And a lot of Famicom games, even good ones, were like that. Like that very early Hudson game. Challenger. Yes, which is odd. Because it starts off where you're like on a train. train rescuing a girl. And then you're rescuing Princess Leia from Pink Darth Vader.

Let's make that clear. And then it just completely changes tone. And you're like in like an early version of Zelda or something. It's top down and then you have to go into like dungeons where there's platforming challenges to get keys. And I've never actually made it past, I think I made it to the third stage once. It's really hard and totally unfair. It's like it's not fun, but they tried. But it's really interesting.

It's a great switcheroo mid-game. I mean, that game came out in 1985 about a month after Squamario Brothers. So like the platforming, by comparison, feels like absolute garbage, but like in terms of design and concept, it was

really more like Zelda. Yeah. Or actually, Zelda 2, where you have like the multi multimodal play. So, you know, that deserves some points. Right. It just, it wasn't good yet. Like they were still figuring out the hardware.

But they had ideas. They did. They did. So I want to take issue with something on your list here, which is DOG. Okay. I think DOG was meant to be sort of an indie budget label, and you have them in here as sort of the bottom tier crap. I think 3D World Runner is a fine game.

I don't think it's great, but it's fine. It was technically impressive. Yeah, but it's also, like, it's got good points to it. hired Nasser Gebeli. He's going to make it technically impressive stuff for you. Yeah, and the song's really good and like... That's Nubu... Nubu Amazir. It sure is. He's going to make good stuff for you.

And like, you know, the jumping actually feels kind of scary and weird, you know, like when you fall. Like, I think that's an okay game. And I think most of their output were just interesting, weird little ideas that they all were on discs and they were all probably pretty cheap. You know, it was more of

an indie label than it was you know, something like a Capcom porting 1942. So I think it's unfair to think of DOG as like a crap publisher. They're more like, I don't know, I can't think of like Midnight City was like an indie publisher last year, I think they went out of business. But, you know, I think of them more in those terms than I do as a company that produce

crap. It was just... Okay, well, I mean, DOG almost went out of business too. If it weren't for Final Fantasy, that would have been the end of Square Inix since DOG was a subsidiary of Square Inix or Squaresoft at the time. Anyway, I like them because they published a lot of weird different things. I mean, they did publish weird stuff. They had like a port of deep dungeon. Which I don't want to play, but it's, you know, it was probably like a $10 disc.

But they adapted little computer people into Apple Town Motogatari. Which is another weird experimental like Sims-like thing. I mean, it's not as good as the original, but you know. Okay, that's fine. You don't necessarily have to agree with all my rankings. I kind of just threw them together for conversation. So success, we had a conversation. I don't think anyone's going to take issue with Toa Chiki

showing up on the bottom of the list, though. Dr. Sparkle can probably tell us all about Toa Chiki. Does anyone know what their name actually supposed to mean? I do not. They're probably most notable in the U.S. for the Week of Garfield game, which is a rock-bottom platformer in which you play is Garfield. The idea, though, is interesting. It's like a week of Garfield.

It's a week of comic strips. Okay, that's a comic character in a week of... Oh, okay. That's not as good as it gets. Walking across rooms and kicking mice and worms. It's like a precursor to comics zone. Maybe. That's generous.

It has a really good death animation where he's just suddenly on his face and that's it. Like, just no transition. He's just... Actually, you get the end of it. The animation is pretty good. Like when he jumps, he's sort of like his feet go down. It's like his head goes up.

And then you're right, the death animation is pretty amazing. Where he just like plops over. Yeah. Completely dead. But, I mean, it's one of those games. It's like, it's kind of like back to the future in the sense that you go into it thinking this will have something to do with Garfield. Yeah. And then you're like, why is Garfield walking all over the place, kicking spiders?

I guess, I guess in the comment. He hates spiders. Yes, that's true. But there's worms. Does he punch Mondays also? There's baseballs that fall down out of the sky for no reason. Because things fall out of skies and video games and you just have to put a random sprite on something, basically.

And the annoying thing is, like, the little power-ups, they actually appear when you walk past them. So you have to back up to get every single power up. Well, it's that old design that thankfully has gone forever where you just move on the random tiles to make the thing you need appear. Everything's hidden. Yeah. But you know what?

Like play the Game Boy Advanced Garfield game. It's worse. Really? Is that a tale of two kitties or something? I don't remember what it's called. But you're like a bad JPEG of Garfield walking around. Because you remember when Game Boy Advanced Graphics were like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were like that. Like you could just scan a picture and it looks like garbage. And the Game Boy Advanced Garfield is you're in this huge environment that's tiling infinitely. It's the house. Because I'm sure John lives in like a tesseract. Right, absolutely. And it's, uh, collect all 100 things and then move on. And, like, I'd much rather play, you know, a crappy Famicom game where everything's trying to kill me

than I would collect all the garbage in one level. So, uh, I'm not going to defend that game or anything, but point is, like, this didn't really stop. And also Garfield is garbage in any incarnation. Whoa. Yeah. The other big Toa Chiqui game was they made several Sherlock Holmes games. The Sherlock Holmes trilogy. Yes.

Upon which Benedict Cumberbatch's series is no doubt based. I'm sure that was the inspiration. Is he making a Sherlock Holmes movie or something? No, the BBC series. I've never heard of it. It's just called Sherlock. I don't really follow Benedict Cumber. There are a lot of shows based on Sherlock Holmes these days because it's public domain.

There's one of the U.S. with like some other guy, right? The U.S. one is an adaptation. of the Benedict Cumberbatchewan, more or less, sort of. It's one of those series that, or those franchises that has the tendency to turn, like, autism into a superpower, questionably. Anyway, the first episode's really good. That's an aside. So the first Sherlock Holmes game, it's, again, one of those games that seems kind of interesting, but the execution is so odd on the choices are so odd.

You sort of, you know, go into, like, sewer levels and stuff. You're like killing people, aren't you? You kill an awful lot of people. You have a kung fu kick where he sort of jumps up and kicks people. So the inspiration for the Robert Downey Jr. It appears to be, yes. But you can walk around. It's almost kind of like a mini version of like Grand Theft Auto.

You just walk around the streets just killing pedestrians for no reason. London, 1886. And your clothes, and I don't know if there's some kind of technical issue with like the pallets available, but your clothes change from purple to green when you go in and out. And I guess that must be a technical issue, but it's a little disconcerting the way your appearance completely changes as you go in and out. And the other games, they sort of transitioned to more sort of boring, like menu-based adventure games. Didn't they do murder-on-the-Mississippi? Was that them?

Or was that someone else? Well, I think that was like an Activision Commonwealth. Yeah, that was like a... Oh, it was something similar. It was like a... Titanic Mystery? Maybe that's the one. That was someone else.

Okay. I will say that that first Sherlock Holmes game, a combination of that and seeing the Robert Downey movie, my dream video game project is actually based on those two things. Like a Toa Chiki version of the Robert Downey, it's called Super Sherlock Holmes, which is like the greatest video game title ever. It is. It's pretty great.

And it's just like what if a fairly competent like 16-bit era a Japanese developer was given Sherlock Holmes and had no idea what it was. And that's basically the pitch. Basically just a home improvement ROM hack? Sort of, but it's more of an open world like sort of, I hate using the word Metroidvania, but, you know, like, yeah, it's okay. Like, yeah, you have the definitive website on Metroidvania, so I guess I'm in good company. But, you know, a platform game with environments that are like, you know, 221 be Baker Street

and, like, inside Watson's body. And, you got to shrink down to go on his body. Oh, I thought that was, like, a sexual in you. No, no, no, no, no. You shrink to go inside. Like a fantastic voyage. Right, okay. And, like, London is, there's a town called London.

You know, there's a town called Baskerville where all the people are dogs in, like, old, old style clothing. Like that Sesame Street skit, the dogs. I don't think I've seen that one, sorry. You really missed out. Anyway. I do, I did see me and my llama though.

Point is that this terrible game has inspired the greatest game that'll never be made. Never. It's public domain. You could do it. Okay, where am I getting the money for this? Refunding my game. I don't know. Are you funding my game?

From the director of Shark Nato, the video game. Yeah, exactly. Super Sherlock Holmes. I mean, Sharknato could be like a secret sub boss or something. There's so many terrible games on Steam, light. Why not? Why not another? True. I don't want to make this wrong. Like, it will cost a lot of money.

You want it to exist? You just don't want to make it? No, I'd make it given the budget. But, like, no one would ever pay the budget. It would be required to make a game that it feels like a low budget game. That's what the lottery is for. So Titanic Mystery was Gacken. Gacken Holdings. Gackin. Oh, there it is right there.

They also made Moulon Rouge Sinky. Yeah, which is... Which has nothing to do with the movie, disappointingly. Nothing at all. Yeah. Again, it's one of those games that's pretty impenetrable, I think, probably to... The war record of Moulon Rouge. Exactly.

Wow. Right. Okay. What? But Titanic Mysteries is a port of a U.S. computer game, a Commodore 64 game that was published by Activision. They completely changed it. Like in the U.S. version, you explore the Titanic using like a robot camera or something

that you look through the rooms underwater. In the Japanese version, you control. a woman in a swimsuit. Pretty much the same thing, right? Exactly. And you actually swim through the Titanic. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. She has, like, this really weird walking animation

where she, like, lifts her legs up, like, too high. Like, goose stepping? Sort of, almost. It's... The third Reich took down the Titanic, now we know. And I haven't played the other Gacken stuff, like Might and Magic Book 1. Is that considered be a bad port?

No, I think, I think I put that down just because a lot of these companies ended up porting Western games to Famicom and other consoles. Yeah, there were all those like terrible RPG ports that just because of technical reasons just couldn't look as nice as the computer versions. Right. Well, I mean, it's a spectrum, really. Like pretty much anything that Pony Canyon had a hand in for developing like AD&D stuff for Famicom turned out really poorly. But then you had the developer Infinity, the company behind Battle of Olympus, and they did a lot of ports of populace and things like that, not to Famicom, but to PC Engine, to like X86,000 or 68,000, to super Famicom. And those actually turned out pretty well because the guy who ran Infinity was pretty competent, annuity was doing, and had a real passion for those games. So, like, there's definitely a spectrum of, like, really good and really, whoa, avoid that. Pools of Radiance on NES, maybe not the game you want to play.

Maybe not the way to play that one. Infinity also made a really weird game called Keita Princess, which one of those games that, like, no one has ever done, like, an English language fact on it. I want to get to that at some point because it's fascinating. It's weird, and it's, again, one of those games, if you just sort of were to pick it up without knowing how to play it, you would really have a difficult time with it. Well, I think that's one of those games that in context sort of goes to prove Frank's point about, like, no time, no money,

because that was, I interviewed, crap, I forgot his name, Hoshi Hori Moto. I interviewed him last year, mainly about Battle of Olympus, but we talked a little bit about him getting into Famicom to, development. And that was his first game project. It was developed for the publisher Imagineering. And it was like, it was part of this series called Wave Jack, which was one of three Famicom Disc Systems that Imagineering published that came with cassette tapes featuring songs by the idol music character, like pop stars, you know, flavor of the month that were

the stars of these particular games. I don't know what the name of the person in this particular game was, Keita Princess, but she was like, I guess the princess that you had to rescue or whatever. So, like, he had never developed for Famicom before. It was like him and one other person making this game, not understanding the hardware, like learning as they went along, very little time, very little money. So, yeah, it didn't turn out very well. But then his next game was Battle of Olympus, which is a really good Zelda 2 clone. Like, it's, it's, oh, that's right, you don't like it. You don't like it. I forgot. I think it's, it's a solid game. It's really solid. And it's also made by

two people. Every game has bats. No, you're thinking of Ninja guidance. No, it's like the worst. No, I think Babylonists has like the worst bats. No, the worst bats are Alf for the Sega Master's system. They, they... You played all the way through that, didn't you? I did. I did.

I beat it live on a live stream. But the bats in Alf, I'm just that has nothing to do with our That's okay. Elf is also not a good game. No, it's a terrible game, but the bats, their behavior is random and the hitbox makes absolutely no sense and there's like no way to reliably get through that section other than like tap hit tap hit you know and they're the worst they're the worst

what would possess you to actually play all the way through elf uh curiosity and love for bad games i like bad games but you're not going to play all the way through american dream which one's that the uh the pachi kuhon oh no pachio kuhun yes there you go you know i will play through a bad game where I'm running around and jumping. I will not play through a Pachinko. I cannot imagine the patience required to actually play through that game.

Or any gambling game for, you know, as far as I'm concerned. And they loved them in Japan. I mean, there were like how many Pachio Koon games. There were like eight Pachio Koon games and then there were games that were clearly part of that universe that weren't called Pachio Koon. I did one of those

again for Game Boy World Pachinko time by the same developer and publisher marionette and I don't remember but I don't care. Anyway, yeah, like you are an anthropomorphic Pachinko ball traveling around conquering Pachinko halls

and video game Pachinko is really boring because you literally just sit there holding down the A button while kind of making fine-tune adjustments with a D-pad to affect the stream of the balls that are flying out and you just kind of sit

there and watch as they trickle down the screen and there's no, like, real physics involved as there is an actual Pachinko, so... But also some of the most popular and biggest money-making games on Facebook are games where you click a button and the Slaw Machine goes. Hey, I'm not saying that people don't enjoy it,

just like... Just saying that people are stupid. I'm not going to go that far, but... Apparently, Kim Kardashian makes most of her money from a mobile phone game. Mm-hmm. Is that really most of it? That was like 45% or something

of the income I thought was from that game. That game's really popular. I don't even know what it is. Me neither, but apparently someone's buying it or is there a free game? I don't know. It's free to play. Okay.

So it's like micro... Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I only know old stuff. Okay, so there's one more game or one more developer that I have on the very bottom tier.

Okay. That we should talk about before we take a break. And that is VAP. Oh, yes. which stands for video audio projects. And this is kind of like, in some ways, it's the platonic ideal of this episode because VAP was actually a media publisher,

published music and stuff, and they were like, let's make some video games, and they were bad. I mean, eventually they got okay. Like VAP apparently was responsible for the super, yeah, the super NES version of Kubert 3, which is kooky and weird. They had some connection to that.

Maybe they just published it in Japan, but at least their name is attached to something that is interesting. I don't know. Have you played it? Very briefly. Okay, I can't say that I have. I didn't actually know there was a keyboard three. This is topical because there's a trolls movie coming out now or something. They actually put out an NES game that got released in Europe under the name Trolls and Crazy Land. It was like a licensed trolls video game.

Oh, and that was VAP, right? That was VAP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. But they'll be forever known. among bad video game connoisseurs for the super monkey

Tyboken game. But talking about Crazy Land for just a second I had a really weird design decision. I don't know if you've played it or have you? I've looked at it.

Which game is that? Crazy Land or trolls in Crazy Land depending on where you're playing it. Which is you're a kid that kicks a soccer ball and that's your attack or you're a troll if you're playing the European version.

But you can get hit like three or four times and every time you get hit your attack gets more awesome so like you go from one to like two to like two big ones you know um so yeah I've so it's kind of an interesting risk reward like the more

the closer you get to the two dying the more effective you are at attacking yes and it's kind of interesting but I got really bored playing that game and I was playing it on an emulator and there was an emulator where you could you could freeze

ram values so I figured out the RAM values for enemy health and just froze them at zero and it just walked through the game and as soon as the enemy spawned on screen they exploded. It was a much better game that way. All right.

So is there anything that can make Super Monkey Di Boken a good game? I don't know. We should explain what it is first. Yeah, well, I don't really know what it is. So it's obviously a video game based on the Chinese novel

Journey to the West. There's like the monkey, the turtle, those guys. It's like 50% of Famicom games were based on Sayuki. Yeah, there's actually multiple of like the great five classical novels of China. I think all of them had been developed into Famicom games at some point. But it's almost avant-garde in its sort of lack of any kind of direction that it gives you or even just playing it. It feels like it almost seems like

some kind of like weird prank that they're playing on you. You walk around on a horse and the first part is like just like this empty island. You just walk around until you just happen to walk into the right mountain that takes you on to the next level. Yeah, it's like, it's not like an RPG where there's an obvious town square. It's just like arbitrarily this mountain square happens to take you to another environment. And a game center CX, didn't he like play that over the course of like an entire season or something? Like he... I think so.

Yeah, I mean, and again, that was like the game that like, I think people like called him to help him play it. Because, I mean, no one, I don't know how people ever figure out how to, how to beat this game. Strategy guides existed in great numbers for the Famicom, actually. Well, yeah, that makes sense. But if you were to play it without that kind of assistance, I mean, you would just not know where to go, what to do. And even when you're walking, it's like really slow. Yes, incredibly slow.

And it's so ugly. Yeah. And the music's like very grating. And you get in these random battles that make no sense at all. Um, my takeaway from, uh, you know, playing it for like a minute, but also watching your videos is like, it seems like a game that someone designed and handed off. You know what I mean? Because you can see a game there, right? It's like, all right, you're literally journeying west.

You're walking west, right? And as you go, you pick up companions just like in the story and you get in random battles and you go in towns where people will help you by giving you food and water. Like it sounds kind of cool in concept. But, like, it was not, it's not a well-executed game and by any stretch of the imagination. It almost feels like a non-game when you're playing it. Yeah. It actually does.

It's a walking simulator. It's a modern indie game. It's one of those darkest J-W games. So ahead of its time. It should have been on the DOG label. All right. So, yeah, that's VAP. And I think with that, we should take ourselves a break

and let the Man Punk. here at us. All right. Oh, I hit record too late. There was an amazing discussion about Tosa. Sorry, Tose. Whoa. Wow, it's infectious. One of these days, I'm going to go to, like, the Tosei headquarters and, like, ask them, what is the best way?

I know the guy you ran Tosei USA. It's Tosei. Oh, but, what, in, there is a Tose USA? Yeah, I don't know if they're still around, but they were, like, the American BISDF arm. Oh, okay. There's, like, two or three guys. I mean, the theory being that it's like a made-up word in Roman characters that has a Japanese pronunciation, but who knows what the equivalent non-Japanese pronunciation is supposed to be?

Actually, I met the Japanese CEO, it's Tose. Oh, you met him? Yeah. Okay, I'll take your word for it. Tose. The nice thing about Japanese is that if you see what it's spelled like, it's pronounced like that too. Like, it's always consistent. Well, so, yeah.

Howells only have one sound in Japanese. Yeah, sort of. But then there's stuff like, you know, Super Mario, where when we look at the Japanese characters, it's... Mario. Well, like, super is like supa. Sure, but that's an American word that they've taken and said, we've got to make this work with our syllabary.

Well, exactly, but when it looks like tose, who knows that does not, not a word in any language. How is it supposed to be pronounced? I know, it's toze, but I get it, people. But I just don't understand why people sort of honed in, of all the many horrible things in my show, I don't know why people. No, I get it.

The pronunciation police are the worst. Like, there's someone right now who's going to bitch about something we say on this show and be like, it's so annoying. And to be honest, I'll start caring about my pronunciation of Japanese words when they start pronouncing English words the way we do. Oh, that's a challenge. It's just a cultural thing. I don't know. Anyway, so Tose. Tose.

Or Tosa, if you prefer. No. We have moved beyond the irredeemable developers onto the developers that are actually pretty okay. Like, there were developers that emerged in the 80s in Japan. They didn't become major powerhouses. You know, you had your, like I said, Capcoms and Konamis that went on to great things. But you also had a lot of companies that kind of sprung up in this time

and survived for a long time and made some pretty good stuff, but never really gained name recognition. Tose, I think, is maybe an exception just because they are so prolific and so widely hired that they've become pretty well known, even in the U.S., even though the exact extent of their work through the years remains something of a mystery. Like, they won't actually say what they won't put their names on things because, in a lot of cases, it's outside the bounds of their contract. They're not allowed to.

Well, and it's also just like how they operate. That's how they prefer to operate. They want to be anonymous. A ninja developer, as they say. Yeah. When did we learn of Tosay in the West? I will tell you exactly when it was when Brandon Sheffield and I interviewed them in 2006. We came across them at a show called Game Connection.

Game Connection typically happens at the same time as GDC, but they're not affiliated, and it's like speed dating for contract developers and game publishers. And if you're a developer, you get a tiny little room, and you can schedule. I think it is 15-minute sessions with publishers who have paid to be in Game Connection. And I was working at Gama Sutra at the time. And there's no one else like covering Game Connection because what are you going to do in Game Connection?

So we were just going into random rooms and being like, hi, can we talk to you? Because we were just naive little, you know, journalists doing real journalism. You have to be naive, I think, to do real journalism now. and we were just like, hi, we don't know who you are, let's talk to you. And so we just sat down and interviewed him

and it's like, so how many people do you employ? They're like, 2000. When were you founded in 1979? I think it was Brandon's next question was, why haven't we heard of you? And that's when they explained the story. We're like, oh, that's really cool. But, yeah, I like Tose.

I don't think I've ever played a Tosei game or I was like, wow, it was a great game. You know, but they made Rocket, Slime. I didn't play Rocket Sline. Man, that game is so good. I've heard that. That game got me back into Dragon Quest.

I have heard that. It's really good. I did just finally play... And I really like Super Princess Peach. I haven't played that one either. I played the Starfeet games. Those are not great. They're like Kirby without any challenge.

Right. But they actually put their name on the Starfle Games, right? They are the co-owners of Star Fee. I think because of their long-standing relationship with Nintendo, they got like, help, you know, making their game. You know what I mean? So, like, yeah, they put their name. Monstarfi, and they're the co-owner of the IP.

But Tose is, like, it's one of those companies where I don't think it's, you can really put a quality gauge on them because they're probably making like 10 games at a time. Right. You know, it's... Well, I mean, with 2,000 people under their input. That was, you know, 10 years ago. I don't know, who knows now. It's probably bigger now.

You think, I don't know. Probably, like, I'm sure they get contracted even more now, like middleware and... But they're also Japanese, which aren't as cheap now as, like, the Philippines. or China, you know, so, like, they, I don't know how many people they employ now. They might say on their website somewhere, but I would imagine the Famicom days, you know, they were probably more prolific than rare, you know, so they probably had multiple teams making multiple games at any given time, so I don't think there is, like, a to say to look at, but, you know, like all of their game, not all maybe, but they probably had some stinkers,

but all of them are, like, I mean, they did, cherry cherub, yeah, they did talk. Okay, fine. But they're all, like, competent and they just feel like they're to spec. You know what I mean? It's just like... The quality is variable by a lot. Yeah, well, money is variable by a lot. Yeah, I feel like Tosei is kind of your...

I mean, they are sort of the archetypal outsourcing studio. Like, you put them on a project, and depending on the oversight you give them, and the budget you give them, and the time you give them, you're going to get back an equivalent product. They've done a lot of stuff for Square Enix, a lot of, like, a lot of... ports of their older games that are actually really good. Like, they were responsible for Chrono Trigger DS, which is I think the new material they added wasn't that great, but the port itself...

What's that? But did Tosey designed that? I don't know. I don't know who did. But, like, the port itself is just impeccable. It's fantastic. They did World of Final Fantasy. Like, something, I don't know exactly what they did on World of Final Fantasy, but that game's really good, too. So, they

do some good stuff, and it really does depend on, I think, who they're working for and kind of the scope of the project. Well, and I don't know if this is always true, but it just feels like it always was. I know more than one person who has worked with them, you know, externally. And, like, they're great if you give them very specific direction. You know what I mean? Like, it just seems like if you let them go off on their own, they're maybe not going to deliver exactly what you want.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. But if you are actually, like, supervising their day-to-day, you're going to get something good. Because they're competent and they're good at their jobs. They're just worked for higher, you know, mechanics that put games together. Yeah, in a lot of ways, they, I feel like they kind of beat everyone else to the punch. I mean, that's probably why they became so big. Like you said, they were established in 1979. Yeah.

God, what were they doing back then? I have no idea. They must have been doing stuff for arcade games. Yeah. I mean, 79 was a couple of years after Space, or like a year after Space Invaders. You should have asked them. Well, I did, and they won't say it. Yeah, they won't say it, but it had to be, they had to be doing arcade games.

arcade stuff, and maybe some early PC ports, but, yeah, like the, you know, the Japanese home games market didn't really take off until 1984. Or they were just software engineers maybe not doing games. I don't know. That's possible, too. It's very possible. But, like, so what NES stuff did they do? I don't really have a list of money.

Well, they did a lot. I mean, one thing about Tosei is the fact they turn out so much stuff, and the range in quality is extremely broad. I mean, it seems like I get at least one Toze game at episode with those guys. That seems right. They're kind of like... That's another reason it comes up so often. Yeah.

Because once per Cron Tendo, at least, we hear Toza. Sometimes two, three times per episode. They're much like the rare of Japan in the sense that like every other U.S. game was developed by rare. Toza just comes up over and over and over again for all kinds of publishers. But I guess they're sort of special place in history. The very first Japanese publisher for the Famicom that was not connected to gaming was Bandai. They were a toy company. I mean, before the new, like Namco, Hudson, a few Japanese companies that worked on computer games.

Yeah, they were actually the first American licensee also. Yeah, them in Capcom and... No, Chubby Cherub and... Konami all came around... Oh, Data East. Chibby Chibabab and Tag Team Wrestling were the first Western third-party games for any of us. And those came out around the same time in Japan in... late

1985. Late 85 and late 86 here. But yeah, Bandai was the first company that had no history with

things like computers, video games, that sort of thing. They were, and it makes sense, of course, they went

with a third-party developer because they had no development team. They were simply a publisher who took their

properties and turned them out into video games. So they're very much sort of like the earliest versions of like these Kim Kardashian

games where you have a property you want to exploit, and you need a middleman to actually turn it into a game. Yeah, and those first games that came to the U.S. from Bandai were, like I said, Chebicherev, which is based on an anime in Japan. They scrubbed the license off. It was, I think, Gay, Gagay and Okitaro. And then Muscle, which was, you know, the little action figures, Kinikumania. I don't think tag team wrestling was based on anything, but, you know, it's two out of three. So right there, you've got the licenses. So that was kind of like

almost like the turning point in sort of the history of the Famicom was Bandic came in, and then in 86, everyone else came in. And the first tose game that I definitely encountered, sorry 87, sort of when everyone started coming in, the first tose game that I encountered was Kanikuman and Chubby Cherub, which came out right around the same time. And Kanikuman, it seemed like it was maybe not the worst game I had encountered, but it was the first game that seemed like it was kind of very hate. distally developed. It feels very unfinished.

Yes. It seems like there were weird games and games that didn't quite work, but this is the first game that kind of felt like a shovelware game on the Famicom. And I think that's part of the reason why just like that particular company is because their stuff, it's competently made to shovelware, which occasionally sort of goes in a little bit further and actually becomes good. But no, I think Tose works in a much broader spectrum than that. Yes, they do the shovelware for publishers like Bondi and Bon Presto and Takara and Tomey that are just like, just take this property and, you know, just get some crap out the door.

That's fine. Here's 10 bucks. But, you know, for developers who need, you know, assistance with their development and need that extra helping hand but still care about the products they create, Tosei comes in and helps out and, you know, gets the job done and can. can do some really good work. Like Frank said, the more hand-holding they have, the better they do. And they definitely improved over time. I mean, as Famicom games in general got better, they got better. So I don't think they're a terrible developer.

And they definitely put out some good stuff. But at least at first, they were sort of like the first kind of shock of the terrible games coming in. They were like the first wave. They were like the shock troops. Here comes the boom. I mean, they were the shock wave of the Famicom boom. Sort of give you, like, numbers here. In 1985, there were 69 Famicom games.

Nice. Yeah. And then in 86, we had a little bit over 100, and then in 87, total of, including Famicom System games, 206 games, and then it dropped in 88 to 196. So 87 and 88 were like the peak years when just as like this tidal wave of product coming out, that just amazing speed. Jeremy's making a shoveling motion. Shoveling coal.

And a lot of that was FDS. There were... Shettling something. Sixty-eight FDS games in 1987, which is a lot because, I mean, the system was still relatively new. That's pretty much when it peaked. But just so many off the wall, I mean, like, you had like book companies, like textbook companies, record companies.

Suddenly everyone was making a Famicom game at that time. That was sort of like the boom was end of 86, beginning of 87, when it all started. and Tosia was, of course, right there at the very beginning. And it was nice, I imagine, for American publishers, because, you know, this is, like, exactly when the NES is starting to boom, too. And it's like, okay, which of these 300 games should we try to like? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, even at the beginning, in 1985, Nintendo had something like 80 games to choose from,

and it picked out 15 of those or 16, and were like, these are the games we're going to start with. So, yeah, anyway. I think Tose is one of those companies that, like, I don't know, that I don't think that they were even trying to be consistent in quality. You know, it's like, they were a contract published. They were just a job. Yeah, exactly.

So it's one of those companies that I just, I don't know, I might sound defensive, but I just don't feel right, you know, trying to define Tosei as a developer because it's like they'll make whatever you pay him to make. Frank is definitely playing the good cop in this episode. Frank has shipped games. the rest of us are just assholes but yeah we tend to think of like games as art and of course it's it's more accurate

I guess to think of them as a consumer product that was credited and put out and designed for business decisions not for artistic decisions games can't be art or whatever but that's really not what most of these things were except walking simulators like a week of Garfield

that's art those are art But there's a lot of craft. I mean, like, obviously there was a lot of passion and craft put into something like Super Mario Brothers. And a lot of these contract companies didn't have that because they were simply cashing a check. Right. And they also probably weren't even getting royalties or anything. You know, why would you put extra effort into making something long-lasting when you have to get to the next project?

Just like the typical stream of, like, direct-to-video movies. I mean, of course, most of them aren't very good. But that's because they don't really have to be. Right. All they have to do is exist. I don't know, Land Before Time 8, I think, was kind of the pinnacle. Penicple of something. Tose is definitely like sort of the big example of companies that no one ever heard of who were nevertheless making a ton of games.

But if you look at the sort of like top tier of these sort of Famicom Boom era companies, some of them were actually pretty good. Like Imagineer kind of ties into what I was talking about earlier with Battle of Olympus and Infinity. Like they started out a little rough. You know, they did those wavejack games. I don't know. But after a few years, Infiniti's lead company president, Horimoto, saw populace in a, like, a games magazine from the West.

He was, like, flipping through, you know, import magazines in Akihabra and was like, this game looks really cool. I want to bring this to Japan. So he got the OK to localize populace for some Japanese system. I don't remember which one. And, like, that became Imagineers, or, yeah, Imagineers business. Like, they became a company that specialized in ports of Western PC games to Japanese systems. And they made a pretty good business of it up until, like, the, you know, the 32-bit era where suddenly the need for that sort of disappeared.

Because Japanese indigenous PCs sort of went away and replaced by, you know, Windows systems. But, you know, up through the mid-90s, they were porting stuff like Doom and North and South and Power Monger and things like that. So, you know, they found a niche and they did a pretty good job with it until that niche disappeared. Another, there's some interesting companies in here, like Sofell. Sofell's weird. They made nothing but weird things. One of those weird things is the current bane of my existence, Fish Dude for Game Boy, which, I have borrowed a copy of the game in the manual,

but as far as I know, the box doesn't actually exist. Oh, for this, dude, yeah. Somewhere out there, but, like, no one I've talked to who collects Game Boy stuff, people who have near-complete collections, they're like, no, I've never seen the box for that game. Yeah, it does exist. It's somewhere out there. No, like, Dane Anderson at a 10-0-0-0. No, I know some people have it, but, like, for all intents and purposes,

it's not something that goes up for auction. Yeah. And why would it, like, who would have bought that game? back in the day. It's called Fish Dude. It has really kind of gross box art, like just ugly. And what is the game? No one even knows until you play

it. Like, it's not a compelling sale. Well, and yet, obviously, whatever allocation existed sold, because you can't find them. But what was the allocation? Was it like 20 copies? Maybe they were buried in the desert. So Phyllis stands for Software

Engineering Laboratory. I see. I thought it was software elves. And they did several financial-themed games, one where you sort of like try to make money in the stock market. They did Casino Kid. And a sequel? Yeah, I think there may be a Japanese-only sequel to Money Game as well. I'm not sure. I haven't gotten that far yet.

I try not to think about the games that I have yet to play. I understand. They almost published, well, they did for the Superintendo happily ever after, the speaking of direct-to-video, the unofficial Snow White sequel. Oh, yeah, I think you mentioned that at some point. Yeah, well, like a ROM came out on. Yeah, earlier this year. It was Atlas, actually, made it.

But that was so fell. That's a very weird, hard game. And then Kokona World, which is one of those bizarre, baffling Japanese games, that you encounter and just you just don't know what to make of it. I don't remember that one. What was that one? I don't either, and I, like, watched a video of it and put a link in the notes, but, like, I remember thinking, well, this is weird.

You're like, yeah, like a girl walking around, like in, like, a fairy tale town collecting objects. I remember this now. And, again, it would, I'm sure, make sense if you had the Japanese novel, but our Japanese manual. But these games, I mean, this is before they had all these in-game tutorials that walked you through everything. So you just encounter these things with no manual and you have no idea how to play them. I'm sure it might be a great game. I think it's a lot deeper

than it really appears to be at first glance. But it does just seem kind of a little bizarre. Is that any relation to the magical world of Ginny? It's called the magic word of Jenny. Oh, magic word.

On the title screen. I think it's called the magical world on the box art. It was some kind of disconnect. And Jenny was the Japanese Barbie. They actually licensed Barbie from Mattel. And then they lost the license, so they changed her name to Jenny. Again, it's a bizarre little game in which dogs, when you're on, the overworld dogs always try to attack you for some reason. They hate her.

I just tried to play this recently. The dogs cannot stand Jenny. And she has like this crazy high kick, like a rocket dancer or something. Yeah, I mean, that's Barbie right there. Well, sure, yeah. Can her knee hyper extend forward, like a real Barbie? But regardless, it's one of those games that just feels so janky when you try to play it that it makes you not want to play it. There are a lot of those on the list that I put together.

Yeah. I think probably the hardest part for any developer was probably just like mechanics, jumping mechanics. Physics, that kind of. Yeah, yeah. So many of these early Famicom games suffer from really bad jump. Jumping is probably the number one thing. That's something no one got right until Super Mario Brothers. And it took, it took like a year or two for other developers to be like, okay, now we get it.

And even after that, a lot of them were still like... Some never did, yes. You still get like these super high jumps, these weird floaty jumps. Or like when you have like, there's like no friction on whatever is you're landing on, you slide. Bad jumping was like the bane of this whole Famicom boom. of terrible games. Nintendo really needed to just release a jumping

API, like just a single API for Famicom. Like, here's how you jump. There you go. One of my worst, most hated games, which we didn't discuss, is Bats and Terry, or Batsu and Terry. Yeah. And I don't know if you guys have ever

tried to play that or seen it. Is it the one where you're, like, throwing or diagonally a ball? Yeah, you throw a baseball, and the other guy has a bat. Yeah. The one thing I've seen in that game that I've never seen in any other game is when you kill an enemy

like a little explosion appears but as you move the explosion moves with you so it doesn't stay in place I guess it's on the background layer Yeah so it was like a technical problem they couldn't seem to resolve I guess The whole thing is just like

It looks like Super Mario Brothers I think I described it as being looking like Super Mario Brothers like the industrial neighborhood It's like all like these barbed wire fences and like concrete blocks and like warehouses and stuff And then you go into hell.

It's based on like a, yeah, like a, among about baseball players and biker gangs, the whole thing is just so bizarre. But the game itself is one of the most technically messed up games, I think I play. But yet it's the kind of bad game I like to play because it's not, it's not all that unfair. It's just awful. It's not boring. Right. It surprises you with its weirdness. Yeah.

And it's like you can play it and not get bored or for. frustrated. It's just bad. And I kind of like games like that. I consider a week of Garfield in that same category. Like, I can play a week of Garfield. I'd rather play a week of Garfield than many games, but it's not good. It's very bad. They have more appeal to us than, say, the typical Mahjong game. Yeah, absolutely. And weeks were like an interesting theme in in these oddball games. There's Linar, a company that was apparently a spin-off of a another company called Astral Corporation. Hmm.

They made it, they made, they made, did. They made weird, interesting, uneven games, not necessarily bad games, just weird ones, but their first kind of like, the first, I think, that people stumble across while poking around in NES ROMs is Bird Week, which is, I guess, supposed to be like a life sim. Like, you are living the life of a mama bird

feeding worms to your babies. Yes. protecting the chicks from... There's also like creditors of some sort I think you need... It's been so long

since they played that game. There's like bad birds. It's kind of like a bird meets choplifter meets based... Right. Yeah, maybe so. And again, one of those games when you load up it, it seems so different

than anything else you'd seen on the Famicom at that time. Yeah. And probably the most famous game is that's... Deadly towers, which really means well. It's ambitious. It's incredibly ambitious.

It's, you know, it's in that Tower of Duraga vein, you know, sort of derived from Falcom's Dragon Slayer. Right. One of those games that, like, no one in the right mind should ever try to pick up now. But, but, like, as an historical relic, it makes sense. Yeah. I mean, even at the time, I had a friend who bought that and was like, oh, this game is terrible and I hate this.

But it's still, there's some. something about it. Like, it has, it's, it's not well made. It's not really well designed, but it does have a coherence about it. And that's something that I respect in games. It's like, there is a vision to it. There is like a world and it has a structure and maybe it's not fun to play and maybe it's not fair and maybe it just hates you, but there's something happening there.

It kind of resembles Zelda in the sense that it does have something like a coherent world. It feels like you're exploring this fantasy world. Towers full of bells. Exactly, yeah. And when I looked at it for the first time, in relationship to like this stuff that came out like around the same time, it really did seem insanely ambitious. It didn't really, you know, it's grasp exceeded its reach or whatever. But I wouldn't call it necessarily like a bad game. Didn't Sean maybe like really, really hate that game? Probably. And a lot of ideas and opinions about NES games that people haven't really played. have been picked up passively from Sean Baby or the angry video game nerd.

He was, he was the YouTuber of his time. He was. But actually, yeah, trying to play it. I mean, it's not fun to play, that's for sure. But it seems like... And the sprite is very ugly, I think. Yes. But there's like, there's something there. And you have no confidence in your sword.

That's right. But yeah, there's definitely something there. And it's like, there's a lot of heart in that game. There's a lot of unnecessary polish. Like when you, I don't know, what did you do light of fire or something? Like, like, there's a little bit Dark Souls? Yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of.

like a cool effect to it with the screen flashing and the music playing and stuff. You know, like, they, there's a lot of polish to that game. There's a lot of heart and ambition to it. It's just kind of dinky now. Yeah, it was good enough that Broader Bund localized it. They tried to bring it to America under the name Hell's Bells,

but Nintendo was like, no. Was that true? Yeah. The Japanese title is Masho, which means like Evil Bell. So they were like, let's be literal. And Nintendo was like, hell in a game? I don't think so. So we got ACDC on The Hook.

I know, right. I'll confess, I just played a Lenar game for the last episode. Which was what? And I can't remember what it was. Was it image fight? No, no. Napoleon Sanky?

It was something, I don't know. Wasn't either of those. Now, Napoleon Sanky was like a really early strategy game on the NES. The Broderbund actually announced here as a battlefield of Napoleon, but did not ship. Strategy.

You did eventually get Napoleon from Koi, though. Yes. Yeah, different game. Strategy games are one of those. games, once you've played like the kind that we have now, it's really, really, really hard to go back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s. I agree with that. But Lenar is one of those companies that started out rough but with some ideas and they

kept getting better. I mentioned in passing mercenary force earlier, which is this crazy game boy shooter that takes place in medieval Japan and you put together a party of people from different. classes and you advance in formation and you can change up your formation. It's really interesting. You have to collect money from fallen enemies so that you can hire new recruits to replace

the people who you lose along the way. It's weird, but it's good. It's difficult, but it's good. And then eventually they made Gunman's Proof, which is a pretty cool Old West Super Famicom RPG shooter kind of thing. Yeah, a lot of these guys got better over time

and a lot of them sort of dropped out and we never heard from again. Yeah, then you have, you know, like a company like Victor Interactive, which was another one of those spinoffs of a music publishing company. This was part of JVC. And they started out with a very kind of, eh, puzzle action game called Banana. I love the logo on that game. Which looks very like Boulder Dash meets, I don't know, Boulder Dash. You're like a mole, like, I guess those are bananas that you're picking up in the ground?

They look like yams or something But it has a really great Sort of 80s like giant banana logo With like the little moles I think that's the most charming thing Right about the game I mean the game itself actually looks like a PC game Circa 1981

It's very ugly and dated But you know eventually they Started doing ports of Western games Like you know Lucas Arts games Like Lung Soul Scum games Both of them

Prince of Persia They published Tomb Raider. They made original titles like Keo Yugi Kitai, or Keo Flying Squadron, the crazy, like, anachronistic ancient Japan shooter where you play as a girl and like a Playboy Bunny leotard. It's weird, but it's good. One of the games I like the least from them is probably one called Hana Nostar Kaidu. It's a game where you play as a musical duo. like two male Japanese pop singers. And you remember like Mickey Mousecapade where you and Minnie were like kind of connected together?

It's the same idea. You two always like jump in unison and of course like one guy can fall off a platform land on. Then you're just like one guy stuck at the top, one guy stuck at the bottom. You have to sort of get them back together. It's an incredibly an annoying game. And again it has like that weird lack of logic that we tend to dislike in video games. Like why are random pedestrians trying to kill you? why do you whip out like a microphone and shoot them with like a musical note?

It makes sense, but if you were a Japanese pop star trying to conquer the world, why would you be murdering people in your path to do so? I mean, that's what Gact does. Gact? Is that the lizard? That's Gex. Oh, oh, right, the singer. Yeah, yes, the singer.

I know the first person that's ever confused Gacked with Gek's. I know nothing about J-pop, so you could name me any. number of J-pop art. He's like the guy where's the makeup and stuff? Yeah. One of many. Yes. Is that what do they call that genre? Glam? I don't know.

What does that call? There's a Japanese term for it. Yeah. I used to know, but I don't care. All right. Sorry, I've studiously avoided all of that kind of stuff. Crystal Dynamics created both of them, so I can see the... All right now the nerds will laugh me for not only this will laugh me for not knowing who Gacked is.

I don't care about that. I just like the confusing anything with gex. No, but I remember people like talking about him on Twitter and stuff occasionally. He shows up a lot in Final Fantasy games for some reason. Really? Like Crisis Core, Durges Cerberus. He was like, yeah, he was like Final Fantasy Durge of Serberus. He was in that game.

And there was another character in Crisis Core that was modeled after him. It was bizarre. I think Tetsu and Omero was obsessed with him or something. I don't know. On a related note, JVC was a month. One of other things, noted for the very high quality of its vinyl, they had some kind of special vinyl formulation, which is one of the reasons why Japanese records are so prized and expensive, was because of their high quality vinyl and totally stopped having to make it because it gave workers cancer. Worth it. Well, that's a happy story.

So we need to wrap this up. I need to kind of bring this to a close. It's almost two hours long now. Oh. Okay. It can be edited down, right? But it's such a great conversation. Why would we do that?

I just wanted to touch one last developer, Hecht, who never had a hit, really. They worked on City Connection for Jalico, but they're kind of a great example of a developer that started out sort of, why would you play these games? But eventually made some kind of cool stuff. They started out, actually in the arcades,

they made a game called Formation Z, which is a shooter, kind of a transforming mag-max kind of thing. there's a crappy Famicom port that they did, and you wouldn't think, oh, this is going to be a company that goes someplace. But their last Famicom game was called Moon Crystal, which was a very late release that only came out in Japan, and is a really good sort of action, brawley kind of, you know, adventure game, a little bit sort of nonlinear, and has probably the best animation ever seen on Famicom

in any action game. It's just a gorgeous-looking game. And, like, that's from the same people that made Formation Z, or at least the same company. I don't know what kind of continuity there was with staff, but it just goes to show that anyone can succeed. It's another game that we almost got here, too. Oh, really?

Yeah. DTMC was going to publish it, and there's screenshots in English. Like, it exists. What did DTMC even publish? I know in TV, I see, or whatever, called... They did Isolated Warrior in a few other games, I cannot remember.

I'm going to look it up. I don't even know that publisher. And, of course, he also did that U.S. presidential election game. Right, bringing it back into the present day. Very relevant, very timely for this recording session. Margaret Thatcher being one of the candidates for U.S. president. Yes, the Go Back to England party. Exactly.

The opposite of Brexit, basically. And as someone pointed out, the music is actually lifted from Anola Gay by orchestral maneuvers in the dark. They actually stole their... that particular main theme from that song wholesale and put it into the game like on the menu.

It's a weird choice. That's a really weird choice. Yeah. That's a, like the subtext of that is really weird. Even weirder than 1943. ETSC was the publisher of Lester the Unlikely

for the Super Nintendo. There you go. But for Game Boy purposes, Square Deal and Laslo's Leap. Oh hey, I have a copy of Square Deal. Yeah. I haven't played it yet. Not really looking forward to it.

Also almost a Nintendo NES game. in America. I started what might be a book on the unreleased American games, and I've been looking at them way too much. That's great. Please publish this book because I want to read it. Okay.

Anyway, so we've talked a lot about stuff and just kind of gone around in circles and rambled a lot, and I think that's probably what people like in retronauts. Retronauts. Well done us. Retronauts. It has no point. But thank you both for taking the time to come here, especially you, Dr. Sparkle, who drove many miles.

Well, from Sacramento. Why, I don't know from Oakland. Right. And you had to come to the sweltering heat of San Francisco. Yeah, it's weird. As people who live here know, we, Sacramento, San Francisco always has the exact opposite weather of everything around it. Mm-hmm. That's true.

So, yes. Thanks. Why don't you guys tell us where we can find you on the internet, Dr. Sparkle? Well, you can find my YouTube channel, Krontendo. You can find my, on Twitter, which is at Cron Tendo, I believe, I hope. I think that that sounds right. Yeah. And I even have a long defunct blog spot.

Do you not post on that? I thought you posted every contendo. Yeah, I do, but I used to post a lot more frequently on it. That's true. You would do like little mini updates. Yeah, talk about beer and stuff too. Yeah. I had to take that torch up and start talking about Jen on my blog.

There you go. as you stopped. Yeah, the beer project I was working on ended up getting canceled because suddenly I couldn't find that kind of beer anymore. Oh, really? I didn't know that.

The challenge at the microbrews. There you go. So I am on Twitter at Frank Sefaldi. That's C-I-F-A-L-D-I. Chifaldi. Well, yeah, in Italiano, it's Chifaldi. Franco Chifaldi, but here I am Frank Sefaldi.

So you find me there. And then I got a little something I'm working on at gamehistory.org, which we talked about in a previous episode. That's probably like January 5th-ish is when that should actually be a thing. That's pretty specific. Yeah. Just in time for the Switch lock. What do you have to tell us? Sorry, what?

I said, that's just in time for the Switch reveal. What do you have to tell us about? It's coming exclusively to the Switch. Yes. My entire website. You are a Switch app. Yeah. But yeah, go look at that.

I'm real scared. I've never started a company before. It sounds terrifying. Yeah, it's awful. And then me, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You know where to find me, per usual, here on this podcast. On Twitter is GameSpite, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, Bob Mackey would normally be here if he weren't coughing someplace and sleeping.

So check him out at Bob Servo. Bob Servo on Twitter. And, of course, we're here as Retronauts. on Twitter, Tumblr, Tinder, et cetera. So thanks everyone for watching. Please support Retronuts on Patreon so we can keep making podcasts where we talk for two hours

aimlessly about old video games because that's what we love doing and you love hearing. So we'll be back next week with a micro episode and in two weeks with a not micro episode. Thank you. Thank you.