Commodore Development in Japan

You wouldn't know it today, but in the 1980s, Commodore was one of the biggest names in home computers. Their most successful machine was the inexpensive and incredibly durable Commodore 64, which sold 17 million units worldwide (according to Commodore's 1993 annual report). But let's focus on two of the company's other budget-friendly products, both of which were made possible with help from Japan.

VICtory

The VIC-20 was Commodore's first attempt at a low-priced color computer, and it was made with Japan in mind.

Commodore founder and president Jack Tramiel announced his intention to develop what would become the VIC-20 at a meeting of managers held near London in 1980. Most opposed the idea, to which Tramiel responded, "Gentlemen, the Japanese are coming—so we will become the Japanese."

Tramiel predicted the Japanese would capture the home computer market. By "becoming the Japanese," always coming up with something new and better, Commodore could stay ahead of the competition.

I'm skipping over a lot of details, but the project was eventually handed over to Commodore Japan, where Yash Terakura and his team would take charge of the engineering.

After that was done, the VIC-20 went on sale in Japan in October 1980, months before it was available in the US. There, it was called the VIC-1001 and made its retail debut at the prestigious Seibu Department Store in Tokyo.

The VIC-1001 was a relative hit in Japan and managed to stave off Japanese companies from selling their low-end computers Stateside. The VIC-20 would go on to become the first color computer to sell one million units.

MAX Power

The MAX Machine suffered a much less noble fate. It was announced at the Winter CES in 1982, along with the C64, and was essentially a cut-down version of the latter. The C64 even has a MAX Machine compatibility mode.

Designed by Terakura, who was working in the US by this point, the MAX Machine was meant to be a "game computer," an idea that Tramiel would seemingly revisit at Atari Corp. with the XE Game System. However, the MAX Machine was eventually cancelled, but not before it was released in Japan.

The Games

In addition to hardware, Commodore also leaned on its Japanese group for software, namely arcade-style games that would help the VIC and the MAX compete with game systems like the Atari 2600.

But who developed these games? This is of particular interest because we know some of them were by HAL Laboratory, and at least one was programmed by future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

The Commodore International Historical Society uploaded internal software status reports. Let's compile what was developed in Japan and dissect the data:

The Reports:
https://archive.org/details/maxsoftwareprojectstatusreport19820430
https://archive.org/details/vic20contractreport19820505
https://archive.org/details/vic20maxsoftwarereport19820512
https://archive.org/details/maxsoftwarereports

MAX games developed in Japan

• Avenger**
• Bingo Math**
• Clowns**
• Football (unreleased)
• Gorf***
• Jupiter Lander*
• Kickman***
• Mole Attack*
• Money Wars*
• Omega Race***
• Pinball Spectacular*
• Radar Rat Race**
• Road Race*
• Seawolf**
• Super Alien**
• Tornado Baseball (unreleased)
• Wizard of Wor***
• Darts (possible)
• Golf (possible)
• Windsurfing (possible)

* Has HAL Laboratory copyright
** No HAL Laboratory copyright, but uses same font
*** These look similar to each other, and were probably done by the same group (SAS?).

MAX games that do not appear in reports
Have HAL Laboratory copyright

• Billiards
• Bowling
• Le Mans
• Slalom

VIC-20 Games Developed in the US

• Radar Rat Race (Bill Hindorff's name appears in the ROM.)

VIC-20 Games Developed in Japan

• Mole Attack
• Pinball Spectacular
• Sky is Falling
• Breakout (possible)
• Darts (possible)
• Golf (possible)
• Kickman (possible)
• Windsurfing (possible)
• Wizard of Wor (possible)

"Possible" candidates were ultimately scrapped and may have never gone into development.

Now let's break down this earlier VIC-20 status report from 1981. It's from before the US launch, so it uses a lot of early/working titles.

Cartridge programs being developed in Japan

• VIC Invaders (Avenger?)
• VIC Avengers (Wait, is this Avenger?)
• "Pacman" (Jelly Monsters?)
• Blackjack (Is this actually Poker? A released game, Vic 21 Casino-Style Blackjack, was on cassette and is credited to Neil Harris.)
• Slot Machine (Slot/Superslot?)
• Race X (Rally-X/Radar Rat Race?)
• Super Invaders (?)
• Lunar Lander (Presumably this is Jupiter Lander, but it is listed as a U.S. game.)

C64

There are no status reports for C64 software available. Some MAX games were sold overseas as C64 games.

It's easy enough to figure out what games were developed by HAL, but what about those four MAX games: Gorf, Kickman, Omega Race, and Wizard of Wor?

Unfortunately, one person who would have known passed away in 2013. That was Taro "Tony" Tokai, the general manager of Commodore Japan, whose name you see on these status reports.

Former Data East programmer Akira Sakuma converted games for Commodore at SAS before he joined Data East. However, when I asked him about it, he didn't seem to know the platform or recognize screenshots I showed him.

Note: Some information in this post came from the books The Home Computer Wars: An Insider's Account of Commodore and Jack Tramiel by Michael S. Tomczyk and Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall.

Shine On, Harvest Moon

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm? Well, they've been down there since 1996. That's when the first Bokujou Monogatari game was released for the Super Famicom in Japan. You might know the farming simulation series better as Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons.

30 years is a long time for any series to still be going, but would you believe this workhorse of a franchise almost never left the stable?

During a 2012 GDC talk, series creator Yasuhiro Wada mentioned how the original "developer went under" because they took on too many projects, and "the president went missing -- literally." Wada worked with the main programmer and the scenario writer to finish the game within budget.

Wada did not disclose the name of the original developer, but an ad from the Famicom Space World '95 Official Guidebook (below) reveals that it was a company called Radical Plan.

From the text: "Planning, Development: Radical Plan (企画・開発/ラディカルプラン)"
(credit to original scanner)

Radical Plan was a company started by a former programmer at developer Zap. Yuichiro Itakura, the founder and former president of Zap, wrote about him in his book The President Returns: Why I Started a Business Again (社長復活 ぼくが再起業した理由) and apparently had a slightly different take on what happened to Radical Plan.

To make a long story short, the president was being forced out of the company, so he took the money he loaned the company and hid out for a while. As I recall, he was working for Itakura's company at the time this book was written.

Bokujou Monogatari, Harvest Moon. Whatever you call it, here's the game in its salvaged, reworked form.

Remembering Roy Ozaki

In May 2026, it was announced on the video game news website Time Extension that industry veteran Roy Ozaki had passed away in 2024 at age 73. Ozaki was the president of Mitchell, an arcade game distributor and game developer behind the Pang series, Cannon Dancer, and Puzz Loop.

Much of what we know about Ozaki comes from his very candid interview in the first volume of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers. Before that, he was interviewed for Insert Credit. At the time of that interview, Mitchell was developing games for the Nintendo DS, and they were apparently in the process of filing a lawsuit against PopCap Games over Zuma and its similarity to Puzz Loop (which did not come to pass, as we find out in the Untold History interview).

As far as I know, Ozaki did no interviews with Japanese media, at least that were published. He was interviewed by the game historian Zekuu. Otherwise, there isn't much about him on Japanese sites.

Ozaki's career in games started at Data East, where he was a voice director on their LaserDisc arcade games and worked in sales. He then joined TAD, a company started by former Data East staff.

After a falling out with TAD over Toki*, he and his business partner Koichi Niida started Mitchell, built on the shipbuilding business Ozaki inherited from his father.

(*Ozaki alleged in his Untold History interview that he paid for the development of Toki [and other games?] and was supposed to receive 80 million yen.)

Mitchell was a longtime coin-op distributor for Capcom and served as an overseas agent for smaller companies like Home Data, Metro, Seta, Video System, and Visco. It started to develop its own games in the early 1990s* and later moved into consumer development.

(*The first three Pang games were developed by Capcom.)

Ozaki is survived by his son Shinichiro. Koichi Niida has taken over management of Mitchell's IP and liquidation of the company.

The Definitive History of Hot-B

At this point in time, I think I can safely stand by that title. And I found it completely by accident searching for something else. Not much discussion. It's a series of articles about the history of Japanese publisher/developer Hot-B called "Restart: Stargazers Will Awaken Once More," originally published in the collectibles retailer Mandarake's magazine Zenbu, now available on the Mandarake website.

As the name suggests, there's a heavy focus on the "legendary kusoge" Hoshi o Miru Hito (aka Stargazers) for the Famicom. Those of you who are familiar with that game will have plenty to dig into, but this series also covers early Hot-B history, including their work with adult titles, and their more notable, later titles. These include The Black Bass, Cloud Master, Insector X, the Mega Drive version of Kageki, The Blue Marlin, Devilish, Steel Empire, and more.

I'm not sure who wrote this. There was a Twitter account that was researching Hot-B; they even interviewed Hot-B's president and confirmed that Sage's Creation, the American third-party Sega publisher, was basically just Hot-B. I was wondering whatever happened with that.

(As of this writing, there were 20 articles, the latest being from February 6, 2026. There was supposed to be an update on April 3, 2026.)

"Restart: Stargazers Will Awaken Once More" (contains some adult content)
https://www.mandarake.co.jp/restart/

Update: Unidentified K-Byte Game Now Identified

It's been a decade since I discovered an old television news report on developer K-Byte, and it's been a year since I wrote a post about that report, but someone finally came forward with a name for that mystery C64 game I noticed: It's Narnia for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, one of a series of two games based on The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Now you can go back to whatever you were doing...

A K-Byte programmer working on Narnia for the Commodore 64?

Oh, wait, there's more...Referred to as an Interface game, an attempt to blend board games and video games, Narnia includes physical dice and cards to be used during play. It's doing the VCR board game thing before those were a thing. Or maybe it's doing the Magnavox Odyssey thing. Of course, the game can't detect what's on the dice or cards, so you're basically on the honor system. Ideally, you'd be playing this with your family, but we'll get into what you do with the dice and cards in a little bit.

I don't know much about the Narnia books, but I can tell you Narnia is based specificially on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. (The book was even included with the game.) It consists of two stages, or "Adventures." In the first "Adventure," the player must find the beavers that wander around the screen. Each beaver gives you a heart for what is essentially your life meter, which you'll need for the next "Adventure."

Dwarves also wander the stage. Running into them takes you to a "Dwarf Battle" in which the dwarf thinks of a random number, and you must roll your dice and get a higher number to win. Of course, you could just make up a number, but that would be wrong.

The stage ends when you get 10 hearts, the Witch captures Edmund (who appears on-screen at the same time as the Witch and automatically goes to her), or you run out of time.

Adventure Two takes place in the Ice Maze. The goal is to reach Aslan the Lion, but you'll have to go through doors and avoid the Witch's crystals to get to him. Each door leads to a prompt to draw a card from your deck. Type the letter ("code") printed on the card to be taken to one of eight "Card Sub-Adventures," most of which are mini-games that involve rolling the dice.

Screenshots from the Commodore 64 version (Source: MobyGames)

There are a few different names on the title screen. Word, Inc./Word Publishing was a Christian book publisher that was owned at the time by ABC Publishing, a subsidiary of the American Broadcasting Company, and was the publisher of this game. The Episcopal Radio/TV Foundation held the film and game rights to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Gruen Studios was board game designer Paul Gruen's company, so the board game elements should be no surprise. Gruen designed many board games including two based on the Narnia books, but his best known was probably Pay Day, originally from Parker Brothers. Presumably Gruen designed the two computer games, and K-Byte wrote the software, but there's no hint of K-Byte's involvement other than the news report.

Title screen, Commodore 64 version (Source: MobyGames)

As for the second game, it was called Dawn Treader, and I think you'll find it looks a lot like Narnia. So if K-Byte developed Narnia, then they probably developed that, too.

Link of Interest:
Narnia on the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History

Pigskin Footbrawl, Y'all

Did you know they played football back in the Middle Ages? It was a little simpler, a lot rougher, but it's all documented in Pigskin 621 A.D., the arcade game from Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman, the duo behind Rampage and Arch Rivals.

The football version of Arch Rivals is basically what this game is. If you've played Arch Rivals, you have a general idea of what Pigskin is like. Two teams take to the field, duking it out for control of the ball. You can punch, tackle, and pick up weapons to take out opposing players, but watch out for hazards such as rocks and water.

Strangely, Pigskin has never turned up on any arcade compilations in the past 25 years or so. Literally the only home versions are the Genesis version and an unreleased Super NES version, both of which were rechristened (Atlanta Falcons head coach) Jerry Glanville's Pigskin Footbrawl. The Super NES version quietly turned up online in 2025.

Pigskin Footbrawl was published, at least on the Genesis, by RazorSoft. If you don't remember them, that's okay because they're pretty obscure. They were an Oklahoma-based company that tried to make a name for themselves by making more violent, "adult" games. Their last game release was in 1992, which perhaps helped them avoid any entanglement in US Senate hearings on video game violence that happened the following year.

With that in mind, it might surprise you to see that Super NES Pigskin is dated 1994 (see video below). Yes, RazorSoft was still kicking around, though they seemed to be more involved with sporting goods by then. The Genesis version came out in 1992; I interviewed the programmer. But the Super NES version had a troubled development.

Allow me to explain: Super NES Pigskin was originally contracted to a company called Knight Technologies, which was bought out by Park Place Productions, which then proceeded to collapse on itself, which led to a lawsuit from RazorSoft for breach of contract. RazorSoft handed off the game to programmer Glenn Volk; that's the name that was given to me by someone claiming to have worked for RazorSoft, and that's the name that appears in the game, so I believe this person I talked to years ago.

This person also said they had access to the original source code and assets, and that the Super NES version wouldn't have come out until 1995. By that point, Pigskin would have seemed antiquated next to the PlayStation and Saturn. They would have had to sell 1.2 million copies to turn a profit, so it wasn't worth the effort.

Back to the game itself, is there any real difference between the Genesis and Super NES versions? I would say the Super NES has the edge in both graphics and sound, with a somewhat better frame rate and cleaner voice samples, and maybe even one additional voice sample ("Let's get ready to Footbrawl!"), though it has less blood. It even has a dedicated "tackle" button not even in the arcade version and an ending sequence of sorts.

Down in the Dumps: Taito Edition

On June 4, 2025, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation dumped 125 Taito prototype Famicom and MSX2 ROMs (mostly Famicom) live on stream. During and after the stream, others tried to examine and piece together these assorted ROM dumps. What did they find? Lots of prototypes of Bakushou!! Jinsei Gekijou (Taito's take on The Game of Life [Jinsei Game]) and Arkanoid 2. But there were still a couple of more interesting finds.

First was what turned out to be graphics data from a prototype of the action RPG Kagerou Densetsu. (No program data, unfortunately.) Kagerou Densetsu was published by a company called Pixel, the same company profiled on GDRI (I've checked before. They have the same address.), but it's been noted that Taito's name could be found in the final release. Was Taito going to publish it originally? They never announced it, but two different Taito logos appear in this prototype data.

The name Kagerou Densetsu and the Taito connection would suggest a relationship to The Legend of Kage, but a different title can be seen in this graphics data — Shinobi Densetsu: Ushinawareta Makimono (忍伝説 失われた巻物) (Shinobi Legend: The Lost Scrolls). A cursory search finds no evidence that Taito announced a game under this name.

By the way, Pixel was mostly a contract developer that previously published three original games for the MSX, but Kagerou Densetsu was developed by yet a different contractor called I.T.L, which did a lot of work for Taito.

Shinobi Densetsu graphics data (Image source)

Then we have what appears to be graphics data (again, no program data) for a seemingly unannounced, unreleased game. Taito announced a few Famicom games they never released, but this doesn't match up with any of them. This looks like some sort of sci-fi adventure, but there's no title; otherwise, it's a complete mystery. The second number font (see image below) was also used in the Hot-B published strategy game Takeda Shingen, developed by Nova (as confirmed by one of its co-founders in an interview), so it may have been developed by them.

Graphics data from a Famicom game with an unknown title (Image source)