In 1983, the game industry was still young, and all things were possible. You could make a game based on a movie called Heart Like a Wheel, and it didn't seem weird at all!
Heart Like a Wheel is a biopic based on the life of drag racing driver Shirley Muldowney, so it should come as no surprise that the game is a drag racing simulation. Perhaps you were expecting a Donkey Kong-like game where you collect hearts? You're a weird person, reader, but alas, it is not.
Heart, which was set to be published by Fox Video Games, was never released, nor was it finished. The prototype was shrouded in mystery, as no company name appeared in-game. Only the name "Universal" appeared on the EPROM board. Was this a lost game from the makers of Mr. Do!?
No. Programmer Jim Collas contacted AtariProtos and confirmed the identity of the game. Collas was at developer McT at the time, as he worked his way through college. He would go on to have a long career in tech.
While Kee Games' Drag Race and Activision's Dragster, two drag racing games that preceded Heart, have a side view, Heart notably has a behind-the-vehicle view. It brings to mind later Japanese drag racing games like the Zero4 Champ series.
Since Heart was not finished, the controls and settings are rather wonky, but the game is playable. You can read more about all that in the AtariProtos article.
Following the original Xenon and Speedball, British developers The Bitmap Brothers came out with what stands as one of the better "Euroshmups" of the Amiga era, Xenon 2: Megablast. It's tough, but manageable. It has shops where you can buy power-ups, a feature I usually hate in games like Fantasy Zone, yet they somehow made it work here. It's just an overall decent game. An acquired taste, perhaps, but don't write this off as a game that's all style over substance like Shadow of the Beast, as some are wont to do.
Of course, it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that the style is probably what people remember most about Xenon 2, whether that's its detailed landscapes or its copious use of "Megablast" from Bomb the Bass. You'll be hearing that particular track throughout the game, over and over again. Maybe you'll learn to love it.
Xenon 2 made its way to various computer and console platforms, mostly in Europe, but there are also ports for the Japanese X68000 and PC-98 computers, which will be the focus of this post. These come courtesy of publisher Epic/Sony Records and developer System Sacom.
Western audiences only know of System Sacom from games like Mansion of Hidden Souls and Lunacy, two of the few games of theirs that made it outside of Japan. That's unfortunate, because they did a lot more than that. (This is where I would link to a write-up about their "Novel Ware" series of games, but nobody's written anything like that in English.)
The big new addition to the X68000 and PC-98 ports of Xenon 2 is the Special Mode, featuring (per the manual) new music and a new ending (nothing too exciting, I don't think). The new music is very good and is a nice alternative to listening to "Megablast" non-stop. It's credited in-game to Yuji Nomi and Manabu Saito, though only Nomi is credited in the manual. Yuji Nomi is the composer who later worked on Mega CD/Sega CD Mansion of Hidden Souls and several Studio Ghibli films. Manabu Saito is the System Sacom music composer who died much too young at the age of 22.
The X68000 version of Xenon 2 is very close to the Amiga version, but apparently someone did not take into account the difference between PAL and NTSC, so "Megablast" plays a little faster than it should. I also think the game is running a little faster, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The PC-98 version has all the features and new music from the X68000 version, but the graphics and sound take a significant hit. The foreground graphics still look good, but a background layer is missing. The game also runs much slower and choppier.
Space Harrier for the Famicom is kind of an odd duck. It was the only Sega port Takara ever published on the system, and there may be a reason for that.
FC Space Harrier was developed by Whiteboard, which had a close relationship with Sega. Programmer Sotaro Suzuki was a guest on OBSLive in 2014 and revealed that it was originally supposed to be a game based on Licca-chan, Takara's fashion doll. I don't believe any other details were given on why the change was made. The Space Harrier port was done without documentation.
In fact, it appears to be based on the Mark III version, but the graphics have been greatly cutesified/simplified, probably because of technical limitations. The bigger problem is the slowdown, which seems to adversely affect your firing. Rapid fire helps, but not completely. It makes you appreciate the Mark III version more; despite that version's problems, it's still very playable. FC Space Harrier is decidedly less so.
Karateka was released across multiple platforms, even NEC's PC-9800 series of personal computers in Japan. The Making of Karateka, Digital Eclipse's "interactive documentary" on the classic martial arts computer game, only features some screenshots of the PC-98 version, but there's a whole playthrough of it on YouTube.
My experience with Karateka is mostly limited to the Famicom version, so I won't speak to any differences in gameplay, but the PC-98 version seems to run faster. The other major, and certainly the most obvious, difference is the music playing throughout the game, to the extent that they may have missed the point of the original game.
PC-98 Karateka was published by Brøderbund Japan and developed by a company called Masternet, an online service provider along the lines of CompuServe or AOL in the States. It was originally a subsidiary of Meiji Dairies Corporation. You can look at a pamphlet for the online service here.
The ending credits are surprisingly lengthy. More people worked on this version of Karateka than any other, and yet I don't suspect Masternet had much to do with game development, at least outside of online games. I could not even begin to speculate on how they got involved with this.
Arc System Works' history timeline, as seen in their 30th anniversary music video. On December 28, 1991, they "developed 'Sonic the Hedgehog'".
Why does Arc System Works take credit for Sonic 1 on Game Gear? That was developed by Yuzo Koshiro's company Ancient; they said so themselves. Yet Arc mentioned it in their 25th anniversary book and their 30th anniversary music video.
Maybe Arc converted it to the Master System? But the Arc book specifically lists the Game Gear version, and the music video gives the Japanese release date for the Game Gear version (see screenshot above). However, both Yuzo Koshiro (in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 1) and Ancient's Twitter account have said they developed the Game Gear version first. Hmmm...
Bomberman used to be about a guy who blew up stuff with his bombs, but in the 1990s, the franchise started going off in different directions. There was a racing game, a strategy game, and even a game where Bomberman can play baseball, golf, and tennis. Then there's Bomberman Quest for the Game Boy Color, an action RPG similar to Zelda with a dash of Pokémon.
Bomberman is piloting his Bomber Shuttle back to Planet Bomber, filled with all the monsters he's captured when suddenly, four mysterious lights attack the ship and steal all four of its engines. (A coincidence, I'm sure.) The monsters escape, and Bomberman has to make a crash landing on an unknown planet.
What's a Bomberman to do? He has no choice but to round up the monsters that are now terrorizing this planet and find the engines to his shuttle. But it won't be easy: Bomberman will have to defeat the Commander of each of the planet's four zones to regain the engines, all the while trying to wrangle the freed monsters. (Gotta catch 'em all to see the good ending!)
Along the way, he'll find items and powerups to help him overcome the puzzles and obstacles he encounters. Some items can be taken to the Bomb Workshop in the planet's only town, which can be used to strengthen current bombs or build new kinds of bombs needed to progress through the game.
That's one of Bomberman Quest's more interesting features, but the game overall is fairly derivative. Nevertheless, it's cute and fun, and if an 8-bit Zelda-style game with Bomberman sounds interesting to you, check it out.
Their name isn't mentioned, but going by the names in the credits, Bomberman Quest appears to have been developed by Eleven, which also developed Saturn Bomberman Fight!!, where their name does appear. Characters from Saturn Bomberman Fight!! make cameos in Bomberman Quest, but that could (also) just be a coincidence.
In this edition of Developers on TV, we head to Japan, via the Australian TV show Beyond 2000, to visit the offices of Techno Quest and check out the "next generation of video games." The year is 1985, so that means LaserDisc games. (Never mind the fact that LaserDisc arcade games are on their way out at this point.)
Techno Quest was a computer graphics production company that was also a subsidiary of Taito. They ran into financial trouble after Taito founder Michael Kogan died, then turned to video game development to help pay the bills.
Only two games are known to have been developed by Techno Quest: The infamous Famicom kusoge Ganso Saiyuuki: Super Monkey Daibouken and the game featured in this Beyond 2000 segment, the MSX LaserDisc shooter Rolling Blaster.
Anyway, we don't get to see much game development going on, but we do get to see how they did computer animation back in those early days of CG. It's just as well, because the game's not very good, and the animation is doing most of the heavy lifting. Such is the case with most LaserDisc games.
The segment starts at 05:04:
Actually, I think Rolling Blaster is okay, but I'm not willing to commit to that for various reasons.
The game is only four stages ("rounds"), not that they're short. If you die, you have to start all the way at the beginning. And you can't skip the cutscenes that play before each stage. They sure knew how to pad things out.
I'll give them credit for trying to switch up the gameplay: The first and third stages play like a typical vertical shooter, but the second and fourth stages play quite differently. You can only move left and right, and you have to steer your missiles into enemies. While you're steering, you cannot move your ship. An interesting change, but these are the most frustrating parts of the game.
CHEAT: Is it a cheat if it's in the manual? Press the left SHIFT + CTRL keys at the menu to bring up two secret options to select your round and amount of lives.
Vadim Gerasimov was one of the co-creators of Tetris. You don't hear as much about him as you do about Alexey Pajitnov, but he was interviewed back in 2022. (He hadn't talked to Pajitnov in 25 years!) You can learn even more about him on his website (though it hasn't been updated in a while).
Did you know Gerasimov created another puzzle game that only came out for PlayStation in Japan? In Vadims (three guesses where that name came from), you clear blocks by forming diamond patterns. Seems like a cross between Lumines and Pyramid by Sachen.
Vadims was developed by Metro, the company behind the rhythm game Bust A Move/Bust A Groove.
Parallax scrolling and cascading hordes of enemies are two of the notable features of Exerion, an early Jaleco arcade shooter. Per Jaleco founder Yoshiaki Kanazawa in the book Jaleco Archives, the game was developed by a company called Kawa Denshi Giken.
Former NMK programmer Kaz Ayabe recounted a story on Twitter about Exerion's development he heard from one of that company's co-founders. Basically, the hardware, software, and graphics were done by one person, an old man who didn't know assembly and made the game entirely in machine language. Great story, if true.
For this edition, we head west...and south, to Carlsbad, California, just outside of San Diego, home of Park Place Productions.
Park Place developed the first Joe Montana game for Genesis, the first NHL game for Genesis, and the first John Madden game for Genesis. They did quite a few sports games, actually, and yet they were never a
household name. And people who talk about old games today rarely talk about sports games, so they never even come up in that context. But I found them to be an interesting company to research because it's a
classic rise-and-fall story. You can read more about that in the GDRI entry.
Hank Bauer of local TV station KFMB visited Park Place and sat down with founders Michael Knox (who died in 2009) and Troy Lyndon. I've dated this to 1993, so it wasn't long before the company imploded. The video appears to have been uploaded by Knox.
NFL Quarterback Club is seen and mentioned. This eventually got handed off to Iguana Entertainment because of what happened to Park Place. The unreleased 3D Football for 3DO is also shown.
Knox and Lyndon talk about home shopping. Lyndon once had an interactive television patent, but I don't know if that had anything to do with this, or if it had anything to do with 3DO, as this report implies.
K-Byte was a software developer and electronics manufacturer based in Troy, Michigan, near Detroit, with a manufacturing facility in the northern Michigan town of Gaylord. In the field of video games, Atari, CBS, and Epyx were among its biggest clients. It was one of two high-tech companies in the state profiled in a series of reports that aired on Detroit television station WXYZ in 1983.
In this report, you'll meet the charismatic president of K-Byte, Patrick Flynn. You'll also hear about the company's growth and the wealth of talent it was able to attract. Yes, the future looked quite rosy for this up-and-coming high-tech firm.
But there was a stumbling block: In 1986, K-Byte filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to the Gaylord Herald Times, "Flynn said his company suffered when some of its customers went out of business without paying their bills."
K-Byte was then bought out by Tampa, Florida-based electronics company Reptron. Under Reptron, K-Byte moved away from software development and focused on manufacturing.
I don't recall any specific clients being blamed for K-Byte's bankruptcy, but I've wondered if one of them was Atari. K-Byte was making games for Atari's Atarisoft division and from what I understand, these contracts were fairly lucrative. (Atarisoft published games for non-Atari platforms.)
This was back in the days when Warner owned Atari and was spending money like drunken sailors. Under these Atarisoft contracts, K-Byte and other companies were responsible not only for developing the games, but also for manufacturing and packaging them, something K-Byte was uniquely qualified to do. In fact, it would appear K-Byte was manufacturing games for other Atarisoft contractors. (The K-Byte name can be seen on PCBs of games the company did not develop.) I would think K-Byte stood to make some money if things had
gone as planned.
Instead, parts of Atari, Inc., including Atarisoft, were sold to Jack Tramiel. InfoWorld reported on the problems some contractors had getting money they were owed. One wonders if K-Byte had similar issues.
Other items of note: Dr. Keith Dreyer is showing off some sort of music software; I know nothing else about it. (Dr. Dreyer would go on to be a prominent radiologist in Boston.)
Dr. Keith Dreyer
Two unreleased games are shown: One seems to be the Commodore 64 version of Donkey Kong Junior; I have no idea what the other game is.
Donkey Kong Junior on the Commodore 64
Unknown game
The name Ice Castles was mentioned; this was a working title for Atari's I, Robot, but this may be a reference to Crystal Castles. (K-Byte developed the C64 version.)
Did you notice the Atari 800s being used to develop C64 games? A source once told me they programmed on Atari hardware, then ported the code over with hardware that was designed internally.
