Jaleco's Forgotten Football Game

In a world where one company has the NFL rights locked down, it's difficult to imagine a time when every big publisher, and medium-sized publisher, had their own (American) football game. Historians refer to this period as the 1990s. Among those companies, Jaleco, purveyors of Bases Loaded, brought to market a football game for the Super NES that has almost completely slipped through the cracks of gaming history. I don't think it was even heavily promoted or reviewed when it came out.

One reason Sterling Sharpe: End 2 End went unnoticed may have been bad timing. Sterling Sharpe was a wide receiver with the Green Bay Packers; his football career was cut short in 1994 due to a neck injury. The game was released in March 1995.

Jaleco once again brought in everyone's favorite second string development team, Tose, to assemble this festival of football fun. Did they deliver a touchdown?

More like a fumble. I generally stay away from football games, so I have no personal impressions, but reviews seem generally lukewarm at best. End 2 End lacks features like a season mode and real NFL teams and players. They would never release a game without actual players today, but it happened a lot back then.

Former Tose sound designer Shigemitsu Goto composed the peppy music:

FMT and AC STG Mysteries

There is perhaps no series more ubiquitous in the world of shooting games than Raiden. You can find Raiden games on the Atari Jaguar, PC, Nintendo Switch, and every PlayStation, and every once in a while they make a new one. It has endured through the years when other series have not. (Gradius arguably has greater brand recognition, but they haven't made a new game in years.)

And it all goes back to the original Raiden arcade game from 1990. Its success in Japan and North America ensured ports on numerous platforms, including this one for the FM Towns, a computer from Fujitsu that was only available in Japan.

I don't have much to say about the game itself except that it's a pretty good version of Raiden, and it has an arranged CD soundtrack. Naturally, there is some question as to who was involved in the development, hence this post.

FM Towns Raiden was published by KID, a fairly prolific developer in its day. But the name of another very prolific developer, Success, also appears on and in the game, and the game is listed on their website. So who was it?

Former KID sound designer Nobuyuki Shioda has talked about the programmer on Twitter in 2021. They were a University of Tokyo student who also programmed Isolated Warrior for the NES (Max Warrior for the Famicom in Japan). This student programmer went to an arcade, cleared Raiden on one coin, then came back and made what a magazine would call a "perfect port."

Back in 2004, the old KID Damashii website also mentioned this programmer, named "Taka," adding that they also worked on G.I. Joe. The name "Y. Takashina" appears in Raiden's main executable, in a text string.

The developer mysteries don't end there. Video of the unreleased arcade shooter Choujuuki Spriggan Powerd, apparently related to Compile's Spriggan games, has surfaced online.

The KID logo can be found on the board, which you can see here. That seems pretty clear-cut, right? And Nobuyuki Shioda recalled seeing it on "Yagawa's desk," presumably referring to shooter programmer Shinobu Yagawa, who once worked at KID. However, a former member of Compile has also claimed to have worked on this.