Blog:4
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Contents
Stuff
- Lots of new questions have been added to the Kevin Seghetti interview (really an amalgamation of questions I've asked him over the past year and a half). Because of that, it has also been given a major re-edit.
- You must watch Once Upon Atari, produced by Scott West Productions and directed by the great Howard Scott Warshaw.
- Game Designer John Pickford is now on YouTube. He even commented on and favorited my Zippo Games tribute video. On his own channel, he has a few videos from beta/unreleased games.
Man at Work
Our goal is to have the Mikito Ichikawa interview completely finished and ready to go by the end of the month. In the meantime, please do enjoy this picture of Ichikawa-san working at the Mindware office.
Vote!
To any Americans out there: Today is Election Day across the country. If you're registered and the polls are still open when you read this, go out and vote! Even if you're in a state that's not up for grabs in the presidential race, assume nothing. Vote! Also, there are other things on the ballot besides the presidential stuff.
This is Not the Game Developer Research You're Looking For
The Electric Playground website had a news item yesterday regarding Game Developer Research releasing the 2008 edition of its annual census and what the survey had to say about the Canadian games industry. Unfortunately, Game Developer Research is referred to as "Game Developer Research Institute" in one instance, and a link is provided to our site.
So if you ended up here because of the Electric Playground site, you are in the wrong place. Though we have a column on sister site GameSetWatch, GDRI is not affiliated with Game Developer Research. In fact, we predate it by a year. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Another One Bites the Dust
Thanks to the mysterious stranger who posted those Serizawa Nobuo no Birdie Try / Mecarobot Golf (SFC/SNES) credits, the clincher in deciding that unknown company GDRI-006 was Advance Communication.
Let's all celebrate by watching a Japanese commercial for one of the games Advance Communication developed, Jekyll Hakase no Houma ga Toki / Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (FC/NES)...
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New Interview and New Betrayal
- Read our latest interview with Steven Dwyer, former programmer with Now Production who worked on Sonic Riders.
- Mikito Ichikawa has done an interview with WiiWare World that deals mostly with MaBoShi for - you guessed it - WiiWare. Excuse me, I think I've got something in my eye...
Anyone Can Edit!
All this time I thought anonymous editing was disabled because of the skin we're using, but it was actually because of some other setting. I have fixed this setting, so now anyone can edit anything on GDRI that has not been locked so that only sysops (i.e., me) can edit it.
REMEMBER: "Anonymous" editing is not completely anonymous, so no funny business! Your IP address will be recorded and displayed publically in the edit history. You will also have to answer a simple math problem.
Things That Make You Go "Hmmm..."
Did some Activision marketing person stumble upon GDRI? From a press release for Little League World Series Baseball 2008 (WII/DS):
"Now Production is a premiere videogame developer founded in 1986 and based in Japan. It has developed games for many major publishers, including Namco, Konami and Activision, working on games such as Katamari Damacy and Dance Dance Revolution and Little League World Series 2008. In recent years, Nowpro has started creating original, independent titles and is also involved with developing mobile software and online games."
Call me wacky, but that seems a bit like our description of Now Production...
Packed with Action
- GDRI has a new bi-weekly column on GameSetWatch called GDRI Wisdom (I preferred my name "Words of Wisdom," but whatever). Every other Monday, check out excerpts from select GDRI interviews. This will be of little interest to loyal GDRI readers (all zero of you), but this could give us some exposure. Nothing wrong with that...
- I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep the column going. I don't think we have enough material that is broad enough and doesn't get into specific games or "clearing up credit-related wackiness," as editor Simon Carless put it.
- Old-time Sierra fans: SierraVault is an expansive archival project covering many things Sierra On-Line related - game lists, ads, hint books, video, catalogs, and more! Check out the site and the YouTube channel.
- The world of Chinese pirates and bootlegs and other oddities is traditionally a mysterious one. Well, it got a little less mysterious when maxzhou88, who worked at Super Game, started posting stories, artwork, and source code from the illegitimate games he worked on, like The Super Shinobi (an FC/NES conversion of The Super Shinobi II/Shinobi III).
- Looks like the Mikito Ichikawa interview has hit a roadblock. As you may know, his answers are being translated by a Mindware employee, and I've been cleaning them up. However, this latest batch has some things that are clearly wrong or just very awkwardly worded. I had trouble re-writing them, which prompted me to ask for some of the original Japanese. Unfortunately, anybody I know who knows Japanese (Dimitri and Idrougge) has been busy.
- Earlier this month, Unseen 64 posted scans from German magazines featuring screenshots of the unreleased Road Rash II for the Game Gear. They also mentioned a post I made at SMS Power (it appears Road Rash II became Kawasaki Superbike Challenge). I bring this up because I just found this promo video on YouTube:
- {{#ev:youtube|XML9-m68TpU}}
- The video is one of many on this YouTube channel. Some girl "owns" the channel, but a friend is apparently the one who posted all these old game promo videos. Where did they come from!? [UPDATE: Turns out these were taken from the Internet Archive.] If you dig around, you'll find some more unreleased stuff (like Future Zone for the Super NES). Did you know there was going to be a Genesis version of the Home Improvement game?
- Back to GG Road Rash II, it and Kawasaki were developed by Teque London. There is very little shared staff between them, though (you can find the credits to RRII in the Kawasaki ROM). I tried to find someone who worked on either game that I could e-mail, but to no avail.
More New Interviews
- Game industry veteran and Microsmiths co-founder Rex Bradford talks about his game development career.
- Part 1 of our Mikito Ichikawa interview is now up. Ichikawa-san is the president of Mindware (formerly MNM Software).
And be sure to check out Mindware's new WiiWare game MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade, released this week in Europe and Australia. Don't know when or if it's coming out in the US or Japan.
