Difference between revisions of "Blog:Transformers: Mystery of Developer"

Revision as of 04:56, 1 December 2016

CRV (talk) 05:49, 1 December 2016 (CET) [permalink]

The Transformers game Convoy no Nazo (Mystery of Convoy) is one of the most high-profile examples of "kusoge" on the Famicom due to its high difficulty and other gameplay quirks. The mystery is supposed to be what happened to Optimus Prime, but the bigger mystery, and the one that remains unsolved, is who developed this infamous game. Unfortunately, there's some conflicting information:

• The company ISCO (pronounced as one word [isuko]) listed the game on its website. [1] Sometimes I wonder if they meant the Famicom Disk System game Transformers: The Head Masters. Note the similarities between it and the ISCO-planned Paris-Dakar Rally Special in these videos: [2] [3]

• Convoy no Nazo came up, to some small extent, in a Tose code comparison.

• In a post written after Convoy no Nazo's release on Wii Virtual Console in Japan, a former game graphic designer alleged that the president of Locomotive was the game's programmer. Tose is based in Kyoto; Locomotive was based in Kyoto. It's not inconceivable that he worked for Tose before starting Locomotive. (The composer of StarTropics also allegedly worked part-time at Tose. The US copyright registration for StarTropics credits Locomotive with music, so we can infer that said composer worked for Locomotive.)

• A former Advance Communication employee rattled off "FC Transformers" in a tweet about the company. To me, neither Transformers game seems like an Advance Communication game, and Convoy no Nazo predates any of their games on our list.

{{#ev:youtube|uWjmkk5H9PE}}

Credit to the creator/uploader of the videos above