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Reach for the Romstars

CRV 09:06, 4 November 2009 (UTC) [permalink] [comments]

- For a change of pace (or not), I interviewed Tony Gonzalez, who was a technician at Romstar and SNK of America and manager of Romstar's home game division. I contacted him because of his involvement with Romstar's NES games (some of which were developed in part by Pixel), but I would say most of the interview is not about those.

Read the interview now!

- If you are interested in old Romstar and SNK arcade stuff, you might want to read Mr. Gonzalez's old posts on the Neo-Geo forums. The man is a wealth of technical information and stories.

- Halloween may be behind us, but we can still look forward to Horrorween, a horror comedy film coming out next year featuring a number of celebrity cameos. And it's directed by Joe Estevez. Yes, THE Joe Estevez. Mr. Gonzalez is credited as "composer: effects music." I don't know if that means he composed sound effects and music or "effects music." I suppose I could ask.

- Mr. Gonzalez recalled during our conversation, "One of the most famous early Seta games sold under the Taito name was Gladiator." That was interesting because I was reading just days before on Japanese sites that Seta developed said arcade game. Since then, I've read that it was Allumer that developed Gladiator. Makes sense since characters from Gladiator later turned up in Allumer's Blandia arcade game. I also noticed that two of Seta's company officers had previously worked at Allumer, one joining as early as January 1984. I didn't think Allumer was around that far back. Also worth noting is that Allumer's early-1990s arcade games like the R-Type-esque Rezon and the aforementioned Blandia ran on Seta hardware. I've also read that Joshi Volleyball and Great Swordsman, two arcade games released by Taito, were developed by Allumer. Sounds about right since Great Swordsman and Joshi Volleyball run on the same hardware, and I figured whoever made Gladiator also made Great Swordsman (They look kinda similar.).


The Strength of Tose

CRV 13:51, 25 October 2009 (UTC) [permalink] [comments]

Oh, to think it was summer 2008 when Dimitri and I pored over these images from Tose's 2000 and 2001 Corporate Guides, trying to figure out what games were pictured. Actually, it was Dimitri who figured most of them out, but there were still some that left the both of us scratching our heads. If you are a game box cover expert, test your skills and help us identify the rest.

If you think you've seen these pictures before, you probably did via our Tose entry. These are newly slimmed down versions with one "new" game identified (Shinobi X for Saturn). [EDIT: Actually, maybe more than one. Looks like I might not have uploaded some updates.]

Tose 2000 Tose 2001

By the way, I'm pretty sure this was all inspired by a Japanese attempt at Tose-related box identification with a picture from 1UP.com:

Japanese attempt at box identification

Note: Click thumbnails to view larger images


Finally...

CRV 12:52, 19 October 2009 (UTC) [permalink] [comments]

After many months, my interview with Beyond Interactive CEO Hitoshi Akashi is finally up. Akashi has previously worked for Communicate, Sonata (which later became Human), Zap, and Electronic Arts Victor. He was also involved in the development of some Family Trainer/Power Pad/Family Fun Fitness games. All that and more are talked about in the interview.

Because of language barrier issues, Akashi's answers required lots of rewriting, editing, and cleaning up. I had to do the same sort of thing with the Shouichi Yoshikawa interview. Not exactly what a professional publication would do, I'm sure, but I'd like to think writers for professional publications would stay away from e-mail interviews in general. I can say this much - I tried to maintain the intent of the original answers. Think of it as an English-to-English translation. As with a Japanese-to-English translation, fixes and adjustments and rewordings may be made in the future as necessary. There's still a little awkwardness in there. I also changed a couple of my questions slightly. That's something I usually avoid, but with all the other changes, why not? Oh, and I might ask Akashi some more questions.

My thanks to Akashi-san for all his time and patience. I'm sorry for taking so long! Everybody who's not Akashi-san, be sure to check out Tappy Typing, available on the iPhone App Store.

Read the interview now!


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