Blog:Reach for the Romstars

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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.).

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