Finished working on the Virtual East entry. The two most interesting things about the company:
PaRappa the Rapper started out as a project for Virtual East
Or at least that's the implication in posts by a former employee of Virtual East's sister company, Plus One (linked in the entry); he doesn't name PaRappa by name. Apparently the multimedia business was driving Virtual East to the brink of bankruptcy, so Mr. M and president Sawai parted ways, and Mr. M took the project to Sony. Meanwhile, D-kun from Plus One's production department was transferred to Sony to help with the animation production.
Said former employee showed the game ("the first sound game for the PlayStation") at Plus One. The female staff in the production department thought it was cute, but Mr. Sawai's reaction was "cold." Said former employee goes on to complement the "flimsy polygon character animation" by D-kun and mentions that the idea originated from a method developed by Sawai for a Mac project he produced with Mr. M.
The PlayStation version of Shin Megami Tensei II had a lot of bugs!
I link to a text file detailing the trials and tribulations in developing and debugging the PS1 version of Shin Megami Tensei II. It's not clear who wrote it or if it's even linked on the main site, a Shin Megami Tensei site.
"Why was the game released with so many bugs?"
As expected, the timing of the release was a problem. They were forced to release the game in order to increase sales before the end of the fiscal year. They also took the stock price into consideration. Naturally, the debugging team was vehemently opposed, but upper management forced their hand.
"Did you do any debugging?"
When Virtual East sent us the master, there were 4,800 bugs. It took seven months to fix about 4,400 bugs, but in the end, 400 bugs remained, the 400 bugs that are currently causing users to cry.
"Why didn't they use the same contractor as the PS version of 'Shin I'?"
Again, it's a matter of cost. Virtual East was cheaper. But of course, Atlus is also responsible for asking such a stupid company to do it.
(based on machine translation)
Looking at the credits, we figured the PS1 version of Shin Megami Tensei was by Dennou Eizo Seisakusho (deSpiria).
This is apparently a message from Atlus user support; they apologize for the bugs, but refrain from reporting on the bugs on their website to avoid confusion. They do, however, mention reports of more serious bugs, freezes and not being able to save to the memory card.
