this is the website i go to to see people post several paragraphs about some jp retro game that i may have barely heard of once. also some other stuff but mostly that since every time a post happens i will see it rechosted like five times
I feel like one of these days I should write something long about the Steam Pilots crowdfunding shitshow, as we in the Anglosphere rarely hear about what happens when Japanese crowdfunding goes wrong.
A very brief summary: ex-Konami composer Motoaki Furukawa did a crowdfund campaign for a shooting game called Steam Pilots meant to invoke some Twinbee nostalgia, even roping in Twinbee/Gaiapolis character designer Shuzilow.HA. Much of the programming was to be done by Pixel, a very small (basically one-man) studio who made indie games like furry STG Horgihugh. Eventually Pixel made public that he wasn't getting paid and was leaving the project, and now nobody knows what the hell Furukawa did with the funds because he hasn't given any details on how things were spent. That's a gross simplification, of course, there are lots of details, but now there are rumblings of a potential class action suit from angry backers. Also, Shuzilow.HA has been pretty publicly dragging Furukawa and his wife/manager/co-conspirator(?) Nanako and it's vicious yet satisfying to see.
I'd heard through contacts long before this went down that Furukawa and Nanako were absolute egotists and miserable to deal with, so I've been watching the situation unfold with interest. Seems like the guy's burned quite a few people over the years and the schadenfreude has come to roost. Hopefully the backers get something out of this in the end, at least.
people tend to get confused whenever this story comes up, so, just to clarify: the Pixel who worked on Steam Pilots is Hidekuni Sasaki, president of indie dev/events company Pixel Co. Ltd, and has absolutely nothing to do with Daisuke Amaya, Cave Story or anything else.
To elaborate a little more on Steam Pilots: Furukawa initially crowdfunded the game to the tune of ¥8M+ but could not complete the game due to the contracted developer walking out on him... which, as it turns out, was prompted by them learning about how he'd screwed over the dev of one of his previous indie project, Momoiro Underground, recognising the same warning signs in their own dealings with Furukawa and cutting ties while they could.
(The Momoiro Underground dev later reissued their game globally for Steam and Switch as Dezatopia, minus Furukawa's small contributions and with a big "this game has nothing to do with Motoaki Furukawa" disclaimer on all the trailers.)
Because both of these devs chose not to say anything publicly, Furukawa was able garner a lot of sympathy from other indie devs in the retro-adjacent scenes he ran in, as well as kick up hostility and doubt about his former collaborators. Sasaki of Pixel felt for his situation and agreed to come on board to bring the game to the finish line, and before long, Furukawa had him doing damn near everything: he was designing and programming the game all on his own and drawing virtually all of the pixel art and even designing most of the characters, with Shuzilow.HA's additional designs/illustrations and Furukawa's music being the only outside contributions (and as far as anyone knows, Furukawa hasn't written/recorded anything in years).
On top of everything else, Pixel wasn't been paid, as he'd agreed to withhold payment until the completion of the project, but given how the entire game had been dumped in his lap, he requested that Furukawa allowed him to contract another artist to help get the game over the line; Furukawa agreed, and ran a second crowdfunding campaign to fund the remainder of development, bringing in ~3M in additional funds.
Cut to two+ years later: Pixel publicly resigns, stating that he still hasn't been paid a cent for all his work, he has no idea what's going on with any of the money that came in and that he's taking all of his work with him unless Furukawa pays him what he's owed; he ended up taking Furukawa to court in seek of payment. Furukawa and his wife/business partner made some very non-specific commitments to finishing the game with yet another set of contractors, but in the ~18mo since the blow-up, they've given no real indication that the project is moving, become increasingly hostile and hard to contact and have started talking more and more shit about both Pixel and Shuzilow.HA, who has recently become more openly intolerant of Furukawa & co., especially once they locked down their accounts and started directly shit-talking him to their backers. (Shuzilow.HA and Pixel have and continue to work together on other games.)
Unfortunately for Pixel, most of his agreements with Furukawa were not made in writing, so nailing him down for anything specific has proved difficult and has allowed Furukawa to skate on all sorts of ridiculous arguments and throw frivolous counter-suits Pixel's way—at one point, Furukawa argued that none of the money he'd sourced from backers was specifically earmarked for financing the game and that it was merely requested for the extremely vague purposes of "risk mitigation", and Pixel shared an extremely gun-to-my-head statement (which has since been deleted) apologising for ever stating or implying that any of the money raised to fund Steam Pilots was ever supposed to go to paying the people making the game. Last I checked, Furukawa was trying to sue for emotional damages.
This has all been bubbling to a head over the last few weeks as people have tried and failed to coerce a sufficient response from Makuake, the crowdfunding platform, and as Furukawa & co. have made it increasingly difficult for any of their backers to contact them at all, let alone give them credible updates on what is or isn't happening with the game. Furukawa's ruined his own reputation in retro circles and has become one of go-to domestic examples of crowdfunding going wrong, and he doesn't seem to care.
(Incidentally, this all ties in to the potential impending expose on the making of Thunder Force VI—one of the many criticisms levelled against that game relates to Furukawa's contributions to the BGM, which were directly and unabashedly recycled from a CD of generic royalty-free music he'd released years earlier, and there's been some conjecture about whether Furukawa might have Tallarico'd em when they commissioned him for original tunes.)
After months of pressure from backers and evident hostility from Furukawa & co. towards providing any credible updates, the crowdfunding platform Makuake has finally intervened—despite their attempts to coerce something out of Furukawa, they've lost faith in his ability and/or intentions to deliver and are forcibly delivering refunds to those who apply for them, which people are interpreting both as some small justice for the backers but also a tacit admission from Furukawa & co. that they're never going to deliver the game they promised (and that they could have delivered if they'd paid the one guy who was actually doing all the work!).
The lawsuits between Hidekuni Sasaki of Pixel Co. Ltd and Furukawa are still ongoing, but one would hope this turn of events is going to swing things in their favour. Whatever the case, Furukawa's completely torched his own reputation and become the boogeyman for domestic crowdfunding, and even those closely involved with him struggle to understand why.
Just announced by Hidekuni Sasaki: BAUNTY SISTERS, a 2024 game made by an assembly of collaborators whose previous project never saw the light of day, featuring some ever-so-slightly-familiar character designs...
Announced last week and released today on Switch: FINAL EXERION, a revival of Jaleco's 1983 fixed-screen arcade shooting game Exerion (of x-in-1 NES multicart fame) and the first in a planned three-part series of "FINAL ____" Jaleco revival titles.
This series is being developed by Happymeal Inc., a studio founded by former Cave employee Junji Seki that made their bones during the galakei era and have recently found success with the Mystery Annai series of Famicom-style adventure games (the first of which was just localised as Retro Mystery Club Vol.1, and one of Seki's particular quirks is that, for whatever reason, he just really likes Exerion—he made a fake Exerion minigame for one of these ADVs and was such a stickler that he went and got the actual Exerion license for it, even, and now they've gone whole-hog and made a full-on sequel with modern game systems and a story and all sorts of junk. I do appreciate that they've identified Exerion's key defining trait—unnatural, disorienting parallax background—and committed themselves to presenting as many new and exciting ways to nauseate the player as possible.
(Incidentally, Seki also runs Famicassearch, a collection & database of second-hand, hand-labelled cartridges that might one day be reunited with their original owners, which I wrote about a little while back.)
City Connection and Happymeal have some other collabs in the works: one, which they fully revealed a couple weeks ago, is an ADV based on OMEGA 6, the recent comic by former Star Fox steward Takaya Imamura, and I believe there's one more, separate from the Final Series, that's due to be announced this weekend...
City Connection's revealed their final new title ahead of TGS: Rushing Beat X: Return of the Brawl Brothers, a new game in their Super Famicom brawler trilogy Rushing Beat (localised as Rival Turf, Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers, respectively) that, just based on the publisher logos in the teaser trailer, seems to be western-made, or at least western-focused. I'm surprised it took them this long, frankly—SOR4's, what, three years old now?
This was a series that only succeeded to the extent that it did by being in the right place at the right time—that is, being the two-player brawler option when Capcom under-delivered with their Final Fight port—and while the later games certainly showed more ambition in terms of non-linearity and an ever-so-slight focus on character interactions (much of which was excised from the localisations), I'd hardly consider them hidden gems or anything, and I can't imagine many people are going to have strong opinions about which direction they may or may not be taking the series because.... like, who gives a shit, really.
(as opposed to, say, Forever Entertainment getting their claws on Night Slashers... brace yourselves.)
that said, the reason this series is even on my radar is because lil dude was obsessed with Brawl Brothers for a minute—I bought him the NSO sub at the same time I gifted him SOR4 and a bunch of other games but whenever I'd check in on him he'd be playing Brawl Brothers instead of SOR4 or Splatoon or whatever, and bringing it up in conversation with his friends as if they'd have any idea what the hell he was talking about, and it was that moment that I knew that, despite my best efforts, I had well and truly fucked him up
No platforms just yet, but it'll be out next year. Both the illustration style and the general visuals strike me as familiar, but hell if I can place them right now... City Connection's listed as the developer, but even if it is completely in-house, they've got a lot of houses... (EDIT: a little snooping tells me it's internal CC, for the most part)
As the name suggests, they're specifically modelling this new game after the second game, Rushing Beat Ran/Brawl Brothers: five of the six player-characters in the key art are straight from that game (the other being a brand-new character), most of the mechanics seems to be iterations on the specific systems seen in Ran, and the game's story is positioned as a direct follow-up to Ran that may or may not bridge to the third game, Rushing Beat Shura/The Peace Keepers. They're also adding a character-upgrade gimmicks, in-game missions and a system to combine carried foods into new ones at healing trucks, as well as an unlockable database of weapons/enemies/etc. It's limited to two players, and there's no mention of online play.
Soichiro Morizumi (director and/or writer and planner on a bunch of Super Robot Wars games & spinoffs, including writer/director of both Project X Zone games) is working on Rushing Beat X as a planner/writer, and will be present at one of City Connection's TGS talk panels on Saturday, so all will be revealed before long. It's playable on the floor, too, so get at it.
EDIT: the character design & key art's by another SRW/PXZ alum, Kazue Saitou.
yknow what, I should've introduced this series via this @Kawaiikochans shirt but I did not and I am truly sorry