A closer look at the Megatech games: Cobra Mission

The story of Megatech Software is a strange chapter in the history of computer games, even in the tight context of foreign ports of Japanese home computer games. Similar to Seika’s Railroad Empire, it was a hardware company’s experiment in computer games. Megatech Software was a division of Liberty International Components, a distributor of passive electronic components with numerous partnerships in Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Whether the division was seen as a serious business venture, or just as a way to have some tax-deductible fun, I cannot tell, though some circumstantial evidence points to the latter.

It lasted about five years and published four games. A lot has been written about these games, they are famous alone for being the first eroge ever to be released outside Japan, but rarely with a view on the Japanese originals. That’s what I’ll try to do here, one game at a time, in chronological order.

PC88/PC98 Conversions

This is an attempt to list all the games originally developed for the NEC PCs and later translated and ported for release outside Japan. I don’t know if it’s complete, but I don’t think that a lot is missing. If you have any additions to make, please comment below.

There are two restrictions to this list: First, I’m leaving out the ports to Windows. It would easily make the list twice as long, but just add a lot of of “visual novels” with little or no gameplay.

Second, I’m leaving out the Koei games. Koei is a special case. In 1988, they established a Californian subsidiary and from then on published at least every other game in the USA, on multiple platforms. Koei’s games were released on multiple platforms in Japan as well, they are not especially linked to the NEC PCs. Nobunaga’s Ambition was originally, in 1983, published in BASIC.

Changing the country tags

Since I’m still quite new to blogging, I haven’t really figured out yet to use categories and tags best. I will probably be creating new ones and removing old ones for quite a while. (I’m nearly rid of the “Games” category. Not a very bright idea on a blog dedicated mainly to games.)

Today I changed the country tags. Instead of tags like Russian games, Japanese games, German games, there are now tags for the countries themselves, and I’m using them more extensively, not only for the origin of games. Under Egypt, you’ll find not only Haridy Columns but some Pharaoh screenshots as well.

So far, I’ve used the USA tag rather sparingly. There simply are more games from the USA than from anywhere else (in early July, more than a third of all the files on Download Central were from the USA), so I try to use it only when it really makes sense, usually when I explicitly mention the USA in the post.

Japanese-Games.info

I’ve started working on a new site, with the domain japanese-games.info. So far, the only page on it is about Sokoban. The idea is to transfer all the pages about Japanese games from the old site to it.

Games from Scotland

I noted before that the vast majority of UK card games is from England, more specifically from rural England (An English love for patience). Now I wanted to see how this is with UK games in general, and went through all the readmes in search for contact addresses. I found half a dozen in Scotland, and two in Wales. Here are, for now, the games with addresses in Scotland.

The Clackmannanshire address is not for the author (Roderick A. Begbie) of HDS Hi-Lo, but for the distributor (Hillfoots Data Services). I’ll put it here anyway. It would be the oldest game from Scotland in my collection, and the only card game.

Peter Balch (Edinburgh) wrote several interesting Windows games from at least 1994 on. So far, I uploaded two of them, more will certainly follow.

Another game from Edinburgh: Code Breaker by R.D. McDermid, 1995. It even has a picture of Edinburgh Castle in the about screen.

Steven Porter gives an Aberdeen address in Jump (1995).

Neil Fraser wrote Chain Reaction in Inverness in 2003.

Now, this whole thing should not be taken too serious. But a few details are interesting. In England, freeware and shareware development seems to take place in the country mostly. I think I came across only one London address, and I can’t remember any from the big industrial cities at all. But from these six Scottish games, three are from Edinburgh and one from Aberdeen.

That all these games are for Windows 3.1, is probably to a certain amount a coincidence, Peter Balch for example has written a couple of 32-bit games as well. Still, the absolute lack of DOS games is interesting. This is very different in England, but it is similar in Ireland. So far, I’ve come across only two DOS games from Ireland, and these were later than most Windows games.

Windows games from Denmark

About a month ago I uploaded Jens Klausen’s 01Soft Mancala, and afterwards I noticed with some astonishment that this was the first Windows game from Denmark on Download Central. In the following week I found quite some more, but it’s still remarkable that there are relatively few Windows games from Denmark, and the development seems to have started rather late, which cannot be said of PC games in general; Bjoern Kroghore’s Yatzee dates back to 1987, which is fairly typical for Europe. Anyway I’ll list here all the Danish Windows games I’ve found and uploaded so far, in chronological order.

Thomas Riedel’s Upuzz is the oldest that I’ve found so far, and it’s from 1996! And it’s not really a finished game either, it was more a programming exercise.

3D Tic-Tac-Toe is at the moment the only other 16-bit game. It has a custom window without a title bar and needs an 800×600 desktop.

Kenneth Boldt’s Balut is currently the oldest 32-bit game, like 3D Tic-Tac-Toe from 1997. It’s a dice game similar to Yahtzee (or, rather, Yatzy), and runs well in Win32s.

Brian Caos Tempting Music Player (1998), both a music (specifically: module) player and a Tetris game with appealing graphics, is on the whole the most interesting in the bunch.

In spite of the name, Anders Busch Hansen’s Master 2001 was finished in 2000. Currently I have no Danish game from 1999.

And finally there’s 01Soft Mancala (2001), the game that started it all.

An English love for Patience

At the moment, there are 67 Windows 3.1 card games, and a few more for other platforms—too few perhaps, too early to make any theories based on statistics, still I couldn’t help but notice the relatively high number of games from the UK. Due to the card game uploads, when I reached 1300 downloads a few days ago, the number of Windows 3.1 from the UK games was for the first time higher than those from Germany.

A closer look shows a few more interesting things. First, this is even more true for solitaire (Patience) games. I have, for example, quite a number of card games from Italy. Most of them are Italian national games like Scopa, one is a Bridge program, not a single one solitaire. Of the four German card games, only one is a solitaire.

And nearly all of these UK games are from England, even more specifically, from rural England. Only for one game, HDS Hi-Lo, the author has given an address in Scotland, and this is not a solitaire game. None has given an address in London, or any other large city.

Interesting. I’ll revisit this topic when the sample is larger.

Five popular German games

These are just a couple of games from Germany that are downloaded more often than others, not necessarily the five most popular, that chnages from month to month anyway. Click on a thumbnail to get to the download page.

The Great Giana Sisters was a 1987 Commodore 64 game, soon ported to Amiga, Atari ST, and Amstrad CPC. The graphics, essentially the same on all platforms, were by Manfred Trenz. It was a clone of Super Mario Bros, too close for comfort in the eyes of Nintendo, who pressured the publisher (Rainbow Arts) to withdraw the game from sale. A planned ZX version not even hit the shelves.

Ten years later Rainer Sinsch started remaking the game, which had achieved a sort of cult status, for PC. At the Mekka & Symposium 1998, his remake was the winning entry in the 32k game competition. A larger version with better graphics soon followed. The games use an uncommon 360×240 resolution (the only other game I know to use it is from Germany as well, it’s Albion). In 1999 Rainer Sinsch started working on a Windows game that sticks less strictly to the Commodore 64 original, Giana Worlds

This is simply Sokoban, nothing else, and as such it is probably the most beautiful implementation ever written for Windows 3.1. It has a nice and fitting Japanese touch about it. The Window background shows the kanji for Sokoban (倉庫番) and the splash screen shows the release year in Japanese style: 平成九年, year nine of the Heisei period.

It’s a strange thing with Shisen-Sho. It’s a Japanese invention, found first on a Tamtex arcade machine, but nowhere has it been as popular as in Germany. More than two out of three of the implementations I’ve come across so far are from there. Maybe it’s because it fits the concept of the arcade puzzle so well.

This game, simply called Shisen-Sho was written ten years after the original boom (which was mostly an Atari thing) by Martin Fiedler. It’s a 32-bit Windows program, has functional yet beautiful graphics and six board sizes to choose from.

MegaPlex is a remake of Supaplex, the somewhat legendary Boulder Dash in a computer. It uses the graphics of Infotron, an earlier Mac remake or port.

The 95 in Dave Dude 95 refers to the year, not to the operating system: This is a 16-bit Windows game. It is probably the only LucasArts-style graphic adventure game written for that platform, the others I’ve seen so far are more like Mystery House and don’t really use the graphics in gameplay.

Othello was not a Swede

After I added GSReversi 1.22 (an Amiga game) to Download Central yesterday, I noticed with some astonishment that it was the first Swedish Othello in my list. Why astonishment?

Well, on the one hand Othello has always been very popular with programmers. There are certainly many more Tetris clones than Othello games, but we’re talking similar dimensions here. On the other hand there are lots of computer games from Sweden, more than from many countries with a larger population, and Swedish games are often implementations of standard concepts. That these two large sets should have such a small intersection is astonishing.

When I looked closer I found a few more interesting details. Currently the Othello list contains only one game each for the other two Scandinavian countries (both Mac games BTW). It contains only one from the Netherlands, and none at all from Finland.

Like many other game concepts, Othello is popular mainly in a few specific countries: USA, UK, France, Italy. But since most of these countries have quite a large output of computer games in general, it’s less obvious than with other concepts.

Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden

I’ve always been interested in where games come from, and I’ve listed the games I write about or offer for download by country for years. Now I looked at the Download Central stats to see from which country listings people actually click through. The results were not what I was expecting. There’s a steep curve, each entry in the following list has about half as many clicks as the one above it:

1. Germany
2. Russia
3. Italy
4. Sweden

All the other country listings create so few click-throughs that the numbers are hardly relevant and might well be a product of chance.

Of course I cannot say how relevant these numbers are at all. I do not know if people come to these pages because they are interested in games from that country, or if the page just turned up in the search for a game they were looking for. But it’s interesting.

One thing that baffles me is that there is absolutely no relation between the number of games I have from a certain country and the number of clicks. UK, France and Canada for example are very long lists, longer than anything except Germany. I’m especially astonished that there was not a single click from the Finland listing, since this is quite a long list as well and one of the few countries with a distinct game culture of its own.