“This really is… I can’t really help you here either…”
“Director Kang, do you have any plans on making Psychic Battle 2?”
“Psychic Battle 2? I do have plans on making it, but… It’s not going to be for the Family console. I’m thinking about developing it after the next generation of consoles are released.”
“Ha… That would take at least several years from now.”
“Right? Haha…”
“I held a pen this morning for a brief moment, yet I had no desire to draw at all. My hands were on fire when I was drawing Ryu Hwa-ryung and Azesha Ren… Anyways, our team manager called me out for doing nothing today.”
He was producing 4~5 high quality illustrations per day when he was working on Psychic Battle; his preference really is making a huge impact on his job performance…
“Is Mr. Hayashi doing well these days?”
“Last I heard, he was transferred to the Inventions Office 1 to work on making the final touches on Super Marigee 3…”
At that moment, a disheveled-looking Hayashi opened the door to the recreation room and entered.
I waved my hands at the sight of a familiar face, but he didn’t see us and shoved a cigarette into his mouth as soon as he walked in.
“Mr. Hayashi?”
“Ah!? Director Kang!!”
“How have you been?”
“That’s… Phew… It’s nothing.”
I could guess what he’s going through.
Hayashi’s personality wasn't a match with the Inventions No.1 team. He sucked a huge breath of smoke in and sighed before speaking to me.
“Director Kang, do you have any plans on making Psychic Battle 2?”
… Did these two plan something out beforehand… What’s happening here?
“You’re thinking the same thing as me, Hayashi. Director Kang!! Please save us!! I want to design beautiful girls. I’d rather look for another job than be drawing Donkey Kim.”
“I also can’t work with the Inventions No.1 team. Just this morning, I discovered a few bugs in the software we were working on, so I gave a few words of advice to the developers. And they treated me like an idiot. Mr. Shige should’ve forced them to fix it and yell at them for being careless, but that’s not his personality...It was much more peaceful when I was working under you; I was learning a lot too.”
As expected, my predictions were right. Hayashi’s personality didn’t match the atmosphere of the Inventions No. 1 team… I took a sip from my cup of coffee and turned my head back and forth between Morita and Hayashi.
A graphic designer specializing in drawing females, and a coding machine… This combination could work…
I stared at them for a moment and opened my mouth.
“Mr. Morita and Mr. Hayashi, I understand how you feel right now. However, I don’t have plans on developing Psychic Battle 2 anytime soon…”
“Oh…”
“Phew…”
In response to my reply, the two made a dejected face as they sighed.
“So I was thinking, How about this?”
&
A few days later, I brought along Morita and Hayashi to Pentagon Soft in Tokyo.
“Director Kang? Where are we?”
“This is the company that developed Final Frontier.”
“Okay, but why are we here…”
“Mmm… Pentagon Soft is currently led by Mr. Kawaguchi, the main developer of Final Frontier, and he wanted to meet you guys after I mentioned my Psychic Battle team members.”
“Whaat?”
Cluck. As we entered through the door, we saw the clean interior of the game development office. Hayashi’s first impression of the interior was favorable.
“W...Wow.”
He couldn’t stand mess at all; Hayashi was the type of person who couldn’t sleep at night if I misplaced a book on his work desk. Seeing such a clean working environment, I could understand Hayashi’s enthusiasm.
At that moment, Mr. Kawaguchi, who had been having a conversation with Yamano Yoshitaka, a game script writer, greeted me.
“Welcome, Mr. Junhyuk.”
Subsequently, Morita who was standing next to me shouted out in excitement.
“P...Professor Yamano!!”
“Oh~ Long time no see, Morita!!”
Mmm? Did they know each other? As soon as Morita spotted Mr. Yamano, he ran up to him and spoke as he grasped Mr. Yamano’s hands tightly.
“I’m working as a character designer now, just like you said I would.”
“Yes, I was aware of that. The moment I saw Psychic Battle’s graphics, I had the feeling it was your work. Your touch is still alive!!”
Hoh…. So Mr. Yamano was Morita’s teacher? This was unexpected…
From their conversation, tt seemed that Morita was Mr. Yamano’s part-time worker when he was in highschool. Mr. Yamano had recognized Morita’s talent in drawing out a unique story using the curvatures of the female body and directed him to pursue a career in character design. But there was another surprising piece of information here.
“Do you know how Satoshi-kun is doing these days?”
“Last I heard, while he was working for a magazine publisher as an illustrator, he was scouted by a company making console games named… Dasia? Anyways, he’s working at that company now.”
Dasaia… Could it be that Dasaia who was famous for the game Sermon Guritsa!? Then this Satoshi is…?
Not being able to wait any longer, I stepped into their conversation.
“Mr. Morita, could you perhaps be talking about Yoshihara Satoshi?”
“Oh? You knew him as well, Director Kang?”
“Ah, I don’t know him personally… But I saw one of his illustrations once…”
“He is also talented in bringing female characters to life on the screen. Haha, I knew you were very perceptive when you recognized my talent, but you were familiar with the beauty of female illustrations all along.”
Haha… I knew this industry was small but to think practically everyone knew each other like next door neighbors… Yoshihara Satoshi… No offense to Morita, but Satoshi possessed an almost god-like sense in drawing female illustrations.
In later days, he would garner international recognition as an illustrator with his project, Sermon Guritsa. So this was the reason I sometimes felt Satoshi’s influence in Morita’s projects; they were old classmates…
A while later, I introduced Hayashi and Morita to Mr. Kawaguchi. As Mr. Kawaguchi was short on human resources for finalizing the development of Final Frontier, he expressed great delight with Hayashi’s coding ability.
“You write code very elegantly. We also like to write in plugs to document my code; our programmers here at Pentagon Soft all follow this structure.”
As expected, Hayashi and Mr. Kawaguchi hit it off quite well. Hayashi also had experience playing Kawaguchi’s Final Frontier, so they were in the middle of exchanging compliments with each other. And Morita was happily catching up with his old teacher.
Meanwhile, I sat at a nearby and looked aorund the interior of Pentago Soft as I sipped on a coffee that an employee brought to me.
I was given access to the inventions office and the employee rest area in the second floor of Pentagon soft as I had partook in the success of Final Frontier. The inventions office was originally split into 2 teams, but only one team was currently active while they were trying to put the finishing touches on Final Frontier 2.
1988 was the year of various famous games being released. And as brands like Dragon Warrior, Super Marigee and Final Frontier were among the most recognized games, plans were being made to continue these series.
Along with the success of these various titles for Mintendo, President Yamauchi had also been unable to let go of the sentiment that games were little more than money factories for him.
“I won’t give Mintendo another game from this point on…”
I had no intention of develop games under Mintendo anymore. Psychic Battle would probably be my last gift to Mintendo.
Making a game required many hours of hard work and effort, but the company that distributes these games would slap their logo on it and buy the copyrights for the penny that they were worth. This was a great downside to the original developers of the game; they couldn’t produce for that series if they moved to another company. Unless one had the intention of living and dying with their first company like Mr. Shige, continuously making games for one company would negatively affect a developer's career.
‘If Morita and Hayashi agrees to settle down here, I will be releasing my next game with this company.’
There were various genres that I could relate to when I envisioned Morita’s designing style, such as the once famous ‘Grow the Princess’ game where one would raise their ‘daughter’ from childhood to marriage, etc…
‘No. Even though I have countless memories of famous masterpiece games in my head, I won’t copy from them.”
Up until now, when I was making Dragon Emblem and Psychic Battle, I had not copied the originals. Even if I was leading the industry with these new genres, I knew I had my morals to preserve.
I took out a marker and started writing on the whiteboard in the inventions office.
First things first, the genre. From what I knew, the first adult game was developed in the 90s for the computer, which was a dating simulator. It was created by Fox Soft called ‘Thumping Memorial’, featuring the main character who would choose a girl to pursue and try to woe her in 3 years with various events.
Other than that, there were a few others such as ‘Sentimental Graffiti’, ‘Piacarot’, etc… There should be a few others, but this will do for now…
I was lost in thought while writing on the whiteboard.
Well, the general storyline of these types of games were like this: the main character would do a plethora of kind acts to every girl he met. Every once in awhile, there would be an event where he could gain points towards “wooing” the girl.
As I had never properly dated anyone prior to travelling to 83’, I had no intentions of making the main character be happy that easily.
“Should I take this in the other direction then?”
There are a lot of “living happily ever after” stories, but there aren’t any about preparing for a divorce. Oh? The more I think about it, it seems to be a good idea…?
A young man who is preparing to break up with his girlfriend… a breakup… simulation… At that moment, a scenario started to play itself in my head.