/vr/ - Retro Games

Hudson Soft was one of the first companies to show such interest and to appeal to Nintendo which took charge of the publishing of Family Basic, the first title developed by Hudson to be released on Famicom. The deal between the two enterprises wasn’t exclusive to the red and white console though, the company founded by the Kudo brothers obtained the rights to use Nintendo licences on computer (Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong 3, Golf, etc.). However, Hudson Soft didn’t wait the signature of this agreement to familiarize its employees with the machine and produce its own development kit. A team of two people designed the tools that would be used by their company: Setsuo Okada who took charge of the hardware part during Fall 1983, while the software part was developed by Shinichi Nakamoto (who later programmed the Famicom versions of Bomberman and Lode Runner). The kit was operational as of Winter 1983, about 6 months after the launch of the console. It featured a graphic editor which ran on X1 (a computer produced by Sharp and for which Hudson Soft developed the BIOS), a ROM simulator (which allowed the developer to previsualize the graphics he designed on a CRT among other things) and a hard disk drive. Although NEC put the first PC-9801 on the market in 1982, this model wasn’t compatible with the Assembler program Hudson Soft used at the time, so the company waited until the release of the PC-9801VM in 1985 to replace its workstations.

On a related note, since Hudson designed the PC Engine and its official development kit -the Hu7-, the companies who wanted to use that kit had to be equipped with the same kind of computer as those used by Hudson’s developers, namely computers from the PC-98 series.