/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10679634
I really wish we got Bernie's perspective. I don't doubt Victor Ireland's account as far as the facts go but he's clearly biased because Stolar kept cockblocking him. The issue is that Working Designs did have a bad habit of doing, frankly, INSANE things. I love Magic Knight Rayearth but any company not named Working Designs would have immediately abandoned ship once they realized half the goddamn data was missing. The game got delayed so long that by the time it came out the Saturn was so dead a lot of stores didn't even have it on the shelves anymore.

Any other publisher would have cut their losses or not even taken the job in the first place. WD's behavior was more in line with a fantranslation passion project than an actual business. If I'm a Sega executive trying to get the Dreamcast ready in order to stop the bleeding I'm probably not going to be all that happy with one of my publishing partners plinking away on a three year old Saturn game and bitching at me that we're not selling backup cartridges anymore (that was one of Vic Ireland's big beefs). This may be projection but I'm imagining people at both Sega and Sony trying to get shit done and then having to field phone calls from this one weeaboo who wants to die on the hill of whatever Japanese game I never heard of that he insists MUST come out in America. If you look at WD's library they were pretty prolific for a smaller publisher. Four Sega CD games, six Saturn games, ten PS1 games, and a couple on PS2. It seems like they were given a pretty long leash. Arc The Lad Collection is an entire FRANCHISE worth of games, none of which America had ever seen before, coming out all at once on the PS1 after the PS2 was already available. As cool as that is from a consumer perspective, that's kind of crazy. If Bernie Stolar was the ONE guy at either company who looked at them a little side-eyed, that doesn't seem like a major crime.

>On Exile 2 it was an issue of limited number of modifications because we weren't doing the game reprogramming, Telenet was. It was a small number of tries. And on the second-to last time, we had it *almost* right, so we added like +1 to the monsters, but it was like that scene with the fat guy in Meaning of Life where the waiter gives him that one wafer and he explodes. That +1 exceeded some limit internally and made the monsters exponentially harder rather than incrementally. Since it was our last "fix" and we had production discs, I thought we were screwed and had made an unwinnable game. Fortunately, with some time and special strategies, we found out you could finish it. We made one of the hardest games ever - by accident.

Why is Vic such a liar?

>>9599591
If you look at the entire Working Designs catalog they didn't publish all that many games. A few are ones that probably would have been picked up by somebody, like Raystorm. Sega probably would have localized it's own stuff like Thunderforce and Sega Ages. But games like Vay and Vasteel? Nobody would have touched 'em other than WD.