| Dossier: Strider on the NEC SuperGrafx |
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Of all the Strider home conversions, the one for the NEC SuperGrafx has been the subject of the most debate. Which is odd, because it was never actually released. Lots of theories about why it never saw the light of day have been advanced over the years, but when exposed to the light of day themselves, these theories amount to little more than rumor and urban legend. That's really all there is to it. If you want hard facts and the final word on what happened to the SGX conversion, you're going to be disappointed. The only people who know anything for sure aren't talking, and without their accounts, all the evidence is inconclusive. If, on the other hand, you like urban legends and are comfortable with interpreting circumstantial evidence, do I ever have a story for you. Pull up a chair and get comfortable. This one's going to take a while. In 1989, Capcom ruled the arcades. Their CPS1 games, including Forgotten Worlds, Ghouls N' Ghosts, and Strider, were their calling cards, and were very nearly licenses to print money. Strider, in particular, was a huge draw, due to its large, colorful sprites, thrilling gameplay mechanics, and voice samples that made it seem like a playable Saturday morning cartoon. Naturally, Capcom licensed their CPS1 games to the home consoles of the time, and the Genesis port of Strider heavily contributed to that console's early success.
Instead of doing that, NEC developed a new system, the PC-Engine 2/SuperGrafx. Since Capcom was the third-party developer most successful at sticking it to Nintendo, NEC bought licenses to port Capcom's games to their new system, perhaps hoping the same thing would happen to them that happened to Sega. This is crucial. NEC licensed the Capcom titles and developed them in-house through NEC Avenue. Keep this in mind. In late 1990, NEC announced its new system and the slate it had lined up for the first, and as it turned out, only generation of SGX games. One of these was, naturally, Strider. NEC made some pretty hefty claims concerning its upcoming port, which the Japanese gaming magazine PC Engine Fan reported in its September issue of that year:
Right away, somebody was making promises they couldn't keep, saying the backgrounds could be "accurately translated" (i.e. "arcade perfect"). Let's put this old rumor to bed once and for all, right now. The SGX port would not have been "accurately translated". It couldn't have been. CPS1 specs completely trounced SGX specs:
I mean, just looking at the difference in ROM sizes between the two games is telling. The CPS1 ROM weighs in between 32 and 43 megabits. The ROM size for the SGX cartridge was going to be a measly 8 Mb, meaning the game was going to have to take a 75-80% reduction in image quality just to fit on the cart! The claim that the SGX's BG2 scrolling background layer would allow accurate translation is ridiculous. CPS1 had three scrolling layers. With a reduction in ROM size and a reduction in scrolling layers, the SGX version could not and would not have been arcade perfect. No way. Someone wasn't paying attention when they wrote that article.
Someone wrote in to the January 1991 issue of EGM and inquired about Strider for the SGX, having caught wind of the planned port. EGM answered his questions, claiming that they'd actually played the game while on a trip to Japan the previous September. Whether they actually did or not is anybody's guess. It's unlikely that the port was in any kind of playable form, having just been announced. EGM's article included two screenshots purporting to be from the SGX version, one of which would survive for years as the only tangible proof this port was ever in production. Astute readers will note, however, that these shots are two of the screens from PC Engine Fan, and EGM merely repeated what they had said.
Just as EGM was passing along four-month-old news and announcing this port's release, PCE Fan was actually reporting a change in plans:
Within four months' time, the announced SGX port was demoted from a full SGX game to merely being "SGX compatible". Basically it was scheduled to be a PCE game that could be played on an SGX, similar to how PSone games can be played on a PStwo. This news also signaled the end of SGX game development. NEC Avenue, as noted before, was the only developer the SGX had. By canceling their line, they effectively killed the console, but they were trying to keep it on life support by releasing dual-format games. Things did not look good, for the SGX in general and Strider fans in particular. Nine months passed. Then, in September 1991, a FULL YEAR after the original announcement, PCE Fan ran an update:
There's several things worth noting here. First, they actually admitted the loss in quality by converting from CPS1 to SGX ("the characters have become somewhat smaller"). Second, the cutscenes they're talking about are not the ones from the Duo version. They're the ones we all know from the CPS1 ("Hum, it is Strider Hiryu. He will never leave Eurasia alive."). Third, even at this date, they're saying that the game won't be out anytime soon. How right they were. The game didn't come out in 1991. It didn't even come out in 1992, and in October of that year, EGM writer "Terry Aki" (a pseudonym if ever there was one) ran a little blurb in his "International Outlook" section, noting that Strider had once again been demoted, this time to a Super CD-ROM. Yet he still claimed it would be "greatly enhanced", once again underscoring just how out of the loop EGM really was. I can't really blame him. Even PCE Fan didn't know what was going on. For example, they claimed the pictures they ran alongside their SGX articles were culled from the arcade, that is, the original CPS1 version. But even a cursory glance shows this is not the case. Observe:
The screencap on the left is from the arcade; the one on the right is taken from the Sept. 1990 issue of PC Engine Fan. I'm sure you can tell there's more than a few differences between these two screenshots, just by glancing at them. According to Chris Covell and malducci over at the PCEngineFX forums, here's how those differences break down:
The amazing thing about the images from PCE Fan is not that they're different, but that the differences are CONSISTENT from shot to shot. Anyone can doctor a sprite. EGM is notorious for doing this in their April Fool's editions. However, I've never seen a hoax with so many screenshots that didn't mess up. Changing sprites is the obvious way to create a fake. Who would think to alter health meters and zero out high scores and make the same changes to every single shot? Like I said earlier, someone at PCE Fan wasn't paying attention. They didn't know what they had on their hands. Of course, it's entirely possible that the screencaps are from a beta of the CPS1 version, but why would PCE Fan run beta screencaps when the arcade down the street had working cabinets? With even the Japanese gaming magazines getting confused, it's no wonder so many rumors popped up about this conversion. No one could get their story straight because there was no straight story to be had. Finally, in 1994, Strider made it to the PC-Engine/TGX, in a home conversion for the Arcade Card that failed to capture gamers' interest, despite brand-new cutscenes, a new level, and an arranged soundtrack. NEC Avenue, who produced the conversion, didn't even bother to bring it stateside. That's how little confidence they had in it. After all the hype, people wondered what happened. Why did the SGX version disappear? What about those beautiful screens seen in EGM? Did that mean someone had a working prototype? No one seemed to have any answers, and the rumor mill started to grind. The first, and most natural rumor, was that there was a playable version floating around. This stood to reason. If NEC Avenue had actually worked on an SGX conversion, a prototype would exist. In a 1997 post on the Turbo List, a mailing list for NEC enthusiasts, someone named Mike Lyon claimed that, all in all, NEC made five working prototypes. His post marked the first time anywhere on the Net that anyone claimed a specific number of prototypes existed. What's more, he accounted for each of them:
All subsequent rumors concerning the number of betas or alphas or prototypes for the SGX Strider conversion trace to that post. Even Daniel Riley of SuperGrafx Extreme and his assertion that there were four copies of a three-level playable alpha in existence trace back to this post. So let's analyze it. Mike Lyon asserts that the ROM was completed up to level 4, the Amazon stage. That's about 80% complete. This is curious, because the PCE Fan article from Sept. 1991 says the game only reached 20% completion. It could have been developed further, as another year elapsed between when it was demoted to the bi-compatible format and it being demoted yet again to the Arcade Card. Still, 80% completion seems to be pushing it. Next, Lyon says the SGX was "more than capable" of beating the CPS1. We've already seen how that couldn't possibly happen. Then he talks about the EPROMs. EPROMs do indeed look nothing like HuCards or CD-ROMs, however, it's possible to dump an EPROM onto a HuCard. That's how the HuCard manufacturing process worked, in fact. If there were five EPROMs around, it's possible, if unlikely, that someone dumped one to a HuCard. But what happened to these EPROMs? According to Lyon, one went to Hudson. Why Hudson? Because they were the first-party developer for the TGX and SGX. They owned a huge share of NEC. So far, so good. EPROM two then went to the head programmer. That would be Isuke. If you want to find him, I guess you'd start in Kobe, Japan. He'd want a copy for portfolio purposes. EPROM three went to the original creator of Strider. That's either Tatsumi Wada or someone from Moto Kikaku, both of whom would also want copies for their portfolio. EPROM four, if it was truly the press copy, was completed at least through level 2. The screencaps from PCE Fan prove that. If it ever existed, this one's in a landfill. Gaming magazines don't archive this stuff. That left one EPROM remaining, as Mike Lyon told it. His assertion was never confirmed, but it turned into a self-perpetuating myth that continues to this day.
As an homage to this programmer, when Capcom included Hiryu's cameo on Ken's stage in Street Fighter Alpha 2, they also included a teddy bear. Presumably the teddy bear represented the programmer's regression.
Now, this doesn't necessarily disprove that the programmer didn't have a breakdown. It just makes the teddy bear rumor highly suspect. This programmer was never named, but I think it was Isuke. I base my opinion on two pieces of evidence. When Chaz Seydoux of insert credit interviewed Roy Ozaki of Mitchell Corp, Ozaki had this to say:
This seems to imply that Isuke was difficult to work with. Darran Jones of Retro Gamer magazine has claimed he has a contact with Isuke but that he's "reluctant to talk", lending weight to this perspective. That's my second piece of evidence. If Isuke and the mysterious programmer who had a breakdown are one and the same, it would explain a lot. Isuke was difficult to work with during his tenure at Mitchell Corp because he was recovering from a total breakdown. He would be reluctant to talk about Strider because that would be an embarrassing period of his life. And of course, the fact that Isuke's still very much alive would decisively put an end to the rumor that someone killed themselves during the development of the SGX port. The SGX port was never released. It did exist at one point in a developmental stage, but whether it still does is something only the archivists at Moto Kikaku, Capcom, or possibly Hudson would know. It may surface one day, but unless that happens it will continue to be consigned to urban legend status. Don't give up hope in the meantime, though. ;^) Finally, I'd like to thank Chris Covell and malducci for their stellar research into the PC Engine Fan articles that convinced me they were the real deal; Laurence of NFG Games, for pointing out the flaws in Mike Lyon's Turbo List post and just generally being a good sport; Parallax Scroll of the Retrogaming Roundtable, for sending me the scans of EGM 18's article; and everyone who's cited this page as a source over the years. You all have my gratitude. |
But all was not well. Nintendo was unhappy because Capcom had made their competitor's more powerful system a success, but that's a story for another time. More importantly, NEC was also unhappy. NEC's PC-Engine/TurboGrafx was struggling to take off in America, due to two things: Nintendo's virtual monopoly on third-party developers, and a large part of NEC's Japanese game library consisting of RPG's. Bringing these games to America would mean translating hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of RPG dialog.
"Strider Hiryu"
Meanwhile, back in the States, someone was paying attention. Unfortunately, that person happened to be working for Electronic Gaming Monthly. In its early days, instead of actually writing their own features, EGM was notorious for stealing everything they could from the Japanese gaming mags.
Are SG games being canceled?
PC-Engine/SG bi-compatible format (tentative)
Another slightly more sinister urban legend that persists to this day is the rumor that 
Not to be insensitive to the programmer's family if this story is true, but I've never believed anyone committed suicide over the SGX version, simply because there's a teddy bear in the CPS1 game. It's a bonus item you can obtain in Level 3, the Flying Battleship Ballog. Here's how to find it: once you've passed the turrets and the railgun in the opening sequence, get to the floor. You have a choice to either go down and crawl along the outside of the battleship, or continue on inside. Behind you should be three levels of platforms, covered in shells. Destroy the shells. Get to the top platform. The teddy bear will pop out of a porthole and laugh at you.
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