Legendary game company “Sun Electronics” NES developers “Laughing Roundtable”…!

Doodles to games.

Capacity was the biggest problem for NES developers. For example, “Super Mario” has a capacity of only 40 kilobytes. The Mystery of the Atlantis” required the creation of 100 stages in a space much smaller than the size of a single photo stored on a smartphone.

Atsushi Sakai (programmer): “ I mainly created the enemy characters for “Atlantis,” but development was a battle against capacity. The opening title screen alone took up a lot of space, as did the music. The key to making 100 screens without eating up space was how to use the same pictures over and over again. The colors can be changed, so you have to use your wits to change the same enemy to a different color, change the background color, and so on. If you make the floor blue, it looks like it is sliding, and if you make it black, you get a completely dark surface.

Also, although today we have the image of games taking years to develop, “Atlantis” was produced in only three months.

Sakai: “ It was probably one of the shortest at Sunsoft. I didn’t go home at all.

Takeuchi: “ It was normal for us to work about 200 hours of overtime a month. I came to the office on weekends as well and returned home after 11:00 am. I went home, but there were people who lived in the company’s nap room.

There is something even more surprising. Today, game development is the work of many programmers, but Takeuchi and Sakai were the only two programmers who worked on “Atlantis. At that time, Sunsoft was short of people anyway.

Sakai : “ There were no programmers, but there were only two salesmen in all (laughs). They were in charge of East and West (laughs). They were not good at games, so we programmers did the demos in front of the wholesalers. We were told to go to Shikoku tomorrow (laughs).

Takeuchi: “ We didn’t even have a designer (laughs). We recruited part-timers, and the good ones became employees.

Kazuyuki Sugiura (designer) “ I joined Sunsoft as a part-time worker, and I enjoyed it so much that I became an employee (laughs). One day I had some free time in the development office and was doodling. I liked designing logos, so I drew a random one, and someone said, ‘That’s a good one. Next thing I knew, it had become a game (laughs).

From Sugiura’s doodles came the action RPG “Madura no Tsubasa” (Wings of Madura). It is a popular game that is sold at high prices during the recent retro boom.

Sugiura: “ What does Madura mean? There is no meaning (laughs). I was just doodling because I liked the balance of the characters.