Unsung Game Creators: Takeru, Part 2

The second half of Unsung Game Creators’ Takeru feature is now up! While the first part was modestly hopeful in chronicling the developer’s side-scrolling action games Cocoron and Little Samson, the conclusion delves into the legacy of Nostalgia 1907, an adventure game that brazenly ignored just about every popular trend of its era. It’s a fascinating title for that reason as well as its own ambitions, but as we see, it wasn’t what the market really wanted.

We capped off the video by pointing out a unique thing about Takeru: they didn’t develop any licensed games. Just about every smaller developer, from Treasure to Wayfoward, funded their future cult classics by taking on projects based on movies, cartoons, and anything else that might have turned the heads of casual customers.

I won’t say that this was Takeru’s only mistake and that they should have canceled Little Samson and farmed out their esteemed ex-Capcom talent to making video-game versions of whatever TV shows or films looked at them twice. After all, they could have picked up Stunt Dawgs or A Far Off Place just as easily as a Jurassic Park deal. And perhaps Takeru just wasn’t around long enough to land any licenses.

As always, we’re thankful for every like, view, comment, and subscription we get—and for the patience subscribers showed during the long delay for this video. We’ll tackle some shorter subjects next, and they’re not quite as depressing as this one!

Unsung Game Creators: Takeru

Well, this wasn’t the best year for Kid Fenris Dot Com. Besides the same obvious reasons that 2020 sucked for so many people, the site’s hosting collapsed in the spring, and it took a while to move it and rebuild everything. So this was the first year in a long while that I couldn’t even manage one entry per month. 

On the other hand, I at least helped launch a YouTube series with Unsung Game Creators. The second episode’s first half is here, and it looks at the short-lived developer Takeru and their collection of Capcom expats.

 

I’m grateful for any support we have so far. Unsung Game Creators episodes tend to take a while to research and write, and that’s to say nothing of the heavy lifting that Joel does on the videos themselves. YouTube values sheer quantity above all else, so it's a challenge to get noticed even in a niche of people who care about the legacy of Little Samson or the sprite work in Metal Storm.  And there are many more developers to cover, so I hope you'll stick with us!

Introducing Unsung Game Creators

I always like unearthing obscure things here. I don’t think I’m trying to show off to anyone; that would require this site to have readers. It’s more that I enjoy learning new things, and I feel the need to validate that by writing about them. 

 

That’s the impetus behind Unsung Game Creators, a new YouTube series from me and my friend Joel (who doesn’t have a site). It’s all about lesser-known developers and the threads running through their games, and I hope that being on YouTube will get it some attention. Yes, it’s a subject with limited appeal, but amid those ten thousand other video channels, you’re not going to stand out with a profanity-laced playthrough of the Captain Planet NES game. 

 

 

So have a look at the first episode of Unsung Game Creators, which covers the Capcom-esque creations of Ukiyotei. We have many more installments planned, and everyone's free to suggest a subject or two! Not even that Captain Planet game is off the table.