Things in Video Games - Vol. 1

Some interesting things and tidbits I recently learned about video games and the industry.

Silent Hill Creator was involved in Hotel Barcelona

Keiichiro Toyama (creator of Silent Hill) was involved in the development of Hotel Barcelona at the beginning. Hotel Barcelona was mainly developed by Swery 65’s studio, with Suda51 being one of the idea guys, but I didn’t know Toyama was also involved. This was before he created his own Studio which released Slitterhead in 2024.

Human Entertainment – Origin of legends

Human Entertainment was a pretty important Japanese developer in the 80s and 90s. Spike (now Spike Chunsoft), Sandlot (the Earth Defense Force devs) and Goichi Suda (SUDA51) had their origins there. They made Clock Tower, Twilight Syndrome and the bizarre Mizzurna Falls.

Discovered in: https://insertcredit.com/show/400/

Brownie Brown

For some reason I looked up the 2006 JRPG Magical Starsign (a childhood favorite of mine) and wondered who developed it. Turns out Brownie Brown was founded by two ex-Square employees who worked on the Mana-series. They released some original games (like Magical Starsign and Sword of Mana), but also helped other developers like HAL, when they made Mother 3 or the devs of Fantasy Life. Nowadays they are known as 1-Up Studio and work directly with Nintendo as a support studio. Games they co-developed include Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Donkey Kong Bananza. Since becoming a full-on support studio one of the founders left the company and formed Brownies to work on original works. The two most prominent of them being Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree and Doraemon Story of Seasons. It’s insane to see that they went from developing some niche-titles to now helping Nintendo with some of their most popular games.

Okami won two Guinness World Records

The two being “Least commercially successful winner of a Game of the Year award” and “Most critically acclaimed video game starring an animal character“. I actively dislike the organization, but the two records show the disparity between quality and popularity the game has. Or at least had back then.

Shigesato Itoi’s work outside of Mother

I was not aware of the bandwidth of projects Shigesato Itoi (the creator of Mother) worked on. This article by hardcore gaming 101 gives a good overview. It’s more of a recommendation, because I won’t recap the whole thing, but yeah, really impressive what this man has accomplished in his life. As well as being the founder of Hobonichi, which is a whole separate rabbit hole, I’m not going to get into.