"They wouldn’t release it under the Seibu Kaihatsu name"

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• by Damien McFerran 16 mins ago

• Image: Seibu Kaihatsu*

Those of you who followed the Japanese launch of Sony’s PlayStation back in 1994 will be aware that Seibu Kaihatsu’s Raiden Project was a very early release for the console.

A two-game collection featuring Raiden (1990) and Raiden II (1993), it launched at the start of 1995 in Japan and would come to North America and Europe later the same year.

One of the key staffers involved with the game, Australian Richard Honeywood, recently sat down for a chat with Time Extension and revealed that Raiden Project only got made because Seibu Kaihatsu covered its cost with a strip mahjong title.

Honeywood explains how Sony approached the studio:

"Sony Music approached us; it wasn’t even PlayStation or Sony at the time. Some executives came to the office, and they brought international staff with them. So that’s why I was called into the meeting, too. It was very weird that such a low-level guy would be in a meeting like this, but they were talking about creating the PlayStation, and they wanted us to port [Raiden and Raiden 2] as a launch title for the console.

We talked about it, and our boss Hamada-san [Hitoshi Hamada] said he’d think about it. He shook hands and saw them out the door, and then he turned around and said, ‘What do you think? Should we even try doing this PlayStation title?’ Everybody was a bit skeptical of it, and even he was like, ‘I don’t want to work with them because they’ve got beards.’ He said, ‘Japanese people shouldn’t have beards. Sending out someone with a beard to do business like that is bad.’ I remember I was really shocked. I think I said to him, ‘That’s the reason you’re going to turn them down?’"

After a short discussion, it was eventually agreed that the project should go ahead – only for Seibu Kaihatsu boss Hamada to throw a spanner in the works. "Hamada-san said, ‘We don’t have enough money to fund it.’ So that’s when one of the guys said, ‘Well, why don’t we make a strip mahjong game for the arcade?’"

This isn’t unusual in Japan; 1988’s Mahjong Gakuen saved Capcom’s bacon at a time when the company was struggling financially. This is because, according to Honeywood, such games are surefire commercial hits:

"It’s because they’re guaranteed money, that’s why they do it. There’s a core user base that will always play those games, even if they’re pretty much the same. They just reskin the characters, put on a bit of different music, and change the girls, and they can pump them out within a couple of months. And basically, what they would do is they wouldn’t release it under the Seibu Kaihatsu name; they always released it under another publisher. So everybody quickly worked on that, while three or four of us were working on learning the PlayStation specs to work on what became The Raiden Project."

As for the mahjong title, Honeywood didn’t say what it was called, but this forum thread suggests that the Seibu Kaihatsu offshoot, ‘Mahjong Cats’, created 26 DVD-based strip mahjong games between 1999 and 2006. According to Wikipedia, Seibu Kaihatsu had previously worked with adult video game developers h.m.p. and Mink to develop mahjong arcade games.

It’s worth noting that, in 1996, Seibu Kaihatsu released E-Jong High School in arcades under its own brand name.

Since 2005, the Raiden series has been overseen by MOSS, a studio founded by former Seibu Kaihatsu staff.

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Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media’s sites from an editorial perspective. He’s also the editor of Time Extension, the network’s newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming’s past glories.

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