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So...Treasure. Any signs of life?
- Thread starter GeekyDad
- Start date
Last news I remember was them hoping to be able to port Radiant Silvergun again.
Not much else.
According to Wikipedia, their last games developed were Gaist Crusher and Gaist Crusher God for the 3DS, in 2013 and 2014. Games based on a manga and published by Capcom in Japan only.
After that.... Ikaruga was ported to Switch and PS4 in 2018 and that's it.
Their twitter was last updated in January 8: https://twitter.com/TreasureCoLtd
So the company is still a thing, but I have no idea of what they are doing.
After that.... Ikaruga was ported to Switch and PS4 in 2018 and that's it.
Their twitter was last updated in January 8: https://twitter.com/TreasureCoLtd
So the company is still a thing, but I have no idea of what they are doing.
They need to tap Square-Enix on the shoulder and get Mischief Makers ported to Switch!
Would be great if they could get Guardian Heroes ported as well, of course.
Would be great if they could get Guardian Heroes ported as well, of course.
From what I understand it's pretty much just Maekawa these days. I don't know who handled the Switch/PS4 ports of Ikaruga but I imagine they were outsourced/licensed.
Sin & Punishment remake could be glorious, heck even a straight port of S&P2 with HD treatment.
They were, to the studio that did the Android port some years back.
Is it far-fetched to think their staff went back to Konami? IIRC much of them came from there originally. Konami is reportedly making Castlevania Grimoire of Souls internally sooo maybe? Someone's making it and I have no clue who is even left there.
I don't know but I highly doubt it. I also doubt that CV game is genuinely interally-made but I haven't looked into it all.
Treasure was a fairly liberal studio and a lot of their "employees" were independent contractors even during the years where they were heavily active, but some of them work under pseudonyms so it's hard to know exactly what they're up to. Quite a few ended up at unremarkable mobile companies, working on unremarkable mobile games.
We know for sure that a couple of them ended up at Studio Saizensen, the company behind Umihara Kawase, Code of Princess and Blade Strangers.
Hiroshi Iuchi, the guy behind Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun and director of Gradius V, is at M2, a studio that does a lot of high-quality emulation work for many publishers including Nintendo. He's directing a new PS4 shooting game at M2 but work is going incredibly slowly, it's been five years and they're still not talking about it except to say that it's still happening.
Hideyuki Suganami literally left the industry it seems like. He was the director of Sin & Punishment and Mischief Makers and planner on S&P2 and programmer of a lot of their games in the 90s.
Norio Hanzawa just seems to have left the industry as well or just retired I guess. He was the composer on a lot of Treasure's most popular games. Honestly just seems like the legacy staff have retired or not interested in making games anymore.
Norio Hanzawa just seems to have left the industry as well or just retired I guess. He was the composer on a lot of Treasure's most popular games. Honestly just seems like the legacy staff have retired or not interested in making games anymore.
Hanzawa and Yaiman ended up at a mobile company that was hoovering up talent for a Square-Enix published game, I forget the name of the game but I'm pretty sure it came out and has since been terminated, that was 2-3 years ago now.
One of the contributing factors to Treasure's current predicament is the president won't do mobile/service games.
I thought some of them might have went to M2? Or maybe I'm thinking of CAVE, they all like to shuffle around anyway so as long as one of them exists the people are still around.
There are still a few core members of the old Treasure team that remain unaccounted for and if all those people were to collaborate, they could credibly put out a genuine Treasure title... but again, nobody knows what happened to some of those guys or if they still get along with the president or whatever, so until it happens it's a big question mark. The fact that they're still not doing it after all this time suggests it can't happen but I really don't know.
The HD era killed off a lot of studios of Treasure's size and caliber--publishers wanted bigger and bigger games and the smaller companies were marginalized from the traditional console space as budgets increased the markets for traditional licensed titles and other smaller contract work dried up. Treasure was fortunate to be in a position where big publishers like Nintendo and MS would fund their work purely for name value, but that could only last so long.
Mischief Makers (Yuke -Yuke Trouble Makers) was such a hidden gem for the N64. One of my all time favorites.
I've lost hopes for a sequel, but I still wish they could use Planet Clancer, Marina, Prof. Theo and co. for another game. Really miss these wonderful characters...
Treasure's last original home console game launched eight years ago. They're pretty much done and it sucks.
Marina is a secret character in Rakugaki Showtime. She can even shake-shake objects to power them up before throwing them.
Indeed! Always wanted to check this game out for this sole reason.
Like most of the studios of their generation, they own very few of the games they made over the years.
People complain about them re-releasing Ikaruga all the time but it's the only game they 100% own that's prepped for modern ports and that they can continue to propagate with little to no resources. It is what it is.
I'm just dreaming. But imagine a Dynamite Headdy Mania. Or an Alien Soldier Mania.
If you make a Japanese account it can get it from the pre-PS4 store.
They just license stuff now, not sure that they even have a development team anymore.
We will probably see Radiant Silvergun ported to Switch at least.
We will probably see Radiant Silvergun ported to Switch at least.
Agreed. This game seems to be cursed. Initially released on the 3rd place console when 2D was a bad word. That it was stuck on XBLA at the height of the dudebro shooter era is one of the great travesties of last gen.
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Minor correction. I believe Gaist Crusher was actually a multimedia project, and that the game and the anime were developed simultaneously. Capcom called it an initiative to try to aim games at kids. So it wasn't exactly a throwaway project as much as Capcom's then bad habit of financing random nonsensical initiatives with no real greater strategy.
They were chasing that Yokai Watch money back then, they had multiple multi-media franchises that failed during that time.
Gaist Crusher wasn't chasing Yokai Watch, those games and many others were part of a broader media-mix strategy that loads of publishers were trying at the time--Sega had Bank Hero, Square-Enix had Gyrozetter, there were tons of attempts at cracking that market that went nowhere.
It's BC on the Xbox One I believe, so there is a current gen way to play it at least.
Sega owns that one so they'd probably be the ones who'd need to be campaigned to.
Right, and all of those were inspired by the success of Yokai Watch.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's just Maekawa licensing out the company's IP. The address on their website leads to Maekawa's house, not any kind of office building or anything. Hopefully someone makes more games like they did, Platinum is great but their work has a different vibe
The media-mix fad existed long before YW and most of the attempts at media-mix that came during that last wave went into production at the same time as YW and released around the same time, so they weren't explicitly aping YW (plus YW didn't really blow up until several months after release anyhow).
You could make a case for them chasing Inazuma Eleven more than anything else, but again, Level-5 didn't invent the formula.
Level 5's successes were right before that trend started though, stuff like Pokemon and Yugioh had been around for years at that point.
Yes, that's what I said--Level-5 followed that template multiple times but they didn't invent it, nor were most of the games I mentioned specifically following Yokai Watch's lead because they entered production at the same time, if not before. Like, Gyrozetter's game and anime both dropped well over a year before YW was popping.
