Before I wrote that terrible little retrospective on Bucky O'Hare a few months ago, I half-heartedly tried to dig up some information about the development team at Konami responsible for creating, against all odds, a very solid NES game about a space-faring rabbit and a fat kid. While I wasted my time at Wikipedia, however, I managed to forget that Eric-Jon had already answered this question for me over a year ago, a few months before the IC forums fell victim to ridiculous internet drama and exploded. I want to warn you beforehand how totally ridiculous (and in retrospect stunningly obvious) the people who made this game were.
I remembered those halcyon days when I saw this GameSetWatch article by Todd Clolek. I suggest you read it if you want to learn even more about Bucky O'Hare (you don't really want to learn anything more about Bucky O'Hare at this point, I know. But you should!)There's information on another Komani Bucky title in the article -- an arcade game much like The Simpsons that I desperately want to play now.
Bucky O'Hare's pedigree is outstanding because many of the key members of soon-to-exist Treasure were the principle programmers and artists on the game. Yeah, that Treasure. The developer behind:
Gunstar Heros, Guardian Heros, Sin and Punishment, Radiant
Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-O, and a personal favorite of mine, Alien Soldier, a game with 25 incredibly short levels and 31 incredibly awesome boss fights.Masato Maegawa,, Bucky O'Hare's director and lead programmer, is the founder of Treasure. He must have left Konami around the same time this licensed game hit store shelves -- Treasure was formed in 1992 -- and there is every reason to believe getting assignments like this one, on top of the pressure to make yet another Contra game after yet another Contra game, was a major catalyst to his departure.
I can see a few of Treasure's trademark design here in an embryonic state: short levels with lots of checkpoints; great boss fights; wackiness (although in Bucky O'Hare's case, the weirdness is external, a direct result of its license; the greatest Treasure games have a very unique ascetic far removed from Bucky O'Hare by virtue of being vibrant and interesting instead of garish and moronic).
There are a few moments that betray this game as pre-Treasure, however. Asinine, memorization-heavy subchapters and unavoidable instant deaths -- two things notable by their absence in the 16 & 32-bit Treasure classics -- are constant, frustrating obstacles. The game somewhat offsets this nonsense by placing dozens of checkpoints in every stage. You do not ever have to replay long segments of the game just because a fucking robotic snake arbitrarily took a zig when you thought it was going to zag, thank God. Other Treasure signatures are missing. You won't find a convoluted control scheme that takes forever to master or some gameplay mechanic involving colors, for instance. It is a shame, too, because the Treasure fanboy contingency would be talking this game up like it was the second coming of Jesus, with import copies going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, if Bucky could turn purple and shoot little purple bullets.
So there's another silly idea of mine that GameSetWatch already did. They've taken a good chunk of my blog ideas, which would be mysterious and sinister if it wasn't so apparent that GameSetWatch and Gamasutra are eight hundred kinds of smarter than I am. Anyway I highly doubt Simon Carless or Christian Nutt or even Brandon Sheffield, whose hand I have shaken, pay any attention to me whatsoever.
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