hg101

Coming Soon - Data East Arcade Classics

Added 2016-05-31 20:24:50 +0000 UTC

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/dataeastbook/dataeastbook.htm

Our next book, due out in late July 2016, is Data East Arcade Classics! Data East was a pretty weird company, as much of their output falls into the "fun but arguably not actually good" category. Plus they did a lot of offbeat stuff like Karnov and Trio the Punch. But that's also part of what makes them such a fascinating company, plus by the early 90s, they actually did start putting out some titles that were on the levels of the greats like Capcom or Konami. (Please, check out Boogie Wings, Rohga, and Night Slashers.) Unfortunately many of these later games never left Japan, and the company went belly up soon after, so at least among English speaking fans, they never outgrew their "B-game" reputation. That's mostly why this book was so fun to put together though. Even their "bad" games have a weird charm to them, and there are a lot of hidden gems to uncover.

This was initially be planned to be "Volume 3" in the "HG101 Digest" line, which are meant to be a little smaller and varied in content. However, I had trouble narrowing down which titles to cover. And unlike Taito or Capcom, Data East's library isn't large enough that I could justify doing subsequent volumes later down the line, so I figured it would be best to cover the whole company in one go. It's going to be about 130 pages, slightly shorter than the Konami Shooter or Castlevania book.

The featured articles chosen for the cover were Bad Dudes, their most well known property, probably thanks to its ridiculous slogan, along with BurgerTime, an early arcade classic that spawned a ton of obscure spin-offs. On the back cover, there's representation for Trio the Punch, Magical Drop, Night Stalkers, Karnov, and Atomic Runner Chelnov.

As with all of our previous books, you'll get a complementary PDF if you're donating at the $5 or above level. As always, thanks everyone for your support, you guys make it possible to focus on these weird little projects!