Hey everyone,

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m sure many of you have for years now. I was wondering if there’s a trail of leads people have followed to try and find this game. I wasn’t around when Bound High or the Faceball prototype resurfaced, but I find it so fascinating.

I’d be interested, if others were, to start a systematic approach to try and find every lead or at least coalesce what likely fruitless attempts have already been made. I know this is pretty unlikely to yield anything but the hunt is always fun I think. Anyone down for some organized work?

[Turbo]

-Turbo

KR155E do you remember anything about the site in question? Or the name of the programmer? I tried looking all over for any other evidence, but I’ve only come across a mention of this “programmer” on GoCollect forums.

They say he was a programmer for the paper Mario “games” (plural), but also that he worked on Super Metroid too. They also mention that he was still working at Nintendo at the time of 2014.

With that much out of the way, I’ve only come across 3 definite possibilities.

-Rikiishi Motomu (however there is 2 mistranslated names, chikarashi motomu and satoshi rikiishi)
-Mitsuru Matsumoto
-Kenji Nakajima (or Ken Nakajima)

Any more leads would be great to at least another name to add to credits.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Turbo.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Turbo.

Thanks for the welcome. 🙂 I clearly need to frequent this forum a lot more often.

Virtual Boy was an interesting little piece of my life, from working on those games to the lab tests for the hardware to the GOD AWFUL Waterworld. Oh and meeting William Shatner at E3 ’95 or ’96. It was the year that KI was the main focus of the Nintendo booth. I was shoved into the VB section. Felt like an afterthought.

Good times.

Hey @Virtual-JimWornell, great to hear from you again! Shatner was at E3 1995: https://www.virtual-boy.com/forums/t/he-is-red-jim/

How was he like? Did he like the Virtual Boy? Love hearing those first-hand stories from back in the day.

Do you have any idea, BTW, why there was virtually no coverage of Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers in Japanese media? Only Bound High got a bit of attention.

@Turbo I do indeed remember the name. It is not on your definite list of possibilities. 😉

The site was here: http://kmkstudio.plala.jp/~kamiki/diarypro/diary.cgi?mode=profile&user=admin

On the above site, Dragon Hopper was mentioned in a list of games that the person had worked on. After some research, I found that the guy’s name is Kaoru Kita (喜多 薫 or きた かおる), nickname Kamiki (かみき), and he was a composer at Intelligent Systems, where he worked on the soundtrack of the Fire Emblem series. He was also the main programmer on the original Paper Mario for N64 and worked on some more games at IntSys.

I managed to find him on Twitter, a newer personal website and more. He seems to be into bird photography nowadays.

Here’s a bunch of links:
– https://vgmdb.net/artist/11405
– http://kmkstudio.atnifty.com
– https://www.at-kmkstudio.com
– https://twitter.com/kmkstudio
– https://www.instagram.com/kmkstudio.insta/
– https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwlON3hSRpHS5G3JWFTCDIg

I tried again to contact Kamiki last year through a contact form on his website and got no reply. I just tried once again to get in touch, this time via email. Cross your fingers and please refrain from trying to contact him yourself, guys (for now), he might dislike being bugged about the game by too many people.

It’s too bad Kaoru Kita’s website no longer mentions Dragon Hopper (http://kmkstudio.plala.jp/~kamiki/diarypro/diary.cgi?mode=profile&user=admin) and nobody archived it for future reference 🙁 Alongside Zero Racers, this is the Virtual Boy proto i’m looking foward the most to play if the day where a working prototype ever arrives during our lifetimes…

[Turbo]

Wow. Thank you guys. That was really helpful. I originally looked at Kita as a potential programmer, but the “Super Metroid” comment on the forums threw me off. You did beat me to the punch.

I’m guessing he doesn’t want to talk about stuff that is possibly under NDA. At least that’s my theory.

I am also hoping G-Zero and Dragon Hopper pop up one day. They are by far the most complete out of all the cancelled software for the VB.

(also, do we know how people know G-Zero and Jump Dragon were the japanese names for it’s JPN release if there was never a full preview?)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Turbo.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Turbo.